When I was at teacher training  college having a lovely time but not learning much about how to teach, one of the things they made us do was to create a book – not write one but create it as a craft exercise. And we could choose what to do or how to do it. Airy fairy stuff but I went off quite happily aged 19 to do this primary school task during the summer holidays – although I couldn’t see quite what I was going to gain or learn from it.

I’d found the books by Iona and Peter Opie in the college library and thought the history of nursery rhymes was interesting. So that became my hand-written book topic. A friend did the illustrations and most of the information came from the Opies. I didn’t get much of a mark for it although I really had tried. I’m simply not good at anything to with art and practical craft. The whole project, however, did teach me to view nursery rhymes in a different light and I’ve remained intrugued.

So imagine my glee when I discovered just before Christmas that Tim Devlin has just published Cracking Humpty Dumpty. His strapline is “an investigative trail of favourite nursery rhymes” and, a former journalist and then PR man, he really has applied his well honed professional research skills.

In fact he has debunked everything I thought I knew about nursery rhymes. Of course Ring-a-ring o’ roses isn’t really about the plague. It’s not mentioned in any of the contemporary sources or in respected historical accounts of the plague years. Rather the earliest references to it date from late 18^th century Massachusetts in a  game version a bit like musical chairs. The plague link stems, it seems, from a nineteen fifties book by James Leasor, a man with a colourful imagination. But the public liked the link and it soon became received truth particularly since the famous plague village, Eyam in Derbyshire understandably capitalised on it for tourism reasons. Fascinating stuff.

And we all know that “Little Boy Blue” was Cardinal Wolsey don’t we?  Well hang on, he was a cardinal why wasn’t it Little Boy Red?  Moreover, Wolsey was a very hard worker and not known for nodding off on the job.  There is another theory that the eponymous lad was Charles II but a very similar rhyme in Shakespeare’s King Lear written over 50 years earlier refutes that. Or was it simply an unloaded comment on children who often guarded livestock on common land in the centuries before the enclosure acts? Sometimes the truth is much more straightforward than the fanciful interpretations commentators try to make fit.

Devlin investigate twelve rhymes in detailed depth. He writes smoothly and entertainingly but his book is packed with information. He has consulted dozens of books and other resources dated from 1837 to 2019 and spent hours in libraries and at relevant sites all over the country. It’s a pleasantly tactile book too in a nicely designed format by his publisher, Susak Press. The paper is shiny, the font a clear sans serif and the 190 x 240mm size slimly neat.

Katarina Dragoslavić’s  warmly attractive illustrations are the icing on the cake. She nails the essence of Devlin’s arguments with a plate at the head of each chapter to which he often refers in the text.

The good news is that a sequel is in preparation. It will feature a further twelve rhymes and Devlin is inviting suggestions about which other rhymes he might investigate in the future.

At the time of writing, this excellent book is not available via Amazon although Devlin is hoping that it soon will be. Meanwhile you can purchase it via the website www.humptycracked.com.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: My Theodosia by Anya Seyton

AJ Cronin was one of those authors who was dearly loved by millions of readers in the 1950s when I was growing up. People like my mother had read his books – along with those of Daphne du Maurier, Naomi Jacobs, Hammond Innes, Neville Shute and many others before the war when she was growing up herself. These authors were still active in the post-war period and tens of millions of library users awaited their new books eagerly.

My snobbish, narrow minded grammar school English teachers condemned these writers as “middlebrow”, by the way, so it was best not to mention them in class. Were we really supposed to read Chaucer, Swift and Conrad in bed or on the bus when we were 14? I was, and am, a voracious and eclectic reader but not because of anything I was told in school.

Anyway AJ Cronin and his ilk were ubiquitous in our household and I read most of his best known works – Hatter’s Castle and The Citadel for example –  in my teens. But I don’t think I ever read any Doctor Finlay stories partly because Doctor Finlay’s Casebook arrived on TV in 1962 (and ran for eight series until 1971) memorably starring Bill Simpson, Andrew Cruikshank and Barbara Mullen. There were only three channels at the time so almost everyone watched it.

It’s a strange hotch-potch of a book to read now. It isn’t quite short stories and it isn’t quite a novel – it reads like notes for a TV series in places but Scottish physician Archibald Joseph Cronin (1916-1981) can’t have had that sort of foresight when he first wrote these stories for a Hearst magazine between 1935 and 1939. Later they were republished under various titles in book form including, eventually  Doctor Finlay’s Casebook.

Finlay is a young, Glasgow trained doctor who becomes assistant to an older doctor in the fictional town of Levenford between the wars.  Like Morse, he does without a given name. He’s decent, kind  and medically on the ball. He isn’t above revenge, however, when someone upsets him. He’s sporty (if you count shooting hapless birds and tormenting fish), quite a whizz on the tennis court and keen on hill walking. He would dearly like to marry and has several romantic encounters none of which ends happily. During the course of the book we meet his patients, the residents of the town and get a pretty convincing picture of what it would have like to practise medicine in Scotland before the genesis of the NHS. Of course, Cronin was inspired by his own experiences.

AJ Cronin

Trying to read Doctor Finlay’s Casebook straight through is not quite satisfactory because the episodic format means that many things go unexplained. Some of the stories are self-contained. Others run on.  It’s not consistent either. One minute he’s practising in Levenford and the next the whole practice seems to have moved to Tannochbrae. Finlay drives a gig out to see patients until, without explanation, he’s doing his rounds by car.  Doctor Cameron is a wise, benign elder statesman with a huge amount of experience until he suddenly morphs into a lazy hypochondriac. The angelic Alice, a nurse, helps Finlay to run a convalescent home for children and seems to be the epitome of virtue until, without warning, she becomes a sexually exploitative femme fatale. Janet, the stalwart housekeeper, is grittily sensible until she gets cross with her two doctors and the worm turns – which seems unlikely.

The other thing which really took me aback was what an age of innocence this was. Finlay treats the children he looks after alone and in a very “hands on” way and at one point falls in love with a girl who has only just left school. It makes a 2023 reader, living in a world of child protection and DBS clearance, blink and wince a bit.

On balance – and very unusually for me – I think Doctor Finlay’s Casebook makes better drama than it does reading material. Maybe that’s why Cronin, by then in his late forties, was involved in the early instalments of the BBC series.  It’s also why, I suppose, that it was  serialised on radio (with the original TV cast) from 1970 to 1978. An ITV series with David Rintoul as Finlay, began in 1993, took the narrative into the 1940s and ran for four series. There were also dramatisations in the early 2000s. It clearly had/has masses of dramatic potential.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Cracking Humpty Dumpty by Tim Devlin

When I was about eight or nine someone gave me The Observer’s Book of Music as a birthday or Christmas present.  I was already learning to play the violin and keen on the (mostly classical) pieces I was hearing at school, on Derek McCulloch’s Saturday morning Children’s Favourites or on the newly acquired family radiogram. I read this neat little book a lot and can remember its contents very clearly – the beginning of my wider musical education, I suppose.

Acquiring Observer’s books was quite a thing for 1950s children and when I married Nicholas Elkin in 1969 we merged our collections and discarded the duplications. He didn’t have the music one so we kept mine, first published in 1953.

Something made me think of all this recently and I went to the shelf where smallest books live to refer to The Observer’s Book of Music in connection with an article I was writing. It was missing. What? Both the middle aged men who used to be my small boys deny all knowledge of it. Did someone else borrow it? Perhaps it got lost in the move “home” to London in 2016?

Just before Christmas I was strolling round Ely market with my elder son, Lucas, and his wife when he spotted a pile of Observer’s books on a stall. He picked out the music one and said “Look – that’s what you want”. So I bought it for £6 which made me chuckle since the original 1950s price was 5/- or 25p.

And, golly, how I’ve enjoyed the nostalgic revisit. It packs in a deal of information but is never patronising. I struggle, even now, to understand the opening section “Sound and how we hear it” which is pure physics but, as ever, I really like the detailed account of musical instruments and how they work. There’s a drawing of Beethoven’s pianoforte, an account of the evolution of the cornet, a wonderful drawing of a Russian bassoon along with details about stringed instruments and not, obviously, just the four you find in a standard symphony orchestra. For such a small book, the amount of information Freda Dinn packs in is extraordinary.

She’s good on terms in common use too. I think this was probably where I first read, for example, that scherzo is the Italian for joke so it usually denotes a jokey sort of movement in a symphony and that andante means walking pace. The little pieces we were playing at primary school didn’t, in general, use these grown up terms much. Then of course, a year or two later when I started first French and then Latin at secondary school the linguistic links began to make sense.

The Observer’s Book of Music ends with biographical notes on composers from Albeniz (who?) to Wolf. I wonder what the criteria for inclusion were? Several contemporary composers are in: Britten, Arnold, Bax, Barber, Walton etc. Of course all the obvious greats are there: Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Purcell and the like but some of her choices (Cui and Palmgren, for instance)  now seem a bit obscure.  She includes Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Ethel Smythe the former the only black entry and the latter the only woman – and this was why I grew up having heard of both of them although it took the world most of my lifetime to wake up to the fact that, of course, neither was unique, Paul Sharp provides a nice little pencil sketch of each composer.

Rediscovering this book was fun. I realise now that the whole of the Observer’s series comprised beginner’s guides. They were child friendly but not intended exclusively for children. Indeed, even now, anyone wanting to learn more about music – mostly but not entirely classical – could do a lot worse than start here. It’s widely available on second hand book websites.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Doctor Finlay’s Casebook by AJ Cronin

I recently saw, enjoyed and reviewed a quirky but powerful dramatisation of Madame Bovary at Jermyn Street Theatre. At one point one of the actors dropped out of role to tease the audience about not having read the novel anyway so it didn’t, he implied, matter what they did with it. Well of course I’ve read one of the most famous of all French novels (although not, sadly, in the original language – if only) but not for many years. So I’ve now put that right.

The first thing which struck me – as nearly always with 19^th century literature which didn’t stem from Victorian Britain – is how explicit Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 novel is compared with, say, Little Dorrit or Barchester Towers which were published in the same year. This is the Emma Bovary meeting her lover Leon for one of their regular trysts in a hotel, for example: “There was a great big mahogany bed in the shape of a boat.  The curtains, made of red oriental stuff, hung from the ceiling, curving out rather too low over the wide bed-head – and there was nothing in the world as lovely as her dark hair and her white skin set against that crimson colour, when in a gesture of modesty, she closed her bare arms, hiding her face in her hands.” Even the simplicity of “She yielded” when she finally gives in to her earlier lover, Rudolphe, is sharply arresting.

Emma Bovary – a pretty woman who reads romantic novels and has extravagant dreams – marries a not very competent and not over-bright country doctor, Charles Bovary, which she sees as an exciting escape and a step up from her own humdrum rural childhood. Bovary, generally a decent man, adores her but she quickly comes to view him, and everything he stands for as dull. “He [Charles] had his cap pulled down to his eyebrows, and his thick lips were trembling, adding a touch of stupidity to his face: even his back, his tranquil back was irritating to behold, and in the very look of his coat she found all the banality of the man.”

So she does two things – she spends money they don’t have and, despite having had a child with Bovary, she takes secret lovers with whom she enjoys rampant passionate sex. It’s effectively a sex and shopping novel. There is, of course, no happy ending for anyone. Flaubert’s last few pages are blunt, matter-of-fact and painful. But of course they’re also truthful. It is pretty much what would/could probably happen in real life. There is none of the jokey satire that we associate with Dickens of Trollope.

What Flaubert is doing is to consider the role, feelings and predicament of a real woman with needs (cf Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, 1879)  and that’s as topical in 2023 as it was 166 years ago when Emma Bovary first made her presence felt.  And look at the contrast with. for instance, Coventry Patmore’s poem The Angel in the House published three years earlier in Britain which is a saccharine paeon of praise to female domesticity.

Emma is not content to potter about in the country, supervising her husband’s meals, bearing children and socialising with the local pharmacists apparently idyllically happy family.  She and Charles, reasonable as he usually is, never understand each other and what ensues is a tragedy for both of them. But even in 19^th century France society cannot accept her individualism so she cannot, possibly, be allowed any sort of upbeat resolution. Anyway Rudolphe and Leon are both, in their different ways, using and exploiting her for their own ends. She would never have been happy with either of them in the long term any more than she is with Charles. In many ways she is the naïve victim of her own rose-coloured inexperience and expectations.

There was an obscenity trial in January 1857 following the serialisation of Madame Bovary the previous year. Flaubert and his book were acquitted but of courses, just as with Lady Chatterley’s Lover in London a century later, the publicity did wonders for sales. When it was published in book form that spring it became a best seller.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Observer’s Book of Music by Freda Dinn.