Margaret Gardiner, A Scattering of Memories
I mentioned that I was reading this the other day, having been inspired to do so by her intriguing obituary last month.
It's a wonderful but in many ways frustrating and tantalising book, because it is just snippets from her long and extraordinary life. What there is, is amazing and vivid - a memoir of her childhood, essays on her friends W. H. Auden, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicolson, a tribute to her father the eminent Egyptologist, and accounts of two visits to the USSR (in the 30s and the 70s) and to Nyasaland (now Malawi). It's quite the antithesis of the Nerina Shute autobiography I was reading recently (comments in this reading roundup), which largely failed to give any sense of the period or the individuals she was writing about.
But Gardiner writes so well and about such interesting people and things, that I yearn for more.
I particularly like the memoir of Hepworth, which dots around all over the place chronologically, but nonetheless works, doesn't feel scatty (which the Shute book did, rather), just the way someone would remember a close friend.
I was struck by something in a letter to her from Hepworth when they were both entering middle age (during World War II):
About clothes & our personal appearance. I've been thinking a lot about it lately - & I think it's a very real problem for people like you & me. I never thought it was going to be - in fact I used to look with scorn on people who fussed about growing old and bothered about this & that. But I can see now that we have got to think it out. I suppose that 90% of women quite simply grow into older women & grow into older women's clothes & hats and 'hair-do's'. Especially when they have children & lose their figures & look forward to grandchildren.
But chaps like us are a different sort of shape! Physically & mentally we have always worn odd sort of clothes & done odd sort of things - we don't feel in the least settled down or contented or stable.
She goes on to consider in detail the problem of neither dressing in 'the average old women's clothes' nor in 'clothes too young & too obvious in colour and form'. I feel that this is a problem still not entirely resolved.