Love is Blue by Joan Wyndham

This rare book was well worth the search. By turns sharp, hilarious and heartbreaking, the voice of memoirist Joan Wyndham is filled with contradictions. She's a devout Catholic with divorced parents. Adhering to conventions inculcated by her mother, she attends art school and frequents concerts, galleries and theatres as well as mass and confession. On the rare occasion her artist father turns up, he takes her for a meal and then drinking at club after West End club.

Intelligent, convent-educated and artistic, Joan is 17 when the war starts. The RADA, to which she's already been accepted, closes indefinitely, putting paid to her plan of studying to be an actress.

Aware of her innocence, she's also guiltily determined to enjoy experiences the church forbids.

Along with jazz and wild parties, she discovers men. Innocent but filled with enthusiastic curiosity, she plunges into the convention-defying lifestyle of Bohemian London. After experimenting with some benzedrine found at her father's flat, she goes on to get the drug prescribed so she can drink copiously without feeling drunk. Experimenting with sex, she runs through a range of men from immature egotistical artists to depressed refugee philosopher-poets. She develops a special fondness for a gloomy sculptor, a German Jew who's terrified the government will intern him - and he does end up spending much of the war in a camp in Australia.

All that's before she gets involved with the displaced fighting Norwegians on Shetland and the RAF. As the war progresses, she interacts with a "conchie," and watches other artistic friends go to war. The mad party scene filled with art, jazz, booze, sex and drugs doesn't end, but continues in a different form when Joan joins the WAAF, and embarks on a whole new set of adventures.

One volume of a three part memoir of Joan Wyndham's life during WWII, Love is Blue offers an intimate glimpse of wartime life. Based on diaries the author wrote at the time, this volume is rich with details of cafes, bars, slang, mores, clothing, food and sketches of colourful contemporaries. We follow Wyndam through Chelsea and Soho, then on to Preston, Shetland, and Inverness.

The final scenes set down a living record of one woman's reaction to the shock of the liberated concentration camps, the exhilaration of VE day, the somber numbness of VJ day, and the emotional commemorative events that followed the end of the war.

In this deceptively simple journal format, Joan Wyndham portrays the great issues of her time. Refraining from comment, she allows readers to judge for themselves what to make of the rigid class system, the social expectations of women, the casually dismissive terms used for out-groups, and the devastating effects of war on the people caught up in it.

In his book of short essays, Colum McCann offers some practical advice along with meditations and philosophical reflections on the writing life.

One thing he insists on is that fiction writer must get to know their characters with absolute intimacy. This way, the author automatically knows how they'll react in any situation, and thus ring true on the page. Indeed, authors owe them a debt for "ringing the doorbell of...imagination."

Tom Joad, Nick Gatsby, and Leopold Bloom are real, "or at least as real as the seven billion people in the world that we haven't met yet." Remembering a funny story, I'd like to add Jane Eyre to that all-male list. Touring in England, a Dutch-born philosophy professor called Peter (of Liberal Studies at SFU), was reading old headstones.

Seeing the name Jane Eyre gave him a jolt. Excited, he called to his wife, also a fan of the Bronte novel. "Come and see who's buried here."

She read the inscription, then looked up, puzzled. "But our Jane Eyre is not real." Peter realized his mistake, but the world had shifted. That moment of emotional elation followed by rapid deflation stayed with him, a reminder of the power of fiction and imagination.

Imagination, says McCann, "gives us access to the "deepest darkdown things." The powerful force of language is "for saying the things we knew, but hadn't yet made sense of." Calling mystery "the glue that joins us, the author exhorts writers to do all they can to make the reader "the most complicit eavesdropper."

Commenting on structure, McCann says stories, "rely on the human instinct for architecture," with stories filling the the structurally sound container "slowly built from the bottom up." Yet this foundation must remain the author's secret. No reader will want to see "the foundation, or the wiring behind the walls, or even the architectural plans." As for endings, he believes a story "should finish in the concrete, with an action, a movement to carry the reader forward."

Stories require research, yet he warns that facts are "mercenary things," and texture is "far more important." The secret is finding the odd detail "that only the experts might know." Then "use it, but don't draw too much attention to it."

Though the title seems to address the book to young writers, it is well-known that many novelists are on the far side of fifty, who are by no means excluded. Using "young" is a literary reference; within the covers the author speaks to all who want to write, in tones that vary from kind encouragement to this sharp warning. "The most destructive force in your life is liable to be the unwritten story." No matter your age, "The work matters. The story needs to be told."

He also calls attention to the difference between writing non-fiction and writing fiction. You can liberate your stories when you stop writing "directly about yourself." Paradoxically, only then will you "have written yourself. And you're the only one you can, or should change."

McCann offers an intriguing exercise on getting to know your characters. "Dear (character)," you write, "Why don't I know you?" Adapting this to "Why don't I know you better?" I wrote her answer quickly by hand. In ten short minutes I learned an astonishing amount of new information about my character. How? 'Tis a mystery. But I believe the indirect trick involved in this exercise gives access to the subconscious inner world where the story is already complete.

Maisie Dobbs: A Lesson in Secrets, by Jacqueline Winspear

Maisie Dobbs is a psychologist and investigator. Beginning with Winspear's first eponymous novel, (originally meant as a standalone), she rises from her original low station.

Her life as a Cambridge scholar is interrupted, she becomes a WWI nurse, an investigator's assistant, and eventually, principal of her own investigative agency. Along the way, she experiences tragedy, friendship. and romance.

Mystery author Lee Child finds Maisie a well-rounded, evolving character whose stories he enjoys. He feels she shares the kinship of non-conformity with Jack Reacher.

Set in the early 1930s, this book deals with the rise of Nazism, communism, and peace education. Now an independent investigator, Maisie is called in by the Secret Service, and also receives another interesting proposal.

Reading this meticulously researched series in no particular order, I've been with Maisie Dobbs in London, India, Gibraltar, Canada, and of course, Chelstone. I've ridden along in her red MG, and imagined the more sedate and less conspicuous Siddeley she later acquires. Through the stories, I've learned something of the plight of WWI veterans without pensions, the terrible treatment of "conchies," conscientious objectors to war, and the social unrest of the 1930s. I've also learned a bit about how the Spanish Civil War affected Gibraltar, and something of the community of Sephardic Jews who live there.

I aim to keep on reading her stories, learning at the same time.

Earth Day: Evening walk on the Serpentine Dike

Dusk on the dike

Open your nostrils

Receive the fragrance of burst willow buds
Breathe spring-steeped air.

Tread lightly:

Hear your own soft footfalls
Feel them reverberate from soles to crown.

Overhear the cadenced conversations of geese

Flying low over the marshlands
Whoosh of wings audible against air.

Catch the splash of squalling ducks

As they swim, see the perfect vee behind each
Traced on the glass-still water.

Scent coming rain

Feel the first hesitant droplets touch your hair.

Sense elusive memories

Connecting this walk with years of other walks.

Feel beneath the feet

The uneven shape, the wild mud and grass-clad body
Of Earth our Mother – familiar, beloved.

The Enemy is Listening by Aileen Clayton

Aileen Clayton (nee Morris) joined the WAAF in 1939. The first woman to be commissioned as an intelligence officer in the British Armed Forces, she served first at Kingsdown in Kent and later at various posts around the Mediterranean. For her devotion to the Y service, to which she contributed so much, she earned honour and recognition.

After years of planning, staffing and supervisory duties in theMediterranean, she was spared at last for a visit home. Once there, she was taken on a tour of the Y stations before being decorated at Buckingham Palace by the king.

In her memoir, Clayton recalls dancing with an officer whose unit she knew was bound for Anzio. At age 25, she bore the "intolerable responsibility" of knowing something ominous that she could neither speak of nor change.

In the chill of foreboding for the young man, (and indeed he perished in the Anzio landings), she was struck by a feeling of premature age, of having "mislaid" her youth, a dark memory that remained with her for life. A similar premonition preceded the loss of her young brother, who failed to return from operations with No. 221 Squadron in March 1945.

For all those who worked in the Y service, the relentless immediacy of hearing pilots crash and die through radio messages took an enormous toll. So, of course, did the pressure to work with great speed and accuracy, solve an endless stream of threats to the system, and of course, maintain absolute secrecy about their duties.

Clayton was over sixty when she published this remarkable eye-witness memoir in 1980, when at last, the veil of secrecy was drawn back. In the Foreword, Air Chief Marshal Sir Frederick Rosier, GCB, CBE, DSO praises the wartime work of the Y service, along with "the extraordinary resilience and adaptability of women who showed that they were supreme in what they were doing."

Brave, calm and adaptable in the face of unimaginable pressure and adversity, Clayton credits the work done by her Y service colleagues for aiding the advancement of women. In a casual tone, she comments that fortunately "both [US General and later President Dwight D.] Eisenhower and [Air Chief Marshall Sir Arthur W.] Tedder were convinced that women could safely and efficiently undertake work which had previously been looked on as strictly a male province."

Earth Abides

A pink supermoon rises over the Serptentine River, with Mount Baker visible on the horizon.

Walking on the dike last night, I remembered a poem that came to me more than ten years ago as I walked home in the quiet dusk from Bear Creek Park.

Today I felt moved to revise it, but only slightly.

Earth Abides

As the sun sets here to bring heat and light to the far side of our planet

the moon rises pink and enormous.

What does it portend?

Growing brighter as I walk,

it clears the gap between trees as dusk deepens.

In the midst of mystery, we have lived careless,  

forgetful beneath the glare of streetlights,

of the nightly blessing of the moon’s faithful lantern

illuminating our earthly path.

Careless, we’ve forgotten the many gifts of our mother,

on whose bosom we yet walk and live.

Yet still, in mysterious munificence,

our earth abides.

The Secret Listeners by Sinclair McKay

Like McKay's book about the wartime codebreakers of Bletchley Park, this is engaging, well-researched, and filled with fascinating details about what life was like for the men and women of the Y (wireless) service in the same historic era. Enjoying and enduring their mundane task of listening to Morse signals and taking them down, they laboured in stations across the world, some "unspeakably dreary;" others comfortable, romantic and exciting.

Breaking up the focus of routine, they experienced bizarre moments, as when late in the war, two Germans were overhead to abuse Hitler and agree on the spot that both would desert. At a base in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), "daubs of colour and brilliance from nocturnal insects" and "lizards on the football pitches" afforded some consolation for "the wearying slog of the shift system."

As they gave their youthful energy to the task at hand, some experienced moments of true horror. The author quotes Aileen Clayton's expression of the terrible burden of secret knowledge she had to bear. When she danced with a young man she felt a chill at learning his unit; she knew it was bound for Anzio. The fact that she could not speak of this, or warn him in any way, made her feel '"very cold and alone...almost old.'" (She was 25.) And indeed her dance partner was killed within a few days of landing. After the war, Clayton penned a memoir called The Enemy is Listening, which describes her wartime work in the Y service. 

Superseded by digital technology, Morse is a dying art. "No one will ever again acquire that fast-thinking fast-fingered skill that the Y service veterans mastered." Working with incredible speed and accuracy as well as patience and endurance, those young people had "a grandstand view of history." In 2009, they were finally given commemorative medals. Most by then were dead.

"Possibly due to their numbers" Sinclair McKay comments, "the various branches of the Y service seem to have been better at organizing reunions over the years, giving a sense of community and remembrance to many who had worked at the more secretive Bletchley Park."