A handful do survive, and one of them happens to be Alfig, the Archbishop himself. When the battering ram fails, the Vikings set fire to the building – iron spear-points await any who escape. Crowds of frightened people huddle inside Canterbury cathedral while besieging Vikings attempt to batter their way in. Turns out some of them are quite good! This wonderful story, ‘Thurkell the Tall’, starts in media res. Who could resist such a potent brew? Besides, these old Puffins are so evocative of long-ago school libraries and the books teachers wanted you to read but which you never did. Some are duffers, some are very much not.īut first the cover: a garish hybrid of Anglo-Saxon style ornamentation and early 1970s psychedelia. In this book, Wordhoard, stories by Jill Paton-Walsh alternate with others by Kevin Crossley-Holland (did one have to possess a double-barrelled name to make it into this collection?), all covering the years between the departure of the Romans and the arrival of William the Bastard. But since my DNA comes from unvarying Anglo-Saxon stock I might as well read about them every once in a while. Personally, I would rather have been born a Guadeloupean – or Gallic, or Russian. 1 Comment ‘Thurkell the Tall’ by Jill Paton-Walsh Published in English in Tales from the Heart: True Stories from my Childhood, Soho Press, 2001 Posted on by Jonathan Gibbs Posted in James Clammer Tagged Maryse Condé. Alas, Maryse Condé is now 84 years old and not in the best of health, but I hope to read, in the newspapers, that story about her collecting the big Swedish gong.įirst published in French in Le coeur à rire et à pleurer: souvenirs de mon enfance, Editions Robert Laffont, 1998. Simple sentences with bite, vivid images, compressed events. I had been enriched by an experience he would have trouble bettering.” From page 1 of this collection you know you’re in the hands of a master. I saw its entire body sticky with mucus and faecal matter.Īfterwards she faints, then dashes off to tell her brother Sandrino: “For once his little sister had got the better of him. Her centre, gaping open like a drainpipe, was spurting blood… I who lived with blinkers on my eyes with a mother who never told me anything, not a word about periods or menstruation… was intent on seeing everything. Through a hole in the wall she and host of other children compete to watch the birth from start to finish.Īs bloated as a blimp, Charlotte was lying spread-eagled on the bed. Maryse, meanwhile, banished to the room next door, hasn’t (for once) sought companionship in a book. Shooing Maryse away, Madame Condé delivers the baby with the help of a servant dressed in a butcher’s apron, all the while speaking in forbidden Creole. Right there and then the cousin’s wife, Charlotte, is giving birth – and no midwife to be found as it’s a Sunday. When they arrive the house is a pigsty and a woman’s screaming. Having decided one day to pay a spontaneous visit to a cousin, Madame Condé packs Maryse into their Citroen ( that’s how successful they are) and off they set across the island. Born the youngest child of a large family, with a vigorous mother – “the success story of her generation”, Condé calls her – and a wealthy but ageing father, the young Maryse is the spoiled baby of the family. One of the most striking stories in the collection is ‘Full Frontal’. Sometimes gently, sometimes violently, the veils of childhood innocence are removed. (And when we read, in the account of her own birth, that “The colours and lights of the word around me were no consolation for the nine months in the dark where I had swum blind and happy with catfish fins,” we might feel inclined to treat one or two of these ‘true’ stories with a sprinkling of salt.) Every story in this collection, Tales from the Heart:True Stories from My Childhood, is superb. Which is a shame because she’s the most terrific writer.

As a black woman from a small Francophone island, Condé hasn’t made much headway in our dreary Anglo-Saxon world with its weather eye always on America. One of whom is Maryse Condé from Guadeloupe. Not necessarily those who win (another white European, yawn) but those whose names are frequently mentioned yet never land that big Swedish gong. Assuming it’s a mission in your life, how do you find your way to new writers? One thing I do is follow the Nobel Prize scene.

Michael perry stoughton opera house