I've been reading "Affairs at Thrush Green" and am enjoying it more than I expected to.
"One blue and white day towards the end of March, the rector made his way towards a remote cottage near the River Pleshey."
One blue and white day - something about that simple phrase is so appealing. Another book I started reading is "Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking". A library patron recommended it. The author makes the point that extrovert behavior is highlighted and applauded in our society as something to attain to, disregarding the natural inclinations of the individual. I hadn't thought of it like that.
"A moorhen fled squawking as the rector passed by, its feet making a sequinned track on the surface of the stream. A water vole crossed nearby leaving an arrow-shaped wake as it forged toward the safety of the bank.
The rector had an observant eye for such details. They added to the joy of his walk which he had undertaken for just such refreshment. He had felt the need for a little solitude, for time to relish the lovely natural scenes about him, free from the intrusion of fellow humans.
He noted the crinkled bark of the willow trunks, the criss-cross pattern softened by grey-green lichen. He smelt the pungency of water-mint growing in the muddy shallows at the brink of the Pleshey. He heard the plop of small animals making for water cover as he approached, and he saw the great galleons of white clouds sailing superbly across the blue sky above the water meadows, and felt the wind on his face.
He revelled in his senses which brought to him such richness, and thanked God that he still had health and strength to enjoy all five."
- from Affairs at Thrush Green, by Miss Read
I would like to remember the comparison of puffy clouds to "great galleons", next time I see a blue and white day.
that is such a lovely passage!!! Miss Read is just marvelous, I have been so delighted/soothed/calmed by her books! And I agree, it is good to realize if one is an introvert then solitude at times at least is a very good thing. I am more introvert than extrovert but surely am both in comparison to one that is strongly introverted.
ReplyDeleteYes, I can see that I'm a combination, too.
DeleteI love Miss Read's books too! They are such good comfort-reads. She went to the school I went to. In 1976/77, when I was in the Upper 6th form (18 years old), the school celebrated it's centenary and we wrote to all the 'old girls' to ask for reminiscences and Miss Read wrote back. She sent us a wonderfully long letter full of interest. Somewhere (in the loft, I think) I still have the school magazine with the letter printed in it.
ReplyDeleteI think I read a review of the Introvert book you are reading and meant to make a note of the title but forgot. I will have to see if I can access it and read it now I know it's title! Thanks, Lisa!
Oh, any time, Clare. :D But seriously, are her books describing the town you grew up in, then? Or are they about another place she lived in later in life?
DeleteThe books are based on the area where she worked as a teacher and where she lived when she was married. I think she also drew on her memories of the village school she attended. She wrote two short autobiographies of her childhood - "A Fortunate Grandchild" and "Time Remembered" now collected together in a book called "Early Days: A Childhood Memoir" which goes up to the time she left her primary school and went to the grammar school I attended. She never lived in the town where I lived; for the first seven years of her life she lived in SE London in the outer suburbs, very close to where my mother grew up. She then moved out to a village in Kent, further away from London than Bromley is. She loved living in that village and that is where she stayed until she went to Cambridge University.
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