An Advent List (reprise)

Last year I wrote an Advent list: the books my family will especially enjoy during December. In case you missed it, here it is again!

I love a good list. Elsewhere, I commented on developing rituals for Christmas; and I'm thinking that they will include a lot of good stories. So what follows is a dozen stories that my family will read aloud between December 1 and 24. Most of them are not Christmassy per se. Instead, they are about hope, joy, bravery, generosity, vocation, sacrifice, community, and love.

'The Singing Bus Queue' (Margaret Mahy, in The Chewing-gum Rescue and Other Stories (London: JM Dent, 1982)) sings rain or shine in seven-part harmony. No matter how hard the town grumps try to silence them, they continue to warble joyfully. Eventually, they are imprisoned for creating a public disturbance - yet even there they sing so sweetly, in such high and pure tones that the prison crumbles. They walk out through the ruins to sing through the night with the moon and stars.

Continuing the singing theme, in 'Four Angels to my Bed' (Joan Aiken, in Past Eight O'Clock: Goodnight Stories (London: Puffin, 1990)) Little John sees four angels carved on wooden bedposts. As he falls asleep, the angels sing him a fugue, and he joins his voice in a new tune that dances with, through and around the heavenly music. Downstairs, his mother smiles at the sound of her little John Sebastian singing as she realises he has discovered his calling.

'Brother Ninian's Blot' is also about calling (Robin Klein, in Ratbags and Rascals (Ferntree Gully, Victoria: Houghton Mifflin Australia, 1989)). Brother Ninian, a messy medieval copyist, spills ink across a nearly completed piece of parchment. In his horror, he tries to disguise the blot with doodles of leaves, flowers, birds, butterflies, and even a jolly abbot. He becomes completely absorbed, and in his absorption creates something wonderful, beautiful and entirely new: the illustrated manuscript.

The illustrated manuscript recalls Jane Ray's lavish illustrations in The Happy Prince: From the Fairy Tale by Oscar Wilde (London: Orchard, 1994). She retells Oscar Wilde's fairy tale in which the statue of a prince gives all it has to the city's poor - its ruby eyes, its gold leaf - via an obliging swallow.

On the theme of gifts, in 'The Gift Giving' (Joan Aiken, in Up the Chimney Down and Other Stories (New York: Harper & Row, 1984)) a blind grandmother can, with the help of a special tune played by her adult son, Mark, see and describe gifts and vistas in rich language. When Mark dies, the gift fades until Mark's nephew and namesake and Mark's daughter together make a new pipe and work out the tune that recalls Grandmother's gift.

Tomie dePaola has also written about gift giving between young and old. In Now One Foot, Now the Other (New York: Puffin, 2005), Bob teaches his grandson to stack blocks, tell stories and walk. When Bob has a stroke, it is the little boy who patiently teaches his grandfather to stack blocks, tell stories and walk again, using the same loving words his grandfather once used with him.

In a similar vein, Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge lives next door to an old people’s home. He is particular friends with Miss Nancy Alison Delacourt Cooper, who has four names, just like him. Miss Nancy has lost her memory, and Wilfrid Gordon sets out to find it for her (Mem Fox and Julie Vivas (Gosford, NSW: Scholastic, 1984)).

Thinking about neighbours recalls Rose Meets Mr.Wintergarten (Bob Graham (London: Walker Books, 1992)). In this lovely book, a young girl moves into a new neighbourhood. When she loses her ball over the fence, her openness and fairy cakes disarm the miserly neighbour who has terrified the area’s children for decades.

Other misers are persuaded to share in Nail Soup (Eric Maddern and Paul Hess, (London: Frances Lincoln, 2007). A traveller, denied all but the meanest of shelter and sustenance, convinces his host that he will make soup out of a nail. As the 'soup' bubbles away, the host is gradually persuaded to add ingredients that turn it into a generous meal they can eat together.

The Mousehole Cat is also about sharing food. When a Cornish fishing villages faces starvation, Old Tom and his cat Mowser brave the winter storms to catch fish for the town. On their safe return, the town celebrates with a feast of morgy-broth and stargazy pie (Antonia Barber and Nicola Bayley (Aladdin, 1996)).

One of the most lively renditions of the Christmas story is by Julie Vivas (The Nativity (Gosford, NSW: Scholastic, 1986)). She illustrates the story in her singular style: the angel Gabriel is a ragged punk and shares a cuppa with Mary; we see the newborn baby, hands outstretched, still attached to the umbilical cord; the shepherds loom, peering into the cot; and in the final scene, Mary pegs out nappies. In Vivas's interpretation, the Christmas story is not a far-off super-spiritual event, but something immediate, physical, real, that happens even now. I particularly love that Mary is enormously pregnant, pendulous breasts and all, rather than resembling some medieval nymph.

Finally, what would an Australian Christmas be without a reading of Wombat Divine (Mem Fox and Kerry Argent (Scholastic, 2009))? Wombat desperately wants to be in the Christmas play, but he is too short, too clumsy, and too heavy for any of the parts. But Emu finds him the perfect role, and Wombat is, quite simply, divine.

As are all these stories. Read, prepare, enjoy.

PS For out of print books, try here.

On marriage and morgy-broth

I recently asked friends to name a story, film, song, piece of music, meal or place which somehow evoked their relationship. I'm helping them prepare a ritual for marriage, so the question was not entirely out of the blue!

But it got me to thinking. Which story evokes my marriage with my husband? And has it changed? We've been together for over a decade; is it the same story as it was ten years ago?

As I pondered these questions, I found myself reflecting, again*, on The Mousehole Cat by by Antonia Barber and Nicola Bayley. And I realise that it is our story so far.

For on the one hand, our marriage has felt like Mousehole: warm, safe, snug, and battered by storms. We partnered soon after my husband's first marriage ended, and his grief, rage and sense of betrayal swept through the air, lashing at us and those around us. Related conflict with friends and church thundered around. My mother, who had a galloping form of multiple sclerosis, moved quickly through paraplegia to quadriplegia to blindness to, shortly before our wedding, death, and the waves of grief almost washed us away. Early in my first pregnancy, his mother died; and soon after that our grandfathers. When I think back to those early years, I remember a black hole of rage and sorrow and loss, so that we almost foundered; yet we held fast. I cannot but think of the seawall, battered by the Great Storm Cat but keeping the worst of the winds and the seas at bay.

But our relationship is growing out of that deeply inward, protective stage. And yet I am still in the same story, because my husband reminds me of Old Tom. He's the sort of man who will put himself out to help others; the one who hands children food off his own plate, who will forfeit the last piece of cake or his own desires if it makes someone else happy. He gets up in the night with the crying baby. He has structured his work to direct resources into the deeply unpopular field of clergy abuse; he has structured his home life so he can spend good time with his children. He's decent, honest, an enabler; what the Yiddish might call a real mensch. I can imagine him, trapped by winter storms in a small town, giving away what food he has and, when that runs out, risking the sea to catch fish for all.

Like Old Tom's cat Mowzer, I can imagine getting into the boat with him, thinking, as usual, of my stomach and filled with hope for morgy-broth and stargazy pie. I can imagine sitting in the prow as he guides the boat, and singing to the Great Storm Cat, finding the words from deep within which placate the winds and the rain. I can imagine being scared, scoured by water and buffeted by the gale, but willing to risk my life in a boat with my husband. I can see him filling the nets, and turning the boat. And between his sailing and my singing, together, I imagine, we might steer through the storms and find our way home, guided by the candles that fill the windows of our town. Welcomed back, we would feast on morgy-broth and stargazy pie, and celebrate with everyone!

Partnership, sacrifice, songs, community. And stargazy pie. What else could a marriage need?

*For more about The Mousehole Cat, see the post below or click here.

Lichen and Running Water

Is it possible to be born into the wrong landscape? I wonder. I was born in Melbourne. Both sides of my family have been in Australia for many generations. I grew up with high skies and eucalyptus trees, and know no other landscape well. Yet I have never really felt at ease here. Perhaps it's psychological, reflecting only a certain discomfort with my own skin. Or perhaps my soul has its roots in another land. Because whatever the cause, and try as I might, I cannot fall in love with thin dry forests and red dirt. I have read, and loved, Murray Bail's Eucalyptus, that hypnotic mythical story set on a property studded with Australian trees. I devoured Tim Winton's Dirt Music, located in the West, and Delia Falconer's The Service of Clouds, set in the Blue Mountains. Foggy Highway, by Paul Kelly and the Stormwater Boys, is on repeat in our household as it tells the stories of Australia. I've lived in Melbourne and Perth and driven the thousands of miles between and around the two, drinking in the landscape. It is stunning, awe inspiring, humbling. But I do not rest easy here.

I just don't feel at home. Even in the depths of a Melbourne winter (which don't run that deep these days), I yearn for muddy puddles and endless days of thick rain. I hunger for green pasture, fence posts exuberant with lichen, and fields and folds flowing as far as the eye can see.

What is my interior landscape? Could it be genetically prescribed? My ancestors were miners and innkeepers from Cornwall and who knows where else. I haven't been there, but perhaps that landscape tallies with my own.

After all, whenever I read Greenwitch by Susan Cooper, I get a tingle of recognition. Greenwitch is the third of a sequence, The Dark is Rising. The series draws from myth and legend to tell of the endless struggle between Dark and the Light. In Greenwitch, based in a fishing village in Cornwall, the battle for good is aided by the even more powerful neutral force of the Earth. A young girl, Jane, participates in the village's annual spring ritual for good fishing and good harvest. The ritual involves the nocturnal making of the Greenwitch, which is tossed into the sea. Jane's pity for the Greenwitch, and her relationship with it, shapes the story and affects the eternal struggle. And the description of the houses, the village, the seawall, the sea - all so different to my own experience - feel deeply familiar. As I read, I sense the tang of salt and hear gulls in the distance; the sound of waves fills the air. The landscape, the stones, the village are like a dream I can't quite remember, something I love but have never known.

Another book set in a village in Cornwall has a similar effect. Every time I read The Mousehole Cat, by Antonia Barber and Nicola Bayley, I cry. This picture book is set in the town of Mousehole, pronounced Mowzel, so named because of the narrowness of the gap through which the fishing boats have to pass from the open sea into the harbour. It's based on an old Cornish legend about a time when winter storms were so bad that no boat could get through the gap to the fishing grounds. The village is slowly starving, so Old Tom, who has no living dependents, decides he must risk destruction in order to feed the town. His cat, Mowzer, sings to and soothes the Great Storm Cat as Old Tom steers his boat to the fishing grounds, and brings home enough fish for everyone. The language and the illustrations are complementary: each intricate, each adding richness and depth to the story. This is a book to read over and over again, and treasure. But beware: it may not be just the landscape that brings tears to my eyes. If you plan to read it aloud to a little one, be prepared for your voice to crack, and keep a box of tissues within easy reach.

I'm not just hooked on stories from Cornwall. Stories set in the north of England also grab me in the guts, so familiar do they feel. Many of us read Jane Gardam's Bilgewater or A Long Way from Verona at high school. Less well known, but absolutely wonderful, are two collections of her short stories. The Hollow Land, set in the Cumbrian fells, recounts the low-key adventures of Harry and Bell as they lock up the fell gate, explore an old mine, listen to ghost stories on a rainy night, find a frozen cataract, and spend time with various eccentric villagers. A Few Fair Days is set on the coast of north Yorkshire, and tells stories about young Lucy. Nothing much happens, but everything is important: a windy day, when mother airs out blankets and Lucy goes for an impromptu solitary wander; an empty house, which the village children commandeer for their elaborate games; a feisty aunt, frequently absent, who breaks all the rules; a house guest who wears a wig.

The stories are shaped by their respective landscapes. The Hollow Land is set on the fells, a land riddled with abandoned mines and studded with sheep. Just as the water runs secret paths, sometimes aboveground, but more often underground until the rains come, many of the stories are about things known to the locals, but unspoken and hidden from outsiders. On the other hand, A Few Fair Days is set in a cold and blustery country of stony slopes and sand dunes, heady with the smell of the sea. Houses are large and chilly, and time drags. Most of the action takes place away from home, in an abandoned house or down in the dunes; and many of the stories are about things uncovered, things which must be recognised for what they are. In this windy landscape, obfuscation and opacity are soon blown away.

In all her stories, which are gentle, funny and kind, Gardam displays her acute ear for dialogue: the offhand comments made by mothers to children, the two short phrases that convey a whole relationship. And she takes the reader back to childhood, when playing on a piece of defunct farm machinery takes a whole afternoon, and aunts loom large.

One day, I hope to visit England. There I suppose I will find that I am not English either, and like all children who have lived in various countries, and all children born to immigrants - however long ago -, I will have to resign myself to statelessness for my interior landscape at least. In the meantime, I continue to search out stories of lichen and running water, endless rain and grey skies, green fields dotted with sheep, dark seas and cobblestones, and noses that drip with cold.

> Antonia Barber and Nicola Bayley The Mousehole Cat (Aladdin, 1996); Susan Cooper Greenwitch (Atheneum, 1974); Jane Gardam A Few Fair Days (New York: Greenwillow, 1988 (1971)); Jane Gardam The Hollow Land (London: Puffin, 1983 (1981)).