Readers of my memoir, Please Miss We’re Boys, will know that I have history with Deptford. I taught in a boys’ school there in the late 1960s and early 1970s, just before the last of the old, arguably slummy, community housing was swept away to make room, eventually, for glittering blocks of yuppy flats with river views.

For all that, I did not know, until I read Laura Shepherd-Robinson’s enlightening, compelling novel (published in 2019), that after Liverpool and Bristol, Deptford was Britain’s busiest slave trade port. I suppose it isn’t something that Deptfordians want to shout about.

We start in 1781 where Shepherd Robinson’s characters lurk near, stride along, work and live in streets I knew and which are still there today such as Deptford Broadway (elegant and full of “little black pageboys and towering African footmen”) and of course Thomas Archer’s St Paul’s Church has already been up for 50 years. Deptford Reach, a mile from the tasteful Broadway is full of sails, ships, and slavers’ inns. The author is good at setting scenes and building atmosphere.

Captain Henry Corsham, a veteran from the wars in America, is summoned from his Mayfair home to Deptford which gives him, as narrator, a chance to describe it all. He is searching for his lawyer friend, Thaddeus Archer, who has disappeared.  A body has been pulled out of the Creek and it’s been beaten, tortured and branded as if this (white) man were a slave. Corsham identifies it in horror. Archer was an anti-slavery campaigner and has paid a heavy price for opposing such a lucrative industry.

“Forgive my bluntness sir, but you’d need to work a spell upon the English people if you ever hoped to end slavery. They like cheap sugar in their tea and cheap tobacco in their pipes. No amount of handwringing will ever change that” Lucius Stokes, mayor of Depford, casually tells Corsham. One is reminded of present day debates about  sweat shops or the environment – providing cheap goods at massive cost. Sugar was, in many ways, the 18^th century equivalent of 21^st century oil.

The novel turns into a complex “whodunnit” immaculately researched and very convincing. It is predicated on a slave ship called The Dark Angel which, appallingly, dumped its “cargo” in an insurance scam – a thinly disguised take on the real life, infamous Zong massacre in 1781 when 130 enslaved Africans were thrown overboard.

One of the most interesting characters is Cinnamon, a mixed race woman living with Stokes as a quasi-wife figure. She’s dressed like a Georgian lady, educated and sits in the parlour but, to Corsham’s horror, Stokes brutalises her. She was on board The Dark Angel and there’s much more to her than first appears.  Scipio, Stokes’s black secretary becomes a key character too.

Blood and Sugar is a fine read even if it does make your own blood run cold at times. These stories need to be told and reworked so that people understand the almost unthinkable truth of what really happened. And given the current Black Lives Matter campaign it’s pretty timely.

The good news is that there’s a sequel, Daughters of the Night, publishing this month.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Black River by Will Dean

I remember exactly where I was when I completed my first reading of George Eliot’s magnum opus. I was in a caravan on a family holiday in South West France in 1966. It was one of half a dozen substantial novels which had to be read during the summer holiday for the Bishop Otter English course and that summer I was between my second and third years of teacher training there. With hindsight I think I may have been a more conscientious student than many others because I dutifully read each and every one – a series of discoveries for which I am very grateful. I still have my original copy of Middlemarch, well thumbed now because I’ve read it five or six times since. I chose the 1960s Penguin cover to illustrate this piece because, although there have been many chirpier ones since, this is the one I am very familiar with. It’s like an old friend and really does – literally – sit on my bookshelves.

Virginia Woolf famously remarked that Middlemarch is “one of the few English novels written for grown up people” and I think, at 20, I wasn’t quite grown up enough because I was daunted by the length and intensity and, I’m sure, missed many of the finer points. I was heartily relieved (and pleased with myself) when I finished it which is why that moment stands so clearly in my memory. It has, however, grown on me as I have grown up and I’ve found myself admiring it more each time I’ve reread it – most recently as a pandemic pastime.

The titular Middlemarch is a provincial town in the Midlands, loosely based on Coventry. The novel which has a huge cast of characters consists of a complex web of intersecting stories. George Eliot (pseudonym for Mary Anne Evans, pictured below, writing in an era when novels by men were more likely to be taken seriously) starts with the innocent, earnest, intelligent Dorothea Brooke and her misguided marriage to the much older, crusty cleric, Edward Casaubon. Using this as an entry point, she gives us nine chapters in which Dorothea feels like the novel’s main protagonist before branching out and gradually introducing the rest of the Middlemarchians with whom we are to spend the next 800 pages. They include Bulstrode, the puritanical banker with a murky past, Vincy the successful middle class tradesman and Lydgate the progressive doctor and newcomer to Middlemarch. Families are widely intermarried and undercurrents and back stories are everywhere.

The novel was published in eight volumes as a serial in 1871/2. I don’t want to belittle it by mentioning soap operas because it’s incomparably better than that but there are structural similarities as it darts between intersecting stories. It was, and is, a historical novel set in 1829/32 against the background of the Great Reform Act of 1832 so Eliot was looking back 50 years to a time which was in living memory for some: a bit like writing a novel today about events of 1970 when Richard Nixon sent troops into Cambodia and the Beatles broke up.

So which characters linger in the mind? I have a soft spot for poor Fred Vincy whose gambling habit very nearly does for him but who is saved, ultimately, by land agent Caleb Garth, one of the most likeable people in the novel. I’m also fond of plain speaking Mrs Garth, a teacher by profession who efficiently homeschools a large family of children. I identify with feisty Mrs Cadwallader too, who doesn’t believe in speaking only when she’s spoken to or taking second place to her rector husband.

Middlemarch bubbles with interesting contrasts and parallels: Worldly Rosamund Vincy (later Lydgate) highlights Dorothea’s religiosity by being so different. Casaubon’s will is, in its way, as spiteful and far reaching as Featherstone’s.  Celia Brooke’s single-minded maternal pride is comic but we can’t help soberly comparing her good fortune with Rosamund’s miscarriage.

Characters evolve, develop and change too as Lydgate recognises his mistakes and tries to rectify or live with them in disillusionment. The maturing of Fred Vincy is masterly and, of course, Dorothea’s trajectory is presented as beautifully as the Italian painting Eliot mentions in the novel’s opening paragraph. There are no stereotypes. Every character is rounded and recognisable 150 years later. The details might change. Human nature does not.

There was a pretty dire Middlemarch TV adaptation in 1994. It  meant, of course, that once Andrew Davies got his hands on it there was a great deal more dishy doctor (Douglas Hodge as Tertius Lydgate) and much less focus on ethereal Dorothea compared by Eliot in her prelude to St Theresa of Avila famed for religious ecstasy – not now very fashionable.  Juliet Aubrey does get a smidgin of Dorothea’s naïve otherworldliness but the emphasis is a long way from Eliot’s intentions. The late great Michael Hordern – one of his last appearances – is good as the curmudgeonly, dying Peter Featherstone, though.

But like all fine novels, Middlemarch is better read – in all its multifarious glory – than watched. And while lockdown looks likely to continue in some form for some time, I can think of few meatier novels to climb into than the work which Eliot subtitles “A study of provincial life.”

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Blood and Sugar by Laura Shepherd-Robinson

Most books remind you of something else and that comparison becomes starting point for your response. Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce  is unlike anything I’ve ever read and it was the startling originality and quirkiness which got me –  hook, line and sinker.

Published in 2020, it’s a quest novel like The Odyssey, The Wizard of Oz, Watership Down and  Joyce’s earlier The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2012). But beyond that structure Miss Benson’s Beetle (isn’t Joyce good at titles?) has a flavour all of its own.

Margery Benson is the daughter of a rector who shows her some pictures of “incredible creatures” in one of the books in his study. After his mysterious,  sudden death in 1914 she is forever haunted by her loss and by the idea of a rare golden beetle on the other side of the world in New Caledonia. Fast forward three decades and Miss Benson is a frumpy domestic science teacher in a girls’ school where she is a frustrated misfit with discipline problems – until she flips. “Beetles she understood. It was people who had become strange.”

Some might call it a midlife crisis. Others would declare it a feminist break for freedom when Miss Benson, suddenly unemployed, sells everything she has, advertises for an assistant, and plans to travel to New Caledonia to find the beetle. Whichever way you look at it her scheme is manically bonkers and I love the image of her packing her Izal toilet paper, a second hand pith helmet shaped like a cake tin and awaiting her assistant at Fenchurch Street Station “holding her insect net like an oversized lollipop”.  Joyce’s style is both tender and witty.

The assistant – Enid Pretty –  is about the most unsuitable person imaginable for this role. She is florid, forthright, eccentric, sparing with the truth, seriously dyslexic and brings with her (no spoilers) a pretty major issue which … err … changes the dynamic between her and Miss Benson dramatically once they arrive in the sensuously evoked Indonesian jungle after their long sea voyage. But Joyce subtitles this glorious novel – in the manner of the Victorian books Miss Benson has grown up with – “An uplifting and redemptive story of a glorious female friendship against the odds” and that’s exactly what it is. It’s a crazily unlikely pairing but in the end each woman saves the other at many levels.

And in the background to all this there’s another person trying to influence events. The reader knows he’s there but for a long time Miss Benson and Enid do not. And that’s neatly done too.

I think Miss Benson’s Beetle was probably the best new novel I read in 2020. I hope someone has snapped up the film rights because it could be sensationally colourful, full of warmth and wit. Imelda Staunton for Miss Benson and Jodie Comer for Enid, please.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Middlemarch by George Eliot

My mother was very taken with John Christopher’s The Death of Grass. Fascinated by the idea that a grass-attacking virus could destroy civilisation, she talked about it a lot. I suppose she must have read it when it was first published in 1956. I came to it a few years later as a teenager. Then, it turned up in the stock cupboard of at least one of the secondary school English departments I worked in so I found myself teaching it as a text. Memories of it – the virus from China which couldn’t possibly reach Britain, government mishandling, public panic – have haunted me during the last year for obvious reasons. So I reread it.

I was bowled over. “Remarkably prescient” as Robert Macfarlane writes in his preface to the 2009 Penguin Classics edition. He also refers to living “in an age of epidemics” and that was eleven years before anyone had heard of Covid19.

At the beginning people in The Death of Grass are dismissive of the virus. It’s a long way away and it attacks only certain sorts of grass. Then it mutates (sound familiar?) to affect all grasses including wheat, barley, rice, rye and anything cattle might graze on. And of course it spreads rapidly. John Custance and his friend Roger – who gets a government tip-off about imminent terror – decide to take their families to the perceived safety of John’s brother’s farm in an enclosed valley in the north of England. What follows is a quest novel – and yes, I do subscribe to the theory that there are really only seven basic stories. Inevitably things get more and more difficult as they near their destination.

It’s a pretty violent novel. John, Roger and the other men who eventually join their party have fought a war only a decade earlier. They are used to combat, lines of command and accepting that the end justifies the means. So these civilised, educated men, and those who obey them,  single-mindedly kill and pillage in their determination to get their wives and children to safety. Civilisation breaks down incrementally as you turn the pages. You are never, moreover, quite sure how it will end and I’m not giving anything away here.

Macfarlane compares it with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, published two years earlier in 1954. It too studies the way in which the veneer of civilised behaviour and what might have once been called human decency, often driven by religious conviction and altruism, disappears almost overnight when the going gets really rough. Constraints disappear at terrifying speed. Both these books were written when the horrors of Nazi Germany and the Nuremberg trials were very fresh in public memory. And it shows.

So, 65 years later, does The Death of Grass stand the test of time? Yes, very much so especially at present when we are seeing mob violence, alarming hospital ward scenes and “reassuring” (not), draconian Government spokespeople on our TVs every night.  And I can’t resist pointing out that although there is justified  very real fear of starvation and the destruction of everyday life in The Death of Grass, it’s the chilling Government reaction to the virus which drives the real terror. Their policy is far, far worse than anything our current lot have yet dreamed up in real life but, as you read in horror, it makes you think …

I’m also struck by how short important novels used to be. The Death of Grass stands at just 195 pages in the Penguin Classics edition. It’s a while since I’ve read anything published in recent years which is quite so succinct, And I like that.

John Christopher (real name: Sam Youd, 1922-2012) never wrote another bestselling adult title but went on the rework similar ideas several times in a lot of speculative young adult fiction including The Guardians, Empty World and The Tripods trilogy which was serialised by the BBC in 1984.  He lived in Rye and once came to talk to teachers at a conference I attended.  Sadly, he was a poor speaker. But I don’t hold that against him. The power of The Death of Grass is enough for me.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce

I was five years and three months when I started school. I could already read fluently. My mother, who’d been an infants teacher, made sure of that. Toiling through the Beacon Readers – as we all had to – was therefore a bit of a bore, but I knocked them off in a few weeks and then happily got on with real books and real life. Severely bitten by bookwormery, I read anything and everything from the Famous Five and the Chalet School to the ever-informative Girl comic and annual. I gobbled up both David Copperfield and Jane Eyre before I left primary school because I’d seen Sunday teatime TV adaptations, so it was easy.

My mother liked crime fiction and there was usually a Ngaio Marsh  or Margery Allingham tucked, face down over the arm of the sofa awaiting her return. At about thirteen I picked up one of her Agatha Christies and began the transition to grown up books which soon included most of Daphne du Maurier, DH Lawrence, a lot of Graham Greene, CP Snow and lots more.

Then I went to college and became a secondary English teacher. That meant that I could happily bang on about books all day and pretend it was work – and I did, for thirty six years. When I was in the sixth form a very misguided teacher told me that Rebecca was rubbish and I shouldn’t be wasting my time on it. Fortunately I knew she was wrong but it taught me something. I carefully promised every class I ever taught that they could be open with me and I would never “rubbish” their reading choices. And I didn’t. Result? Hundreds of hours of constructive two way discussion about books and I quite often read what they were enjoying: Flowers in the Attic (Virginia Andrews) and The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay), for example. I didn’t like either but I approached them open-mindedly and was able to tell students what I thought and why. Rebecca, by the way, is now set for A level. Tee hee.

As I cut my teaching back in order to pursue a career in journalism I also started to write English text books – all based on extracts from novels, poems, plays, journalism or non-fiction. Each themed chapter begins with a passage to read. And golly, how I enjoyed writing them. It was another excuse (as if I needed one) to sit at my desk reading and skimming under the guise of work. The books are now all published by Hodder under the Galore Park imprint – you can find them on Amazon. Might, come to think of it, help some families with homeschooling?

I’m convinced it’s easier to weather the privations of a global pandemic if you’re a book worm than if you’re not. It’s such an easy form of escapism.  During the last year I’ve probably spent an average of two or three hours of every day reading. Since I was widowed in 2019 I’ve taken to reading at mealtimes too – the Kindle app on my iPad is brilliant for this because it props up and you only have to touch the screen very lightly to turn the pages leaving hands otherwise free for eating. But I’ve banished screens from the bedroom in an attempt to get a bit more restful sleep. That means that I habitually read at least two books at once – one digitally and a hard copy (usually a re-read) of something on my bedside. I’m currently reading Will Dean’s Black River downstairs and Tess of the D’Urbervilles in the bedroom, for example.

It was one of my lovely daughters-in-law who said (phone) to me recently, when I was feeling a bit low and lonely: “Why don’t you start a blog about all these books you read? Share it with the world. You used to inspire students with reading. There are plenty of people out there, like me, who’d love to hear it now.”

So I’ve thought about it and I’m giving it a whirl. Having set the scene today, I shall kick off Susan’s Bookshelves with thoughts about John Christopher’s Death of Grass (1956) later this week

The photograph, by the way, really is my bookshelves. Designed for, and built in, my sitting room by my can-do-anything elder son, they’re based on Cambridge University Library where he used to work.