Backlisted - The Town House by Norah Lofts

Episode Date: March 19, 2018

This week John and Andy are joined by journalist and author Lucy Mangan, whose new memoir of childhood reading Bookworm has just been published by Square Peg. They discuss Norah Lofts' novel The Town House (1959), the first of her 'Suffolk house' trilogy. Andy also talks about Words Best Sung by Lee Stuart Evans, and John has been reading Emmanuel Carrère's The Kingdom.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length) 7'44 - Words Best Sung by Lee Stuart Evans16'30 - The Kingdom by by Emmanuel Carrère21'29 - The Town House by Norah Lofts* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. Well, the last time I spoke to you, you were in the snow, you were saying, because we were recording this just, it was a terrible cold snap. A terrible cold winter of 2000. A cold winter that lasted three days. But you were out in a field.

Yes, I was. I was just getting livestock in because in because i mean the sheep are hard enough probably to survive it but they're pregnant so it's what i feel they ought to be inside they of course as soon as you bring them in the first thing they do is go out and sit in the snow it's just it's just what sheep do um but uh they're just thick aren't they um well i i don't know i don't know how thick they are. What they are is they've definitely got personalities and you've got dominant sheep, sheep that lead and others that follow.

That blows everything out of the woods. Half of Lenguid is gone. I know. Wait until he gets on to Lemmings. Well, you know the Lemmings. The Lemmings is totally made up. You know that. It's all made up for a Disney film.

They don't throw themselves off cliffs. They never have done, never will do. I don't want to know. It was a thing called the Thing of the North, it was called. I can't remember. And it was, you know, Lemming after Lemming plunges into the icy waters below. Turned out they were filming them on a turntable going round. It was really, really cynical.

Well, I didn't know that. But what is a lemming? A lemming is a small rodent. It lives in Scandinavia. And what happens is occasionally they do have population explosions. And lemmings do die as a result of that. What they've become because of this one documentary isn't it the computer game that's done it i will i will search

this out and make sure we put this in the show notes but i'll find out what the name of the film was but this if it makes the cut but what happened was they literally filmed them to make it exciting they invented the myth of the suicidal lemming that lemmings would at a certain point be possessed as a mass sort of furry mass throw themselves off cliffs into into sort of glacial torrents below and and die this is not true sadly myth but the gadarene swine the gadarene swine yeah so you don't farm lemmings anyway. That's the point. I barely farm sheep.

I mean, the sheep live in our field and we eat them, I'm afraid. The lambs anyway. And the pigs too. But I got a new pig post the big freeze on the train yesterday. And my farmer friend said, do you want a pregnant sow for 75 quid? And he said, I'm at Sorencester Market. And so I said, yeah, well, why not? Sounds like a great deal. So she arrived yesterday evening

and is still casing the joint. And it's slightly, I know that Buster, our boar, who is past it and probably needs to go to the knacker's yard, he's making lots of his customary grunting noises think if you did you ever see buster when you were there yes and he's infeasibly large he's called he's the only pig we've ever named because of his gonads yeah yeah unfeasibly large go what's the have you have you named are you going to name the new uh the uh hamish who names the animals i don't't usually say, has already named it Notorious P.I.G.,

which is quite good, quite witty. Anyway, that's enough animals. There'll be farming coming up later in this podcast. Shall we kick off? Let's. Hello, and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today, you find us hunkered around a fire and a sturdy though malodorous medieval lean-to

with a moth-eaten performing bear snoring in the corner. This feat of time travel is brought to you courtesy of Unbound, the website where readers fund writers directly to make books of quality and distinction. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And joining us today is the writer, critic and broadcaster Lucy Mangan. Hello. Hello, Lucy. Lucy is a columnist for Stylist and features writer for The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph. And according to her Wikipedia page, her writing style is, quotes, both feminist

and humorous. Multitasking again. Do you know who wrote your Wikipedia page? No idea, I just know that when we tried to amend it, when the first one went up, my husband tried to get a couple of basic facts that they'd completely invented

as far as I can see, he corrected them, and they got so annoyed they took it down so this is the new one that's gone up after a couple of years. They get very sniffy if you correct your own entry, it seems some sort of self-promotion but when it's fact... It was really just, no that's not my dad

and I didn't do that at university it was that kind of level and it was my husband did it, I've no idea how to edit as you'll see from my book. True. And Lucy is also the author of five books. The latest of which is Bookworm

a memoir of childhood reading and that's just out from Square Peg. I have dipped into the book. The bits into which I have dipped please me greatly. John, you have read... I have read it cover to cover, yeah, and I've in fact reviewed it on Monocle. And loved it, loved it, loved it, loved it.

But the book that you're here to talk to us today about isn't Bookworm. It's The Town House by Nora Loss, which was originally published in 1959 and is the first volume in the Suffolk trilogy. Well, is it? Because there's more than one Suffolk trilogy. There's another Suffolk trilogy, but I think this is the Suffolk House trilogy. Because the subsequent titles are The House at Old Vine and The House at Sunset. And it's 600 years, isn't it?

And the house is a consistent. And it's 600 years, isn't it? And with a house as a consistent theme right through to 1956, I think. Yeah. Anyway, we've got something else rather exciting. Doing well enough to have attracted the attention of a sponsor for the first time, other than, of course, our band. Bloomin' Wild, the UK's top-rated flower delivery company,

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it's all much more practical. Well, marvellous. Anyway, there we are. Bloom and Wild. Very exciting. 20% off if you use the code backlisted. Okay, before we plunge into the Middle Ages, Andy, I have to ask you what you've been reading this week. So I've been reading a book this week by a man called Lee Stewart Evans,

and he is a comedy writer. He's worked on many TV and radio things. He's written for Frank Skinner and he's written for Live at the Apollo, 8 Out of 10 Cats, etc, etc. Not Lee Evans. It's not Lee Evans, because that's why he's been released. The rubber-faced comedian, you mean? No, the sweating funny man, Lee Evans. No, it's not Lee Evans. It's Lee Stewart Evans,

who has no... Or Stuart Lee. Or no perspiration issues. Poor Lee Stuart Evans listening to this. This is like a highfalutin episode of Dinner Ladies. Highfalutin is definitely what we are. It's what we are every episode. So the novel's called Words Best Sung.

I read this. I'd heard about it on The Grapevine and in fact Lee had contacted me because he's seen on Twitter how much I love things to do with the 1960s film of the 60s, music of the 60s written a book about the kinks writing about 60s film in my next book he said

well you know I wouldn't normally do this but I think you might quite like my book because it's set in the 1960s and it features the kinks. So I thought, well, you know what? Every so often I'm allowed to read something that I might like to read. I might actually enjoy reading that's based on things that I'm interested in as a human being. So I read the book and what I did really, really enjoy it. If you are into 60s beat music, or you're into kitchen sink films like A Taste of Honey or Billy Lyre, or a kind of loving, if you're into the book Absolute Beginners, Backlisted Listens, as you know I am, you would really enjoy this book.

beginners, backlisted listeners, as you know I am, you would really enjoy this book. I'm going to read a little bit in a minute. What I like about it is it manages to, in one way, it's sort of, it's got a sort of fan fiction element to it. It's sort of, it takes place in a kind of 60s that probably didn't exist, but is based on all those texts and films that I've just been talking about. So it's very much the Billy Lyre of John Schlesinger's film rather than the Billy Lyre of Keith Waterhouse's novel. A quick digression to say the thing about Billy Lyre, the novel, is great though it is, it's significantly different from the film in two ways. The first way is in the novel, nobody escapes to London. And escaping to London, as in fact happens in Lee's book,

is one of the things we would associate with Billy Lye, but that only happens in the film. The other thing is that Keith Waterhouse really hates all the kids that he's writing about in Billy Liar. The subtext of Billy Liar is, look at all these idiots in the north that I, Keith Waterhouse, got away from by escaping to London, and I'm not

going to, and I'm pulling the ladder up after me. I'm not allowing any of them to get down here. Whereas the message of the film is, you can get away, and maybe you ought to get away. So it's got that going on. There's a sort of fan fiction element to it.

But also, and this dovetails with Nora Lopes and some of the things that we're going to be talking about, it's sort of at this distance, it's historical fiction. It's like they're events that might have taken place 50 or more years ago. And, you know, we are of an age to have grown up with the 60s being an ever-present thing in popular culture. And it might well be it will take the Gen Xers who grew up in the 60s to finally die and stop going on about it before it passes into history. passes into history. But it really struck me that it's the sort of book that would not be sold in a gendered way, whereas some historical fiction, depending on the era in which it's taking place, and I would include Nora Lott in this probably, and I would add straight away, unfairly,

if you look at the jackets of the Nora Lofts books I have with me, few men would be willing to walk around reading those on the tube, right? And that seems really unfair. And in a way, I sort of feel the same about this book. So I'm just going to read you a tiny bit here. Our heroes, Alistair and Trevor, think of them in your minds as the young tom courtney and rodney buse if that helps their mate is has is playing drums in a group called the checkered saracens he's playing drums in a group called the checkered saracens i'm already loving it

and they're they're at a holiday camp in Skegness, which must be Butlins. So they're waiting for their mate Jumbo to come on and the band to come on. So I'll just read this. A raucous squeal went up as a roadie crept out onto the stage, swiftly dying away again as he scurried about in the shadows, fiddling with guitars, amplifiers and cables, and the crowd recognised him as a nobody. He must be shitting himself, Alistair shouted over the searchers. Trevor laughed. I am and I'm not even playing. Still, if they're awful, we'll be able to give him plenty of stick about it.

Jumbo was first out. Wearing a pale blue suit, he strode purposefully towards his drum kit and seated himself without even a glance towards the screaming crowd. The look on his face showed no sign of nerves. In fact, he seemed so cool and composed, he might have been settling down to practice alone in his bedroom as he went about adjusting his stool and worked the pedals of the hi-hat and bass drum for comfort. Jumbo's bandmates followed him out, each wearing a smaller version of the same blue three-button suit. A thin, shortish lad with a floppy blonde fringe, the singer presumably, made for centre stage where he now stood back to the audience, his right leg jerking four-four time as he fiddled with the mic lead.

A guitarist with dark curly hair and a threatening face took up position stage right, legs wide apart as he fixed the crowd with a still, dead-eyed stare. The final member was a very affable-looking, bespectacled bass player who, kneeling before the altar of his amplifier, spent a moment or two making sure his instrument had just the right amount of throbbing depth to trigger a full front-row nosebleed. Jumbo raised his sticks, and with a one-two-three, they were off. were off. With an almighty smash, his drums collided with the thudding bass and wildly overdriven guitar, blasting an opening trio of crunchy major chords out into the auditorium, a sonic wave of such force that the whole place seemed to lunge to one side as the crowd screamed and began to jump up and down as one. Bolstered by such an ecstatic, unexpected welcome,

the checkered Saracens tore through their opening number, an original composition with a driving beat and impressively typed stop-start guitar riff, which relied upon some rather fancy percussion work from their sweat-lover, The Pow. The lyrics were largely indecipherable, but that hardly mattered when they were belted out with such energy that the audience was soon swept away on the waves of noise pouring from both the stage and themselves. When Alistair turned to Trevor, he was staring back at him open-mouthed. The checkered Saracens were good, bloody good in fact. Raw, but then so were lots of groups live. They raced through their set of eight equally breathless numbers, including both a Kinks and a Rolling Stones cover, their confidence visibly growing with every tune.

Towards the end of their set, the singer even just started to pick out faces in the crowd, friends he recognised, girls he liked the look of, acknowledging them with a loaded finger or a cocky wink. The guitarist, despite his surly demeanour, also turned out to be quite a showman, and when not pirouetting, becoming entangled in his own cables, would suddenly throw himself to his knees like some borstal Chuck Berry, or lay on his back firing a volley of angry notes up into the ceiling at one point jumbo removed his sodden jacket twirling it above his head before tossing it

out over his kit so that it came down perfectly positioned for the bassist to then kick it out into a sea of screaming faces it was a blistering performance for a band no one outside the pubs of lincolnshire had ever heard of they were hardly the kinks or the who by a long way but the checkered saracens definitely had something and whatever it was they'd given every last drop of it during the 20 minutes they played on that stage it's very good i mean that seemed really evocative to me of of what it's like to have 20 minutes where you and the audience have 24 minutes to fling yourselves at one another yeah so if you if that's your sort of thing words best sung is the sort of thing you'll like john what have you been reading this week oh gosh yeah gosh. Yeah, quite different.

It feels slightly like I've bitten off more than I can chew, but I've wanted to read Emmanuel Carrère for some time. And I thought, it's lent. Why don't I read his big, mad book about the Gospels called The Kingdom? And it is big and it is mad, but it is also brilliant. I mean, it's sort of, if you can imagine, you know, St. Augustine's Confessions rewritten by kind of a sort of halfway between Knausgaard and Huelbeck. That's what you got.

I mean, somebody says Carrera is one of the great, one of the best French novelists, great French novelist you've never heard of. And I had sort of been aware of him. He specialises in what he calls the non-fiction novel, which of course is probably... Lucy is mopping her brow, listeners. So it is, I have to say, it doesn't sound like a page turner, the history of the early Christian church.

I mean, I won't bore you with the thesis, but the thesis is basically he's coming, trying to reimagine how these gospels were made. He starts in a very French way by saying, you know, it's crazy. How does anybody believe this stuff? You know, I mean, I'll give you a little sense of the buttonholing style of Monsieur Carrère. And, you know, he's talking to people, he said, day after day, meal after meal, conversation after conversation, I'd have come to

find these people, he was talking about going on a cruise with a bunch of Catholics, with whom on the face of it, I had almost nothing in common, endearing, moving even. I saw myself kindly grilling a table of Catholics over dinner, for example, taking apart the Apostles' Creed phrase by phrase. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. You believe in God? But how do you see him? As a bearded old man up on a cloud? As a superior force? As a being so large that we're like ants beside him? As a lake or a flame at the bottom of your heart? And Jesus Christ, his only son, who will come again in glory to judge the living in the day and his kingdom will have no end. Tell me about this glory, this judgment, this kingdom

and get to the heart of the matter. Do you really believe he was resurrected? I'm glad you've been trapped on a cruise. Anyway, it's totally addictive. I found it very addictive. The whole idea that Luke, who kind of writes the same gospel, you know, the sort of mad mystical gospel written by John, he theories about that.

But he thinks that Luke was so in love with the idea of Jesus, so in love with Paul, he kind of knew Paul, that he invented, and it's true, Luke, in the earlier gospels, Mark and Matthew, there is no resurrection. it's in Luke. And he's basically said this is his great fictional. James Wood said he's like a teacher, some brilliantly improper teacher, the one you were lucky enough to enjoy before he got fired.

A whirling eccentric who feels free to compare St Paul to Philip K. Dick, ecclesiastical authorities to the Bolsheviks, and prayer to yoga. Well, he wrote, like, 20 years ago. You made that comparison with Welbeck. And Welbeck's first book was a fantastic book, in fact, about H.P. Lovecraft, the writer H.P. Lovecraft. One of Carrère's first books is a book called I Am Alive and You Are Dead, which that must have been published like 20 years ago.

Yeah, 1993. A fictional biography of Philip K. Dick. A fictional biography. And Dick features a lot in this book because Dick, as you know, went into a massively kind of religious phase towards the end of his life. Sounds hilarious the way you said that. Peter knows what Dick likes. He wrote a biography of Limonov, that was his mother,

before that, which he was a kind of Russian gangster, politician, poet. And then The Adversary, which is the one people know him best for here, which was subtitled True Story of a Monstrous Deception about the guy who killed his family. I love the French public intellectual as a thing, right? Yes. Lucy, I reckon you don't, but I really like them.

It's my poker face not working. If you like that kind of thing, if you like Segal, if you're interested remotely in... I mean, what he does brilliantly is talk about philosophy and he can talk about Nietzsche in a sort of way that makes you interested. And it's brilliantly is talk about philosophy and he can talk about Nietzsche in a sort of way that makes you interested and it's brilliantly translated I mean it really doesn't feel like it's been translated by um and we should say by John Lambert it's a it's a it's a crazy ride while it lasts

so we've talked about 60s beat music we've talked about the early church the early church we talked about the french intellectual but that have we covered medieval farming in i i i'm not sure we're about to the book chat will continue on the other side of this message so the townhouse by nora lofts i was saying to you earlier luc Lucy, that I don't think I ever would have read this if you hadn't elected this particular book for this episode of Backlisted. I think

Nora Lofts might be the best-selling and at the same time most obscure author that we've ever featured on Backlisted. And I wasn't really aware of her work and nor was my mum, to return to my mum. We're going to talk about my mum a lot this episode. But she sold millions of books, particularly in America.

She wrote 60 novels, something like that. Yeah, I mean, her first book, which was in the 30s, I mean, it immediately went into that American, the American Readers Club kind of edition. So she was, I mean, and... She won the National Book Award, the Bookseller Discovery Award in 1937 for her, for a collection of short stories

called I Met a Gypsy. I Met a Gypsy, that's it. So I hadn't come across her before and I probably wouldn't have read this book and I thought it was terrific. I just thought it was terrific yeah I'm so relieved no no I can't wait I was so looking forward to talking about it as well because because I mean unexpectedly good because it's it's not the first thing you want to say about it is it it's packaged the way I'm looking at those as historical romance. It's much darker, much grittier, much more interesting.

I mean, and also, I mean, knowing a little bit about medieval life. I mean, her research is amazing. And she's used by people who are doing kind of medieval houses. Her research is sort of pretty exhaustive about it. So, that said, Lucy, where did you, where and when did you first encounter this book or Nora Loft? Well, this is just typical, isn't it? I remember almost every book where I first come across an author or a book for the first time. I can't remember which of hers was the first.

I think I must have just come across a little haul of them in one of my many trips around the bookshops of Norfolk because she sets most of her stuff in Norfolk or fake Norfolk and a lightly disguised Suffolk Beresford Edmonds um so I think it must have been one of them but then I just went on a tear and this is about all about 10 years ago according to my book of books book list um and yes I've just been collecting them ever since really and reading them. When did you start keeping your book of books book list? Yeah, about 10 years ago, 2006, 2007. I wondered whether you'd read her as a sort of, you know,

when you were 13 or 14 because it strikes me. I didn't read any historical fiction as a child because i didn't know anything about history and when i tried it didn't mean anything i didn't even have enough basic facts to i mean to hang the story onto it's all just sort of fell to the floor like a load of clothes you say that in um book work don't you that you do yes i probably do that's my you um yes I'm still annoyed by it. I have a copy here. But you kind of just caught the tail end of Joan Aitken, Walls of Willoughby Chase. Just Walls of Willoughby Chase, and I didn't realise.

But Liam Garfield and all of those, Cynthia Harnett. No, well, I was already confused by Joan Aitken. I thought, hang on, there's a channel tunnel in here. And I know that they're only just thinking about, but what have I missed? Have I missed a memo? Is Blue Peter lying to me? What? So I didn't know anything about this alternative history that she puts it all in because I didn't know any history.

When I was doing GCSE, we did, honest to God, we did medicine 1815 to 51. So if you ever want to trepan a chartist, you know where to come, but apart from that. So what you're saying is, because you didn't have a factual historical context to draw on. Yeah, because I didn't have a framework to plug all, you know, a traveller in time

into the Babington plot when you don't know nothing is quite a facer. Literally about 10 years ago, I decided that this is ridiculous i'm married to basically a historian um certainly by hobby if not by job so i started with children's fiction to try and build up you know my knowledge because now i can take it in i do know a few facts i've gleaned from mostly blackadder, but let's leave that aside. And so then I graduated to Jean Plady and then Nora Loft sort of came along

and fills in so many blanks because she's so good on detail and she's such a thorough world builder and she makes it all live so well. I grew up in a house where the books that we had were there was a there was like a a glass cabinet that had the subscription to the companion book club that my parents had must have had in the 50s and 60s and what they did what they did my parents when the new book arrived once a month you got one a month they'd they'd take off the dust jacket and throw it away. And then they'd put the new book in the cabinet, right?

So we had those. We had Alistair Cook's America, which everybody had in the 70s, and like a world atlas of cheeses. And then we had loads of, what my mum read serially was Victoria Holt. No, Victoria Holt and Jean Plady, the same person. And so when I was saying earlier that my mum hadn't heard of Nora Loss, I was really surprised because this, in theory, is totally in the sort of thing that she would have read when we were growing up.

But then having read The Town House, it occurred to me that actually it probably wouldn't be to my mum's taste because it's not soft enough. townhouse it occurred to me that actually it probably wouldn't be to my mum's taste because it's not soft enough no it's not for georgia hayer fans and that kind of thing i mean it's a bit like kind of um you know pierce plowman crossed with cool mac mccarthy's the road i mean this poor martin reed who is the the peasant serve at the beginning of the book. The touch of Job. I mean, he is... Yes, yes, absolutely. Literally everything that could possibly go wrong for him goes wrong.

I mean, every bad decision, a bit in the beginning, I just... We likely say the words, starve to death. Put like that, it sounds easy and brief enough. A man ceases to eat and he dies. The truth is, he does not die immediately. Death by stovation has many unpleasant stages. There is the belly pain, as though within you some strange animal hungered and lacking other sustenance gnawed at your vitals with sharp fangs.

There is, following the pain, a constant desire to vomit, as though you would turn your empty belly inside out, like a beggar proving his pocket to be coinless. There is a shakiness in the bones. Your hands fumble and grow clumsy. Your knees give way. There is a ringing in your ears as though bees hived there. I mean, it's pretty early on in the book and you're already thinking, yeah, tough. Martin's starving to death before the things got underway. And she doesn't let up. I mean, she's, you know. No, but that's what she's, she's so good at showing how everything works together

and you get a kind of cascade of problems, you know, because he's born a serf and he makes one mistake, a bit like, you know, anyone disadvantaged now, you can't afford to make mistakes. It just makes things 10 times worse if you're already under pressure. But I love books, many, I mean, books set in the medieval period.

I was just a weird, I felt I was born in the 12th century. I'm at my happiest when I'm out, you know, tending my whatever, sheep. Tending your rood. But the point about this book is it's like, it makes medieval England like a dystopia. I mean, it's almost as sort of grisly as Ridley Walker or something. It doesn't feel like the warm, merry England, jolly place at all. It's vicious and it's kind of people are venal.

You do long for Robin Hood to come along and sort things out, don't you? But it feels far more realistic. I've actually no idea whether it is realistic, but I feel it must be more so than most. What you feel is that she's done her homework really seriously well. It was funny because I thought, I know that you're a fan of The Wake. And that was another book where I felt at least this is not, you know, I get a bit, you know, I sort of was a bit addicted to the Brother Cadvails for a while.

But it is all very, it's medieval light. And this is definitely medieval. I'm going to do the backlisted thing of reading the cover copy or in this case jacket, the flap copy. This is the blurb. It was in the first week of October in the year 1391 that I first came face to face with the man who owned me, the man whose lightest word was to us, his villains,

weightier than the king's law or the edicts of our holy father. So began the story of Martin Reed, a serf whose resentment of the autocratic rule of his feudal lord finally flared into open defiance. Encouraged by the woman he loved, Martin Reed began a new life, a life which was to culminate in the building of the house and the founding of the dynasty who were to live there. The Town House is the first volume of Nora Loft's famous trilogy spanning five centuries of dramatic events told through the lives of the people who lived in the house. And there's two quotes, one from the Sunday Times.

Faithfully and vividly conjured. Eminently readable. I know, it's sort of the heart sinks. The Manchester Evening Chronicle said, a superbly written historical novel full of colour of the moving social scene of the 14th and 15th centuries, great sweeping narrative. More like it.

I really loved it, actually. I really thought it was incredibly skillful and the way in which the narrative, she writes a series of first person narratives over the course of 70 years. And the narrative is a baton being passed from character to character. And never once did I think, as I would so often in books by men or women, haven't quite got that. The tone isn't quite right. It's really well written. It reminded me in terms of that sense of 14th and 15th century colour of a novel that I read because of Batlisted a couple of years ago,

which is Sylvia Townsend, Warners, The Corner That Held Them. a couple of years ago, which is Sylvia Townsend, Warner's The Corner That Held Them. Yeah. It really has that same sense of picking up, like, the cup that's on the table and holding it and showing it to the reader in a sort of, look how interesting this is, the filth and the dirt and the death, as well as you were saying, John. Yeah.

It's a terrible scene. I mean, we won't give it away, but, you know, the fire. I mean, it's just really... She's good on childbirth as well. Oh! Oh, my goodness. And also, isn't Anne one of the best alcoholics in... I think I've read in literature.

I mean, she's not good, but it's the smell of the brandy wine and the kind of the sense of, I mean, it's a very clever, that thing of using the different characters' perspectives. Much more interesting piece of constructed fiction than I was expecting. I was expecting a good yarn, but it's much better than just that. Do you want to give us a little excerpt? that do you want to give us a little excerpt and give you a little taste and um with the proviso that half the power of it all comes from the sort of cumulative detail how she how she sustains all and works in all the the economics and the of the time and as well as the farming and the difference between town and country and i love it all And this has a lot of it in there.

Martin's talking. He's escaped from his feudal lord because he's lamped him and he's in danger of his life. He's gone to the town of Baildon to try and live for a year and a day, which would render him a free man if he can avoid being caught. So I was established and had a footing, however humble, in the town and could not be driven out as a vagrant. And Kate found work the next day in a bakehouse in Cook's Lane. The work was hard and heavy, the wages very small, but, and this meant much to us, she was allowed to bring away at the end of her day's toil a good quantity of unsaleable stale bread.

We started off our life in Baledon in a lodging about which one of my fellow apprentices told me, saying it was a cheap place. It was in a loft over a stable and contained six straw-stuffed pallets laid close together on the floor and a cooking stone under a hole in the roof. There was a trough in the yard below. The beds at that time of year, when people were on the move, were always occupied by travellers of the poorer sort, tinkers, drovers, tumblers and bear leaders, and by the humble pilgrims to St Egbert's Shrine in the Abbey. The loft had a stench of its own, a mingling of the

stable smell from below, of years of careless cooking on the greasy hearth, of sweat and foul breath and human excrement. Kate and I found this irksome, for though neither of us had been bred to be fastidious, we were used to fresh country air and to stink so accustomed as to be unnoticed and on it goes and then he's got he's there's loads of detail i had to pay the rent out of my small store of money i was ignorant of town life and had imagined i might earn a coin or two by doing odd smith jobs for people as father and i had done in and around reed two things defeated that hope and then you segue into a little neat description of the guilds and the difference between town and country life. I thought, it was in the bit you read there,

one of the things that's so well done is the, you know, the intensity of research is there, but striking the right balance so that you're not constantly seeing Nora Lough sitting at her typewriter copying something out of a big leather-bound volume. It's worn really lightly and really integrated. I mean, it reminds me of, you know, Anya Seaton and Kathleen Windsor, who didn't, you know, who just loved the period

and lived the period for so long before they wrote their books that it was part of them. But the idea, and the idea that this would be, I think we're going to keep coming back to this because I'm quite exercised by this now. It's partly as a result of when we did Georgette Heyer and I realised that the assumptions amongst ourselves, but also Georgette Heyer's readers, run pretty deep as to who is or isn't likely to enjoy these books. So when I look at the covers of these Nora Lofts books, they say to me, well, somebody in the marketing department has said, this is historical romance. It's a female readership. But when you read her, there is very little romance and i found a an interview with her where this is 1942 out of the bits and pieces i could gather out of my own imaginings and speculations i build up a

picture and a story after all how much nearer even with much documentary evidence, can we come to understand the myriad dead who have gone to their graves, carrying their real secrets of motive and essence and personality into the silence with them? Motive and essence and personality. I think that was brilliant. She knew exactly what she wanted to do. Yeah, she's a very, very good writer. She's a very good psychologist.

I love this thing that Martin, in the Martin section of the book, it's a brilliant sentence about marriage and about, you know, the shine going out of a marriage. He says, Our first fond love had worn away like the nap from a woollen garment, but below the fabric of unity was still strong. I mean, that's great. It's perfect of the period.

And it's just, you know, it's good. That is good writing. She's not just a kind of a historical chronicler. I mean, you know what you're saying? If you like, and I'd say, if you like Wolf Hall, you're going to like Nora Lough's a hell of a lot more than you're going to like, I don't know, other historical romance writers.

I think she's much more, what she's doing is much more interesting. The stories that she's telling, the darker stories anyway. We're going to come back to Hilary Mantel in a minute. Are we? Yes, I've got something I want to... You've got some thoughts.

I've got some thoughts. But don't you also like, don't you think that the idea of one house through history is such a, I know she did that again. Lucy, you've read the sequels, haven't you? I have. I haven't reread them for this, unfortunately. I ran out of time.

Because that's the other thing she does, which I find really strange. Because it's so dense, I read her much more slowly than I do anyone else, even on a reread. She really slows you down because there is so much in there. You want to assimilate the detail and go, oh, that's how they did it. That's how they chose how many sheep to put on there. And that's how they tithed and blah, blah, blah.

Then you've got to appreciate the language. And then you've also obviously got the story and knitting all these, it's a large cast of characters. So I read her very slowly and probably with more satisfaction than many other people I read. Sorry, it was a long window where I was saying, no, I haven't reread the sequel. No, but the, again, what's quite interesting is I think she's actually totally true to the premise that she sets herself.

There's a story of a house and she doesn't create some phony family saga to carry her through 600 years because it would be implausible to do that. saga to carry her through 600 years because it would be implausible to do that so the first volume is uh one man's life through you know his children his children's children by the time you get to the third book she's she's writing a different kind of book she's got six or seven stories in six or seven specific historical eras it's almost like and she's devised this wonderful way of giving herself license to dip in and out of historical periods write short stories they're almost short stories you know it's a it's a really interesting one the one i would love to read is a wayside tavern which i think she takes a pump from roman times right through to the 1950s which um is such a great

idea it's sort of simple but i mean she was born into a farming family in norfolk and then her father died when he was quite young and they moved to very st edmunds and she married a builder and i wonder it's just kind of this far too much good solid building knowledge in the books for that to be a coincidence wait till you get hit pargeters you didn't realise you could be so fascinated by plaster. It's just astounding. But the whole, it's a bit like Captain Corelli's mandolin when he gets the, you know, spends eight pages getting the P out of the mouth.

P out of the, yeah, yeah. The opening bit of Pagetas is just this man moulding a crest above a door. The book, as I said is is divided into five tales martin reed's tale old agnes's tale and blanche flower's tale maude reed's tale poor old maude reed we don't want to not too many spoilers but it's a miserable old time she has a bit and then triumphantly nicholas freeman's tale she ends the fifth story is with the least likeable character in the book. You then have to spend 100 pages with her. Are we allowed to say he does get a bit of a kicking at the end?

Oh, he does. But I just want to read the end of old Agnes's tale. Agnes is an old woman who Martin Reed has taken into the house. She disapproves of Martin Reed's second wife, Magda. Who is a gypsy. Who is a gypsy. So Magda has just given birth. This extract, it struck me, is the thing that really does give the lie

to quite the bleakness of lofts. It's peak lofts. Loft vision, yeah. Peak lofts. The moment I had Martin's son by the heels, Agnes the midwife, spry, knowledgeable, intent only on the job, cleared off and left me. First I had a good look at the baby. If Magda's own brew or the wise woman's muck

had marked or marred him, I knew what to do. I wasn't having Martin saddled with something crippled or wrong in the head. So far as I could see, though, he was perfect, thin but healthy, and his first cry was real lusty. Then I paid particular attention to his face. There is a moment, and any midwife will bear me out on this, just one moment when all the newly born bear the stamp of the man who made them. They may lose it and never have it again but they all, boy and girl alike, come into the world looking like their father will look when he is an old man. Magda's baby was Martin at 60, bald and wrinkled. Happiness flowed into my heart. Here it was, the boy he wanted, the boy I had wanted for him.

I knew that what I should do was to call Mary down, hand the child to her and busy myself with the mother. I thought about it, knowing exactly what Agnes the midwife would do. I knew I couldn't do it. That old shuddering loathing was back on me now her precious load delivered she had become once more the woman from whose lightest touch I had shrunk but that was not all I had no need to touch her I could have called Mary and told her what to do the truth was I wanted her to die I thought how happy we could be now what life was left to me I could devote to bringing up the baby. But not if she stayed, and she would. She spoke of a baby being ruined to a dancer.

Besides, any woman, however wild, is settled by motherhood. Martin would be so pleased with the child that there'd be no question of forgiving her wandering off. It would just be forgotten. She'd be reinstated, more than ever mistress of of the house and I would be back with peg leg. Oh, I know that women do die in childbed every day, every night, but not without a fight, not until every measure has been tried. Agnes the midwife had had many a hand-to-hand fight with death and knew all the tricks. I, I did nothing. I sat down with the child on my lap and saw to him,

while behind me on the bed, the Romany blood, the witch's blood, the woman's life blood, soaked away. It's harsh. I'm not even going to read the bit with the bear, because that's very distressing. It is very distressing. Is that just how it was back then? Well, if they took against you, yeah.

I mean, I think the way she carries on through Richard and the son, Walter, the kind of the sort of the gypsy, you know, wayward, music loving, is very good as well. I mean, it's, again, it's quite, you know, you don't feel, she was interesting too, wasn't she? She lived in Bury St Edmunds all her life and was a teacher and then became a kind of, you know, a counsellor in the local town. She married her husband, the builder died, and then she married a guy called Robert Jorish

who was a Hungarian emigre, and with another guy called Martin Neumann, they set up a modern, state-of-the-art sugar beet factory. And do you know who Martin Neumann's grandson is? Most famous living Norfolk

inhabitant. I do not. Stephen Fry. Stephen Fry. Well, I never. So, no, just a little. So you kind of get the sense that she was sort of civic-minded, but, I mean, a book a year is pretty extraordinary, isn't it? Good books a year. Yeah.

Good book a year. How many murders are there? In each of her books, generally. Yes, Lucy, how many murders are there? Uh-huh. In each of her books, generally. Yes, Lucy, how many murders are there? There's quite a few. I love it. There's two in the five tales in Town House. There's at least two that I can remember.

And murderers. Just carry on. And then life just carries on, closes over and carries on. Yes, that's what's so interesting about it, actually. First of all, death is really present as it as one assumes it would have been so the possibility of death or a falling over just for there's a character in this who has a fall that they're gone 48 hours later because there's no medical intervention possible um and there's one important murder where somebody's murdered because he's getting, you know, a little too pushy.

And that's dealt with. I mean, she does, Anne, who commits the murder, I think we can say, lives with the consequences of it rather horribly for the rest of her life and becomes an alcoholic and sees visions. But the actual... But never confessing, never gets any redemption, none of that. You just, you know, you do it, you die.

That's what I mean. There's no religious... Yes, and that's why it's so interesting. These were popular in the States because there's no, there's no moral universe in it. The church has money and there are kind people within the... Yeah, there are individuals that are okay.

But there's no... It's very rare in in lofts to find a non-corrupt monastery or anything like that. There's this amazing passage where Martin, you know, he's thrown into that prison and he thinks he's going to die. And then he basically says, you know, I don't care. I'm freed from the... my sins are unshriven. Everything rocked a little. The darkness lifted, the walls melted away, and I was lying on

the grass under the little crooked hawthorn tree, freshly green and white, just breaking into blossom. I could smell it, cool and full of summer promise. You, I cried, and all at once I understood everything. Nothing to do with priests or sins or being forgiven, nothing to do with anything there are any words for. Just the beauty of the tree and my acceptance of it, promise and fulfilment all in one. And what there are no words for. Now I could die. Well, he doesn't die, but he kind of develops a weirdly,

almost like a sort of stoic, rather depressed sort of attitude to everything. He's very detached. And he gets the last line in the book, which is a pretty good one, if I seem to remember. Less easy to ignore was the memory of old Martin Reed saying mildly out of his garnered experience, people do what they must. It's leaving a gypsy to bleed to death.

It's funny. It's a proper, proper novel. Lucy, you were saying about the world-building element of it. Yeah. Actually, I'm interested that you didn't read these when you were younger or in childhood. Have you gone back and read children's historical fiction then? As an adult, yes, for the first time.

Yeah, absolutely, I did. Traveller in Time. Found the rest of the Joan Aikens, which confused me slightly less, and I was able to piece bits together. Did you ever read the Cynthia Harnett? Yes, yes, Cynthia Harnett I got, again, from Norfolk Bookshops. How about The Eagle of the Ninth? I can't do Rose Rosemary Sutcliffe.

I'm really sorry. I only remember The Eagle of the Ninth being read on Jack Norrie when I was a kid. We're reading that to my son at the moment. And actually having it read to you is easier than reading it. I rushed to the library and borrowed a copy of it and found it very difficult. A lot of marching. Yeah. Do you steer clear of historical fiction? Not now.

No, I love it now. It's one of my sort of favourite things. Everything, you know, Philip and Gregory. You're a Mantel fan, aren't you? I'm a Mantel fan. Philip and Gregory too. Dorothy Dunnett. Just getting into Dorothy Dunnett, yeah. a Mantell fan, Philippa Gregory too, and she played him now.

Just getting into Dorothy Dunnett, yeah. Let me, this is, you've just mentioned Philippa Gregory and Hiri Mantell. Apart from reading The Town House, the most enjoyable things we've come out of preparing for this episode of Bad Listed is discovering a blog called The Head That Launched A Thousand Books Anne Boleyn in Fiction and listeners you can find that at anneboleynnovels.wordpress.com it's a terrific

blog whose owner has written in-depth overviews of 112 novels about Anne Boleyn, dating back over 200 years. Such a good idea. It is a brilliant idea. And she gives each one a proper review,

but then she's also broken down into sections about what you look for in a novel about Anne Boleyn. And these are some of the subheadings. Sex or politics? Does it focus on sex? Does it focus on the politics? Very good. Yeah.

When born? Because nobody can quite agree when Anne Boleyn. Do you have six fingers on your right hand? It's a number of fingers. Yes, no, or never specified. Writers of the Purple Page is how flowery is the prose. And then, brilliantly, she also has a section where she says how accurate it is. How factually accurate it is, and then does it matter.

So this blog is absolutely terrific. I totally fell down the wormhole with this one. I'm just going through it thinking, oh, my goodness. About three or four years ago, she was asked to post her top ten novels about Anne Boleyn. I'm going to give you, in reverse order, the creator of the Head That Launched a Thousand Books blog. Here are her top ten novels about Anne Boleyn in reverse order. Ten. The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory. And in her blurb, she says,

everything its detractors say about it is true, including me, since I wrote a very snotty review of it for an online magazine. But you know what? As a packaged historical daydream, it is absolutely spectacular. And its historical errors, while legion, are no worse than those of numerous other books, including a couple on this list. So there you go.

Nine, Threads by Nell Gavin. Eight, Murder Most Royal by Jean Plady. Lucy's nodding. You haven't read Murder. I've read two out of the three. Excellent. And Wild For To Hold by Nancy Kress. No. K-R-E-S-S.

Six, Blood Royal by Molly Hardwick. No. Five, The Concubine by Nora Lofts. In at number five. Is it good, The Concubine by Nora Lofts? It's just like this. You know, it's thorough, sort of granular and a really good story. Therefore worthy of comparison with number four, Wolf Hall.

Yeah, baby. She says about Wolf Hall, I don't think this is going to hold up as well as the Booker Prize Committee apparently does, but for now at least this is one of those books which can pull the reader in so thoroughly that she ends up vaguely astonished when she looks up from the page and sees the people around her aren't in 16th century dress. That's very good. How can you not imagine Walthall enduring?

She says, even the non-trivial inaccuracies in this and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, are easy to ignore. Back in the knife box, this show. Right, right. Three, Anne Boleyn, A Tragedy by George Boker, 1850. I doubt this play will ever see the stage again. It's a play. It's a play written in 1850 about Anne Boleyn.

That is the third best. Number three. Right, that's number three. Two. Brief Gaudy Hour by Margaret Campbell Barnes, 1949. Okay. Which means in at number one, Anne Boleyn by Evelyn Anthony, 1957. Oh.

That's probably not been greeted with the astonishment I was expecting. Why were you astonished by that? You'd have thought that Mantel, Booker Prize winner at the time. And she says here, but the idea that there is, you know, a whole sub-genre of novels specifically about Anne Boleyn.

It's pretty extraordinary, isn't it? And that one person has read them all. Well, that one person has read them, but also that they are marketed. Why would they be marketed only to women? Yeah. Why? they be marketed only to women? Yeah. Why? That seems madness. Well, they lend themselves to, well, that story just lends itself

so easily to modern female sensibilities and modern feminism. You can bend it that way dead easily. And I know I've established my historical ignorance at some length um i've no i you know i don't can't evaluate the stories on those on that basis but any story about amberlynn can can illuminate your your time and your and your particular pets your hobby horse of any kind. It's just, it's perfect. It's got everything.

You know, is it a wondrous romance? Is she a battered wife to end all battered wives? Anything you want to throw at it. It is a great story. Right, loft. Get on it. So would you say this is, if our listeners wish to start somewhere, that I think the townhouse is a good place to start,

are there others that you particularly like or that you're fond of? I love, John, I love the Wayside Tavern, and I love the other trilogy, which I think it begins with, I think it's Nethergate, the beginning of the, anyway, Nethergate's wonderful. Bless This House is supposed to be the same, but one volume, one house over time. They're all the same in the best way. You won't be disappointed.

They all stand out. And I'm going to read more of her supernatural books, The Haunting of Gad's Hill, I've got my eye on, because I thought The Witches, or whatever it's called, The Little Wax Doll, was really, really brilliant. You've undergone a lofts conversion. Oh, he's been sitting on that now for 90 minutes at least, possibly weeks, actually.

It's worth it, it's worth it. It's good, though. Thank you. I'm just going to say, at the end of the podcast, we're just pushing one unbound project worth backing. And this week's is Women and Nature, an anthology edited by Catherine Norbury, author of the multi-shortlisted The Fish Ladder. She writes, I will sift through the pages of women's fiction, poetry, household planners, gardening diaries and recipe books to show the

multitude of ways in which women have observed and recorded the natural world about them, from 14th century writing of the anchorite nun Julian of Norwich, to the 17th century travel journal of Celia Fiennes, through the keen observations of Emily Bronte of Haworthmoor in Yorkshire, to the brilliant new voices throughout the archipelago of Britain and Ireland today. If you pledge for it or any of the other 354 Unbound projects currently live on the site, you dear backlisted listeners will get free postage on that pledge by entering the special codes LOFTS as you check out. Thank you to our guest Lucy Mangan, whose new book, Bookworm, is available now in bookshops and libraries.

So buy or borrow it and then read it. Thank you to our producer, Nicky Birch, to Unbound and to our very first sponsor, Bloom and Wild. You can get in touch with us on Twitter, BacklistedPod, on Facebook, Backlisted Podcast. Twitter, BacklistedPod on Facebook, BacklistedPodcast. Also, if you do feel like rating us on iTunes, five stars or fewer, we will be bashfully made up. We're trying to, we're trying to, if we, you know, like the totaliser on Blue Peter listeners, we're trying, we're trying to fill, or outside a church, like a thermometer with red in it. We're trying to fill that up, okay? So thanks for listening. We'll be back with another show in a fortnight.

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