READING LIST:

Picked up three excellent books from the charity shop.

Anthony Trollope - The Prime Minister

John Betjeman - Letters 1951 -1984

Mark Twain -The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Every book - and how clever are the people who write them - brings with them associations and memories.

Millais, John Everett (1861), "Julians on Harrow Hill, Trollope's boyhood home", Orley Farm (drawing) (1st ed.), frontispiece.

Anthony Trollope (1815 - 82) was a great writer of Victorian institutions and characters. He is accredited with introducing the post box and spent the larger part of his life in Ireland and England working for the Post Office in a senior position. He paid many visits to the United States and established contacts with literary figures there, including Mark Twain. His two years travelling in the Westcountry he said was the happiest time of his life. In 1871 he even travelled to Melbourne, Australia on the SS Great Britain - another Westcountry connection. He is remembered for his Barchester Chronicles, loosely based on Salisbury. This political novel was written in 1876, and amply illustrates the dictum that "all political careers end in failure". I look forward to reading it.

John Betjeman OM (1906 - 1984) was and is a 'national treasure'. Reading this exhaustive compilation of his correspondence by his daughter, is an insight into a packed social life, full of friends and events. One cannot help but be envious of the man and the life, or of his ability to write amusing and affecting prose and verse. His mother, who he visited frequently in her last days, was buried at Trebetherick, in Cornwall, as is he, close to his holiday home, Church and golf course. The church was famously excavated from the sand and his moving plain memorial stone is in black Delabole slate. I feel an insignificant empathy with his life-long campaign against modern civic and architectural barbarism.

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884 was published some eight years after Twain's first great writing success, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, based loosely on his own experiences as a child. Ernest Hemingway wrote : "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." Amazingly this is the first time I have read this classic tale of a boy on the Mississippi but I always felt an affinity with those two characters based on my own experiences on the river and land. (How is one to compare that majestic water highway with the humble Chew, but such is the human imagination and the power of the story teller?) Of course the mind of the child is portrayed with the mind and experience of the adult and is deeply satirical and challenging to the accepted social norms and moral code. Huckleberry Finn quickly learns to survive on his wits and moderate his words accordingly. I called my best and closest friend 'Huck' - an abbreviation of his surname - not without an allusion to that classic literary relationship, rooted in the legendary 'wild west' of an emerging super power.

Photo: Daily Mail.

Childhood in '50's Britain was dominated - at least in my case and leaving aside Christianity for a moment - with two cultural themes: the American Western and the war with Germany that inspired our play and imaginary world. Both promulgated the notion that shooting people was necessary in the battle between good and evil, order and chaos. Of course it ignored all the contradictory ethical principles. It was a subtle, or not so subtle, psychological and political conditioning, that has its modern parallels. Time sweeps on but it is the written word that provides the mileposts and road map to understanding where we have come from and possibly where we are going.