MARY'S BIT or STILL A FAVOURITE MANY YEARS LATER
When strings of street lights sprang up in yellowish necklaces dotting along the busy roads and another sooty night began to fall upon Newcastle-on-Tyne, my sister and I would go up to our attic bedroom and draw curtains patterned with castles, ships, and jesters with curly-toed shoes to shut out a darkening urban landscape of slate-roofed dwellings marching down in regular lines to the river. Ungraced by gardens or trees or any growing thing except whatever took root in the cemetery at the top of our street or on bomb-sites left uncleared for years after the war, those long grey terraces of houses stretched away out of sight in all directions, sheltering the inhabitants of the northern English industrial city known proverbially for its coal, not to mention shipyards and factories that in those days rang with the noise of machinery around the clock.
As bed-time approached we'd read for a while before the light was put out -- and for a lot longer afterwards by torchlight under the covers. Books aplenty were available to us between the city's free libraries and Christmas or birthday gifts, for we always received a book to mark each occasion. So it was that at about l2 or l3 I discovered Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, and later on her other novels about the March sisters' adult lives.
One thing about Little Women was rather puzzling. Like us, they lived in financially straitened circumstances and yet had a servant, Hannah, who had been with them for years. As a daughter of the working class, this seemed very strange to me, the more so as my mother had been a parlour maid and the notion of us having a servant was so alien as to be unthinkable, despite the fact that I was always being told that I had too much imagination. One of my favourite scenes is Beth's reaction to the beautiful piano given to her by elderly Mr Laurence, for her expression upon seeing it must surely have been the same as that displayed by my musically gifted sister when our parents managed to get hold of a second-hand upright piano for her. This piano subsequently lived in our scullery next to the copper where the original tenants boiled up their washing, our street and those surrounding it having been built for industrial and pit workers when Queen Victoria still ruled. Graced with high ceilings, picture rails, and ornate iron fireplaces, they are now sold for fabulous sums as artisans' dwellings. When we lived there, there was still a working gas light in our bedroom but the entire place was also extremely damp and the only plumbing was a cold tap in the scullery, the necessary offices being in the back yard -- about as far as you can get from the brown stone March house which, although old and a little shabby, had a garden with roses and vines and stood on a quiet street in the suburbs.
Yet as thousands of readers from numerous countries living in all sorts of housing have discovered, there is much emotional common ground with this delightful tale of a family's ups and downs and its tears and triumphs. I loved Little Women the first time I read it and every year or so I re-read it. The four March sisters -- gentle and ailing Beth, artistic but vain Amy, quiet, dependable Meg, and the tomboy bookworm Jo -- have become old friends. We see them shepherded by Marmee while their father, not strong enough to soldier and too old to be drafted, serves as a chaplain in the Civil War. Then there's their dashing next door neighbour Laurie, his grandfather Mr Laurence, Laurie's tutor John Brooke, the girls' rich but demanding Aunt March with her huge library and disrespectful parrot, plus a bevy of supporting characters, most of them types familiar to us all. Time has made Little Women as familiar and comfortable as a favourite pair of slippers, while that strong sense of the March family's love and emotional support for each other remains as striking as the first time I opened the book and began reading.
It is Jo, generous and good hearted although hasty in her speech until she learns patience, who has always been my favourite of the four sisters. She is the only character with whom I have ever identified and as a youngster I firmly declared that like her I was going to be a writer and furthermore intended to live in a garret. In fact, I said it so many times that it became family legend, one of those humourous stories trotted out whenever we'd gather for celebrations, like the saga of when my brother-in-law lost me at a tender age in the London Tube system.
Now, years later, I live far away from Newcastle-on-Tyne. But I still have my battered old copy of Little Women and I did finally achieve that long-held ambition -- only I scribbled in a basement rather than a garret!
AND FINALLY
Samuel Johnson once remarked that the business of life is to go forward. Doubtless many of us won't be at all sorry to slam the gate on the difficult twelvemonth that has been 2017 with the fervent hope that next year will be better. Only fly in the ointment: the next edition of Orphan Scrivener will buzz into subscribers' inboxes on February 15th.
See you then!r…
Mary R and Eric
who invite you to visit their home page, to be found hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the Web at http://home.earthlink.net/~maywrite/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including more personal essays, a bibliography, and our growing libraries of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Our joint blog is at http://ericreedmysteries.blogspot.com/ Intrepid subscribers may also wish to know our noms des Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales Drop in some time!
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