I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t graze in bookshops much these days. Most of my browsing is now online or I buy books I’ve seen reviewed or which someone has recommended. The other day, however, I found myself with half and an hour to kill and wandered into Waterstones. Inevitably I came out with two (yes, only two) books one of which was this one. I remember reading Sheila Hancock’s The Two of Us (2004) and Just Me (2009) after the death of her husband, John Thaw. And I enjoyed and admired her performance in This is my Family at Chichester in 2019. She is now 90.

Published in 2022, Old Rage is written episodically as a sort of occasional diary starting with the letter from the Palace offering her a DBE in 2020. It then pops back to 2016 and runs to June 2021 with a bit of an update for the 2023 paperback edition which takes us through to December 2022 and tells us about the day she went to Windsor Castle with her grandson, Jamie,  both “looking the business,” to be invested by Prince William. Touchingly, that day, she wore the neck chain bearing the wedding rings of both her spouses (her first husband, Alex Ross also died of cancer) and her parents because she wanted to take them all with her.

It’s ruminative and often recalls incidents from long ago as well as commenting on what’s happening today. She ranges across Brexit – deeply detested because it undermines the peace, harmony and collaboration across Europe which she sees as the finest thing to come out of two world wars – ageing, Quakerism, her daughter’s cancer, life without her beloved John and, of course, Covid, the pandemic and lockdown, among many other topics.

Sheila Hancock is extraordinarily good company. She chuckles and chats as well as getting very cross about the likes of Trump and Johnson. On the other hand she has a delightful knack – perhaps it stems from her Quakerism – of quite liking people she disagrees with. She is kind, for example, about Theresa May and has a fond regard for the Royal Family despite knowing that logically she should be a republican. Classical music is her great comfort.  She’s caring (work with Ukrainian families)  and self-deprecating too, never really acknowledging just how good she is at what she does.

She’s ruefully funny too. She has a good anecdote, for example, about breaking up a fight in the street. She then tells us that her success wasn’t down to the Quaker anger management skills she was busily applying. The fight stopped because the perpeptrator recognised her from Celebrity Gogglebox.

Now in her tenth decade she has no illusions about her future and she’s realistic about her rheumatoid arthritis and immune system. On the other hand she’s still working and her brain is clearly in excellent nick. This is one of the most entertaining first person books I’ve read in ages. Thank you, Dame Sheila.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: My Name is Leon by Kit de Waal

Forget Visconti, Dirk Bogarde and Mahler. It’s very interesting to read what Thomas Mann actually wrote in his 1911 long short story/novella.

For me this was a return to something I read – only once, I think – long ago. Mr E was keen on Thomas Mann because he’d done German A level and become absorbed in things Germanic. Death in Venice arrived in our household with him when we married so of course I picked it up. And, rather sweetly, it’s his old Penguin (price 2/6) copy that I have revisited now, although the cellophane with which he’d covered it (no, I don’t know why either) has gone crispy and all flaked off as I handled it.

Gustave von Aschenbach is a complex character. Writer and aestheticist, he has, it seems, been suppressing urges all his life. Although it’s written in the third person the narrative is presented entirely from Aschenbach’s point of view until the final three- sentence paragraph. When years ago I described Death in Venice as being about the death of a sad, repressed homosexual (the word “gay” meant something else then) who falls in love with a boy and then dies, I was told off for crude oversimplification. Actually, that’s exactly what it is.

At one point he is described as “utterly lovesick” and the physical descriptions of Tadziu’s skin, hair, clothes and voice almost quiver with intensity. In fact the writing is often warmly sensuous: “foreign birth raised his speech to music”, “a waft of carbolic acid” “the sea, dazzling white in its morning slumber.” Aschenbach is a sick man and has been ill since the age of 35.  Mann makes no secret of where this story is going. The title is unequivocal.  All the protagonist’s senses are heightened by his illness which means that at last he can give rein to forbidden inner thoughts.

He and Tadziu never speak to each other although the boy eventually becomes aware of being followed – I’m afraid the word “stalked” came to this 1923 reader – and flashes the odd smile at the old man.

It is true, though, that this is more than a daring (for 1911) story about a dying man transfixed by a pretty boy and that’s what the famous 1971 film loses. It’s also a reflection on the nature of true – great, even – art. Aschenbach is famous for an epic novel on Frederick the Great at which he worked with “almost religious fervour”. There’s hint of Mr Casaubon about him. Mann gives us a lot of detail about his upbringing and career and shows us that Aschenbach’s ideas about art,  have mellowed. It is the purity of Tadziu’s beauty which first assails him – like a homecoming.

I know you probably can’t help seeing Dirk Bogarde’s face every time you hear Mahler’s famous adagietto from the 5^th Symphony. I certainly can’t. It is, however, well worth going back to the source material and marvelling at the power of Mann’s prose, even in translation.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Old Rage by Sheila Hancock

Once Mr E and I had become an item in 1967 he took me to meet his maternal grandparents and it was lovely. His granny, Alice Hyne, was a very bright former grammar school girl whose promising career in the Civil Service was aborted by her marriage in 1917. She knocked off the Daily Telegraph cryptic crossword every day and had completed it, as usual, the day before she died (COPD with complications) in 1974. Of course she was an avid reader and liked and approved of me immediately because I was (am) too. She also liked my being a teacher because that’s what her mother had been before marriage. Granny Hyne willed me her well thumbed complete works of Shakespeare which not only had she read but used frequently to find crossword clue answers. I treasure it.

One day she asked me if I’d read Mazo de la Roche. I hadn’t so I did. Roche (1879-1961) was a Canadian whose most famous work is the Whiteoak Chronicles – a 16 book series about a British family who settled in Ontario in the mid-19^th century. It spans a hundred years. Well I’ve always been a sucker for a family saga and I lapped it up – borrowing the books from the library. Gradually I became aware that some people are snooty about Roche possibly because she’s Canadian and maybe because she’s a story teller without literary pretensions. In the end I moved on to something else and didn’t mention her in “polite society”. In fact I suspect she’s far more highly regarded in Canada than she is in snobby Britain: her home in Toronto is now a “Heritage Property.” In Ontario there are schools and streets named after her and her characters. She’s been serialised on Canadian TV.

Coming back to Roche now in my mature years – with decades of serious academic study and teaching behind me – I opened The Building of Jalna on my Kindle, very curiously. It was published in 1944, by the way, and is the chronological first book but she didn’t write them in order. The first was published back in 1927 but actually falls in the middle of the sequence. The last title was Centenary at Jalna which was published in 1958, three years before Roche’s death. Did she have the whole thing mapped out in her head, I wonder, or did it simply evolve?

The Building of Jalna tells the story of Adeline Court and Captain Philip Whiteoak who meet in India, fall in love, marry and eventually decide to go to Canada to build a house on Lake Ontario. They’ve inherited the money to enable them to do this. The characterisation is strong. Adeline is a feisty, convention-defying impulsive redhead who doesn’t suffer fools and usually gets her own way. He is a competent, tolerant, attractive man also determined to make everything work well. The sexual attraction between them is vibrant but Roche (almost certainly gay herself) doesn’t do sex scenes and that’s rather refreshing. We get the message without them. There are other interesting characters too: the troubled Wilmott, whom they met at sea en route from Britain. Then there’s Robert, the son of the couple who put the Whiteoaks (and their two children) up while Jalna is built. Both are clearly entranced by Adeline but this is no soppy romance.

We get a vivid picture of the unspoilt mid-nineteeth century Ontario landscape and weather although Roche also makes sure we don’t miss the sadness of cutting down virgin forest for building. The other thing I really admired was Roche’s depiction of the voyage out – the storms, the damage to the boat, the seasickness and the death of their Indian ayah at sea. It is all pretty awful as many such voyages must have been.

In short, I enjoyed it and at my advanced age I am not remotely ashamed of that. I believe passionately in eclectic reading. If it grabs you, then go for it.  A good storyteller is worth celebrating and that’s what Mazo de la Roche is.  She sits somewhere between RF Delderfield and Daphne du Maurier in style. I have downloaded  Morning at Jalna which is the second title in the series. And, a little bonus, I’ve thought a lot about Granny Hyne in recent days and have been chatting to her in my head.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Death in Venice by Thomas Mann