Authors Electric

Now THIS is what I should have posted last month, just ahead of the 80th anniversary of VE Day on 8th May, and if I’d been more switched on (and less distracted by the disturbingly named Mandela effect ), I would have done. Still, we’re only a few days away from celebrating the 81st anniversary of the D-Day landings on 5th June, 1944, so very much still in the remembering mode, in which eye witness accounts have increasing value as that generation passes away altogether. Going through the papers left by my late mother, Ruth Heppel, I found all the letters she wrote to her elder brother and sister-in-law in India during the Second World War. As a portrait of a teenager living through the Blitz (her home was bombed twice and the family had to be rehoused), they make a fascinating record; but what stands out is the one dated 10th May 1945, in which Ruth, by then a 19 year-old art student, gives an astonishingly vivid account of the VE Day celebrations in London. The joyous uproar she d...

My mother died 3 weeks ago. At nearly 98, this could hardly come as a surprise but it did. Stouthearted, resilient, refusing to be beaten by her increasing physical limitations, she seemed indomitable.  A Wreath of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor Then, barely two months into her move into a residential home, she had a stroke. Over the next few days the carers looked after her beautifully until she gently faded away. I couldn’t have wished for a more peaceful death for her, though I did feel sad that it happened just as she was starting to enjoy herself. The best moment to go, perhaps. I’d already begun to clear out her flat, and chanced upon a book in her shelves that intrigued me. My mother had never been a great reader, unless of theology or gardening; so how did a novel I’d never heard of, by a writer I admire, Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that Elizabeth Taylor), end up in her collection? Of course I had to read it, and for the first 100 pages or so of A Wreath of Roses I was none the ...

Hooray, hooray, the First of May…. and we are five days away from a coronation.  Not just a coronation, THE coronation. Not long now.... The first one we’ve had for very nearly 70 years, for 69 years and 11 months, to be precise. (Google tells me Queen Elizabeth II was coronated – coronated ? Ye gods – on 2nd June 1953.)   So here I am, toying with what to blog about this month, and naturally my mind turned to coronation scenes in fiction, for adults or children. Those many, many examples… er, not.  I couldn’t think of a single one. In fact, of all possible celebrations, it’s the least likely to be included in a story. Winnie-the-Pooh by A A Milne. Birthdays, oh yes.  Winnie-the-Pooh , Spot , The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (no, not a great sequence, just what came into my head, sorry). Weddings make a satisfying end to many a tale (if you’re romantically inclined) or give possibilities for high drama: Jane Eyre, Three Men and a Little Lady, Four Weddings an...