Dear diary (blog)
Where or where do I begin?
So much has happened over these last weeks.
I have attended a large family wedding somewhere not too dissimilar to Downton Abbey, passed through to a final year of study and read some amazingly insightful books, including one which has truly taken me. A unity in time, a heartache and a pleasure all-in-one. Caitlin Davies' The Ghost of Lily Painter.
A story centred around the lives lived during the course of a little over a hundred years in one house in London just off the Holloway Road. During this gripping page turner of a story we the reader are treated to a lesson in local and national history. One resident during the first part of the twentieth century kept a journal allowing the reader to feel like they are a part of this moment in time. The journal starts on January 28th 1901, right at the time our dear old Vic - Queen Victoria - died. Dear old Vic died on the 22nd January 1901 sending the country into a state in mourning. The keeper of this journal, a Police Inspector, notes :
"It is a way to record day-to-day events, in what I trust will be a manner much interesting for posterity."
Davies utilises the literary technique of this journal and the surrounding characters related to it, namely the inspector, his wife and their lodgers, as a truly fascinating tool providing a harmony between their time and the time of 2009 when the modern-day protagonist, Annie Sweet, moves in to this house and finds herself unravelling the history within the place she has bought.
Using a history centre Annie finds information to strengthen her knowledge of her house and to ascertain who Lily Painter was. This is achieved by her use of a microfiche machine. In realising that perhaps the past is not so far removed from her present it was with a real sense of pleasure and also, I might add, a personal attachment to this particular thread of plot, I followed Annie's, Lily's and Molly's lives in search of a shared goal.
What particularly took me with Davies' work is the way she interlinks with, as far as I know, a factually accurate retelling of life in this part of London at this time whilst showing and telling the reader of the developments that have come to this street and area of London in the intervening years. Told through the eyes of several rounded and engagingly presented characters relevantly characterised in each time.
Davies introduces 'modern-day' life in this area thus:
"Holloway Road, a London Street if ever there was one, a litter blown artery into the City, a road clogged with trucks and buses where every tenth vehicle is a police car or an ambulance..."
For me at least as the reader of this story this description coupled with that which I have shown from the journal, encapsulate the overarching unity of time this story so brilliantly captures. To be of interest to the many not the few.
The Holloway Empire, where once a one Lily Painter, a young aspiring music hall star who used to live at this house performed at, which then becomes the Odeon Cinema, the place our protagonists of the early Twenty First Century, Annie Sweet and daughter Molly go to watch movies. Molly, like Lily, has aspirations to be on the stage, and so, in Davis' consummate adept and technically in-tune use of plot-lines and language, weaves a narrative that is not only historically accurate and revelatory, but teaches the reader, or is that guides the reader? to an understanding of the harmony between the past with the present and no doubt, the future.
Once I had finished this book, I did in all honesty have a lump in my throat. It is something of a rarity that I can write a book has captured me to the point I feel a deep and raw sadness. To close the characters and lives they lead back into themselves within the closed pages of a book makes me truly sad!
I can think instantly of just two in the last six months that make me feel like this.
Caitlin Davies, The Ghost of Lily Painter - of course - and Sebastian Faulks Birdsong
This written it is also with a slightly self-congratulatory nod of appreciation, I as can you, have the luxury of re-reading.
On this note I bid you farewell dear friends. For now.
Until we meet again through the page, I hope this finds you in good health and a happiness,
Warmly yours
Peace Friends X
RJ Wardle
