Tag Archives: prose

Fiction Month 4

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In the last instalment of ‘Chalet Concerto’ Angela finds that being a good Samaritan is not all it’s cracked up to be…

Chalet Concerto Part 4

       I looked up. ‘That’s about all I can tell you, Officer.’
Dave gave my shoulder an encouraging squeeze. ‘Well done, love,’ he said.
The detective constable had stopped writing in her notebook. Will I…am I going to be arrested for aiding and abetting?’ I asked her.
‘I doubt that, Mrs Tanner.’
‘Angela’
‘Angela, yes. I don’t think there’s any cause to prosecute you as you couldn’t have known at the time that Anne LeParnier was wanted in connection with a crime.’
‘What will happen to her, when she is found?’
‘She’ll be taken in for questioning of course.’
‘And if she is found guilty of murder? What then?’ I was still feeling nauseous and I couldn’t stop shaking. I’d vomited the words out just as I’d vomited all morning after turning on the TV news and discovering that Guy LeParnier, the prominent French conductor had been found stabbed to death in his Bayswater apartment.
‘A lot depends on the circumstances, Angela. It may have been self-defence or she may have been driven to the act by her husband’s behaviour. Or she may be innocent. But you are certain to be called as a witness so you must be prepared for that. You are sure that you didn’t see her enter the house?’
‘I’m certain. But whose house is it, if not her sister’s?’
The policewoman shrugged. ‘We don’t know yet. But there was no one at the address earlier this morning.’ She stood up and Dave showed her out then came back to sit with me.
‘Do you want another cup of tea, Ange?’
I looked at my husband, sitting up close to me on the chalet’s tiny sofa. ‘I’m sorry Dave. I’ve ruined our holiday, haven’t I? Should we go home, do you think?’
‘Well it’s been a bit more lively this time, love-I’ll give you that. And no, I don’t see why we should go home. It’s Karaoke tonight isn’t it? And curry night? I tell you what though. Maybe we should do something a bit different next year. We could see if our Kayleigh would mind us tagging along when they go to Majorca. They’ve got some cracking golf courses. Do you fancy it?’
It would be a long time before I could think of Anne LeParnier without imagining her slender hands drenched in blood, without dreaming of her long fingers plunging the blade into her husband’s heart. But I knew if anyone could help me get over it my husband, Dave Tanner could.
I nodded. ‘Majorca with Kayleigh and Martin. Yes, I think I’d like that very much-and I’ll have that second cup of tea, too. Thanks Dave. I’m a lucky woman.’

 

     If you stumbled upon this, the final part of a long, short story and want to read from the beginning the 1st, 2nd and 3rd parts are in weekly instalments from the beginning of November. Just check into ‘Anecdotage’ November 4th to find Part 1. If you’d like to comment, critique or share anything regarding Fiction Month your input will be enthusiastically received. 

 

Reading the Years

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Janet and John

Janet and John

I learned to read with Janet and John; that is to say-I was taught using the reading scheme, Janet and John, not alongside 4 and 5 year olds with those names [although there may well have been Janets and Johns in my class]. The prose was simple, repetitive and tedious but did the trick. I recall that the satisfaction of achieving the decoding of the words was enough to motivate me. I believe the time taken to learn to read was very short, as I was very quickly moving on to the likes of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ which I was soon able to quote long chunks of, so familiar did I become with its enchanting story line.

Janet and John was of its time, the 1950s. The family was standardised mother, father, boy, girl and dog. They were white and middle class. Janet was pictured helping mother in the kitchen while John and his father did manly chores involving the garden. These were not riveting tales. Most sentences ran along the lines of ‘Run, John, run’. He would not be running to avoid the attention of the police or to save the planet but in some vague notion of play.

By the time I was myself teaching children to read, the Ladybird scheme had arrived, although the cultural and socio-economic portrayal of the characters was not a jot different. This time the children were called Peter and Jane, the dog Pat. I feel I should apologise, here and now to the children in my class in Stockwell, London who had no option but to use these books with their white, middle class nuclear family. They must have seemed as alien as the bar in Star Wars for children whose cultural backgrounds were African, West Indian or Asian and who lived in tenement blocks in 1970s London.

Later still, my own children were given ‘One, Two, Three and Away’ books, which at least had story lines-albeit surreal. There were the beginnings of some kind of diversity, with deviant ‘Percy Green’ portrayed as a naughty boy-the character small children loved the most.

When I returned to teaching after an eight year child break there was a bright, shiny new scheme. Political correctness was burgeoning and the books went some way towards addressing it. There was still a white family with a dog [‘Floppy’] but there was the addition of Wilf and Wilma, Nadim and Aneena and their families. Everyone continued to be middle class, with no depictions of unemployment or single parents, but this is to be expected since nobody wants children to learn to read using material based on dispiriting circumstances.

Since the early 90s subsequent governments have meddled with increasingly heavy-handed interventions in the teaching of reading-each new education minister eager to make their mark and overturn the previous ‘big’ idea, regardless of what teachers know and have always known. Normal well supported children can learn to read from the back of a cereal packet but get their richest experiences from real, proper books. Those from homes with little language input and impoverished bookshelves cannot.

Who can resist the lure of children’s books these days? They get better every time I visit the book store!

Writing Superstardom

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Congratulations to Richard Flanagan, the winner of the Booker Prize 2014 for his novel, ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep South’. I have yet to read it, but fully intend to, not just because the judges were unanimous in their praise for the book but because I like to think the act of reading such an acclaimed and feted novel is a piece of research. Maybe there is a remote chance I will be able to uncover the secret of writing superb and successful prose by reading it.
When casting around for something new to load on to my Kindle I often turn to the long or shortlisted books that are in the race for a prize. I learned some time ago that Amazon reviews are not to be trusted [with the exception, of course of my own reviews]. I have posted before about the ghastly mistakes I’ve made-most notably in the case of the tedious ‘One Day’, a predictable rom-com set in the eighties [not a thrilling decade]. The book prize method of selecting reading matter is not always reliable and needs backing up with additional reviews, generally from a respected newspaper.
The only 2014 Booker contender I have read so far is American writer Karen Joy Fowler’s ‘We are all Completely Beside Ourselves’, a story which captivated me for a number of reasons. It is both laugh-out-loud funny and tear provokingly tragic. The subject matter-the tale of a child growing up with a chimpanzee as not only a sibling but a ‘twin’ is unusual and compelling. The book raised many issues including parental, children’s and animal rights. It is certainly a book I would have been proud to have written.
There was something of a shumuncous regarding the opening of the Booker prize to anyone who writes in English. I can see that widening the field does increase the competition, but perhaps it also leads to more diversity. As time goes on it becomes harder to find new subject matter. It is accepted that there are only seven basic story lines and that each and every tale is based on one of them.
The two world wars have spawned an explosion of literature both fiction and fact, much of which is very good-[Helen Dunmore, Sebastian Faulkes] and so any further foray into war territory must necessarily attack from a new angle. I gather Richard Flanagan’s novel is inspired by his father’s experiences as a Japanese prisoner of war. It is the author’s sixth novel and one that took him twelve years to write, a fact I find most heartening given that my novel 2 is stubbornly resistant to progress!
I wonder how winner Richard is feeling-beyond the euphoria of victory of course. There could be an element of pressure, I imagine, as once the excitement recedes the pressure must surely mount to produce another blockbuster, Hilary Mantel style!