Deborah Burrows

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

Until you’ve experienced a few gorgeous English summer days, you don’t fully appreciate the honour Shakespeare was paying to his lady. We’ve had some perfect summer days lately, as lovely as a perfect autumn day in Perth, but with fluffy white clouds for interest and a sun that’s hot but not burning. We have lunch in the garden most days at a table near the honeysuckle-covered side fence, and the scent is heavenly…

I’m settling into research and writing. This is my writing nook, in the sunny bay window of our bedroom. I set myself up originally in the spare room. The view over the garden is lovely, but I like to be a part of the world, and the world seems to wander down Church Way each day.

One trap I’ve discovered is that it’s very cheap to buy second hand books here! My purchases over the last few day (all under £5) are: Civilians at War: journals 1938-1946; The Blitz!; Love Lessons: A wartime journal; Raiders Overhead: A diary of the London Blitz; Slipstream: A Memoir; A Wander through wartime London; Eggs and No Oranges: the Wartime Diaries of Vera Hodgson; Bombers and Mash; London at War.

So it will come as no surprise when I say that the next novel is set during the London Blitz!!

On 11 June we went into London and I spent 5 1/2 hours in the City of Westminster archives, poring over the Bomb Map – a map of where all the bombs fell on London in WW2, reading the original incident reports of where and when bombs were dropped and the damage done, and looking at photos of bomb damage from 1940. It was all so interesting, and you could almost smell the smoke.

You know the Vera Lyn song ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square”? Well this is 30 Berkeley Square after a couple of delayed action bombs exploded on 18 September, 1940:

And this is the incident report about it.

It is amazing to touch the handwritten incident reports, and view the photographs taken at the time. I know that digitisation is the latest trend, but NOTHING beats ferreting around in the archives.

We’ve joined the Friends of the Bodleian Library and on 17 June we were invited guests to the opening of a new exhibition, “From Downing Street to the Trenches”. It was opened in the amazingly beautiful Divinity School by Michael Morpurgo, who wrote the children’s novel, War Horse, among many others. His speech included him reciting a poem by his Belgian grandfather ‘the Rupert Brook of Belgium’ and he finished by singing, unaccompanied, the theme song to the musical production of War Horse, ‘Only Remembered’. The audience of academics and various worthies (including me!) all joined in at the end and it was really quite moving.

I even got to meet him in the Quad afterwards and he’s a lovely, unassuming man.

The exhibition is a display of letters and diaries that belonged to politicians, soldiers and civilians, all in some way connected with Oxford University. Among the personal documents are diaries and letters from the Oxford alumni who served as junior officers on the western front. These reveal, not only their experiences, but also their attitudes towards the war.

So many of them were killed. Made me cry…

A couple of weekends ago we drove into the Cottswolds so I could see Stanton Harcourt, where there was a large airfield in WW2. The airfield has become fields again, and there’s a sense of tranquility that would not have been there in 1940, when the Battle of Britain was raging.

I suggest that there’s little call for the bus service:

WE had lunch in the pub and wandered around. It’s a lovely village:

I want to live here!!! I fell in love with this house, which is next to the Church and I may use it as a setting in my next novel.

You see some odd sights in Oxford. If we walk into town along the Iffley Road we pass The Cricketers’ Arms – a lovely 1930s pub which I have discovered is dedicated to none other than Our Don Bradman. He’s been imortalised in stone on the front and is eternally at the crease, facing the bowler. It’s now an up market night club and renamed The Mad Hatter, but they can’t get rid of the Don.

Mind you, our local pub is the delightful Rusty Bicycle, on Magdalen Road. As you can see, they are not averse to dogs in there:

It’s now light until 10.00 at night because last weekend was the Summer Solstice. We spent it in Kent and Sussex, seeing family and meeting up with our friends Joanna and Mark, who are living down there for a while. We stayed in a hotel near Hayward’s Heath and on Friday night saw Toby’s 88 year old uncle in Seaford, near Beachy Head. We took him for a meal in the Old Plough, an old pub. He was particularly taken with the scampi!

We’ve joined the National Trust, and want to make the most of now free admission to the properties. So, on Saturday we visited Standen, a gem of the Arts & Crafts Movement and a National Trust property. It was built in the 1890s, and gives a wonderful feel for the life of an upper middle class family during the 1920’s. The house was designed by Philip Webb, who filled it with the genius of his friend William Morris and other big names of the Arts & Crafts period. This is what you could have as a ‘country get-away’ if you were a solicitor who made it big representing the railways. Beats our Bridgetown cottage!!

Then we met up with Joanna (Sassoon) and Mark at a fascinating stone-carvers’ studio – Stone Carving Now – where I bought Toby’s Wedding Anniversary present, a paperweight – it has a “T” carved in a stone in a medieval font.

And off we all went for a bracing walk on the Downs at Ditchling Beacon. Apart from the prodigious views, the best part was exploring a 19th-century windmill which some volunteers have opened to the public: http://www.jillwindmill.org.uk

On Sunday we visited Batemans, the former home of Rudyard Kipling. It’s a Jacobean house set in beautiful gardens in Sussex.

And when we were there Toby bought me the perfect wedding anniversary present – a first American edition of Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), a book I adored as a child, which has original Arthur Rackham illustrations. The UK edition was issued later with a different illustrator. Lucky me!!

We met up with Joanna and Mark again at a pub called “The Poet” in the village of Matfield (Kent). The poet who’s referred to in the name is Joanna’s famous relative, Siegfried Sassoon, who lived in the village for many years. After a toasting Sigfreid (and Joanna) We picnicked on the lovely village green surrounded by fine houses.

And after lunch we managed after much looking and asking of locals, to find Sigfreid Sassoon’s home Wayleigh, a Victorian monstrosity.

But it did have the blue plaque and here’s Joanna under it.

It took hours to get home on the M25 on Sunday evening! To avoid some of the traffic we stopped in at the White Hart pub in Brasted, Kent, which was a favourite of the Battle of Britain pilots, as Biggin Hill air base is very close.

During the Battle of Britain, in the summer of 1940, it became so popular with the young pilots that it was virtually a second mess. With four or five scrambles a day, The Few were permanently shatteringly tired. The White Hart provided a moral boosting bolt-hole, which heard more than a few sing-songs from the young airmen. A regular at the White Hart was Biggin Hill Station Commander in 1940, Group Captain Richard “Dickie” Grice. Every evening during the Battle of Britain the Group Captain would lay on a coach to take his war weary pilots to the White Hart to play a game of darts and eat a meal. Apparently he had a loud speaker fitted to the roof of his car and as he led the coach from Biggin into the hotel’s forecourt, he would announce “25 beers!” (or whatever number) on the loud speaker.

Unfortunately the pub’s been completely refurbished – there are a few photos over the bar of the pilots – but it has lost any sense of that era. It had a pretty beer garden, though, and we drank Pimms and I thought of the young men who’d visited all those years before.

Our eighth wedding anniversary is today – 26 June. It’s also the first birthday of Toby’s gorgeous granddaughter Sunday Cammell. Happy Birthday, Sunny darling.

Last night we went to the New Theatre in Oxford (built around 1932 and amazingly Art Deco) and saw – wait for it – “Annie Get Your Gun”. It had our very own Jason Donovan in it and he did very well. We’re suckers for the old musicals, although this one was given a ‘modernisation’ in the 1990s and the version we saw won a Tony award as a result (with a different cast, of course).

Today we’ll be attending the AGM of the Friends of the Bodleian Library followed by afternoon tea in the Divinity School, and Toby has booked us in for dinner at Trip Advisor’s top Oxford eating place, a Thai restaurant just off the Iffley Road.

I should comment that over the past couple of weeks, Toby has been glued to the TV watching the World Cup – a disappointing result Australia ☹ and England. And what about that bite!!

Next week, we’ll be in Cornwall because our wonderful neighbour Venetia has lent us her holiday house at a place called Port Quin (http://www.kestrelpromotions.co.uk/quaycottage/quaycottage.htm).
I’m going to write and read and generally relax. We’ll be out of Internet contact, so the next blog update will be after we return.

It’s been an eventful two weeks, and I’ve not had a chance to email anyone or update the blog.

In the week commencing 26 May the Oxford Colleges were preparing for and then participating in Eights Week, a major event in the Oxford calendar. Eights Week is the annual rowing competition between the Colleges and it’s held on the Isis, just down from Iffley Lock. We strolled down to the river to watch a fair few races, barracking mainly for Linacre College, of course. Only Linacre wasn’t in the Head of the River – the races between the Colleges elite First Division Eights.

Being Oxford, the rules of Eights are almost impossible to understand, but I think they go like this: each College can have one boat in each division, and there are male and female divisions. At least twelve boats participate in each race and there are three races held on consecutive days for each division. The objective is to ‘bump’ the boat in front. That’s exactly what it is – you catch up to it and bump it, or the coxswain of the boat you’ve caught concedes rather than have you physically bash the boat.

The boats set off at intervals of 130 feet and the racing order is determined, firstly, by how successful you were last year, then by how successful you are in the first and second races. If you bump another boat in the first or second race, you then start ahead of them in the race following. The third race determines overall winner – for the First Division Eights it means they’re “Head of the River”, a great honour for the College.

We watched Oriel bump Pembroke in the second race which meant Oriel was first in the final and as it couldn’t be caught, it was Head of the River. Oriel is a major player in Eights – it seems to have won most of the past decade. Here, the boat in front is about to be ‘bumped’:

It’s great fun and very exciting when a boat is catching up to the one in front, which is frantically trying to outrow them. And it was amusing to see the big beefy boys in the boat being yelled at by a tiny girl cox.

Here are a girls eight about to commence a race:

In fact, I got ‘bumped’ myself. We were walking along the towpath on Saturday morning, watching a race and a voice behind me said in a very plummy accent, ‘Sorry, wolf coming through.’ And I was bumped into by a young man in a huge wolf costume, presumably supporting Wolfson College. He had very soft fur…

A those who follow me on Facebook know, on Wednesday 28 May we drove over to Bletchley Park and thoroughly explored the mansion and the restored huts where the code-breakers were housed during World War Two. It’s pretty well accepted that the work done at Bletchley to break the German Enigma and other codes shortened the War by two to four years. It’s an amazing story. They had to hide the fact that Enigma had been broken, so the reports of German activity were given the appearance of coming from an MI6 spy, codenamed Boniface, with a network of imaginary agents inside Germany.

(The Brits were full of such tricks. To hide the importance of Radar in helping to win the Battle of Britain – Radar gave advance warning of the German bombers crossing the Channel – one story that was put out was that a special group of RAF pilots had been fed extra carrots and as a result had especially good night vision and could see the Germans coming!)

While this was pure fiction, the real network monitoring the Germans’ every move was the ‘Y’ Service, a chain of wireless intercept stations across Britain and in a number of countries overseas, listened in to the German radio messages. The messages were then sent back to Bletchley Park (known as Station X) to be deciphered, translated and fitted together like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle to produce as complete a picture as possible of what the enemy was doing.

We saw a demonstration of the reconstructed Bombe machine, which effectively mechanized the code breaking tasks and was run by women.

Several of the huts have been restored to something like their wartime appearance, and it was easy to imagine Alan Turing, Dilly Knox and all the women – women outnumbered men 3 to 1 and were paid a third less for the privilege – beavering away in crowded and spartan conditions. It was freezing and in winter they worked in coats with mittens and hats.

Here’s Toby impersonating Dilly Knox and I’m talking to ghosts.

After Bletchley we drove in to Milton Keynes to attend a concert by one of Toby’s favourite musicians, Julie Fowlis. She sings Scottish Gaelic traditional songs and plays the tin whistle. Toby met her briefly afterwards and here’s the photo to prove it!!

We spent all of last week in Toronto, Canada, where Toby gave a scholarly paper – which was well-received I understand! It was for a group called IASSIST – the International Social Science Data group. Toronto is a great place for shopping, so I had a lot of fun filling the gaps in my wardrobe.

Toronto is a big city (6 million) and reminded me of Melbourne mixed with Singapore. The downtown area near Lake Ontario is almost entirely high-rise, with a network of shopping arcades running underneath the towers, called PATH. We walked it in its entirety one day and believe me, it’s a long walk. We could imagine how important it would become when above ground was thickly piled snow. Another day we walked out of town to the trendy hippy neighbourhood of Kingston Heights and had vegan meals. One of them was with our friend Duc (who has the distinction of being even shorter than me – go Duc!!) – here’s a photo of Toby and Duc outside the Vegan restaurant we found.

This photo shows the Toronto Academy of the Arts:

Yet another day we took the ten minute ferry ride to the Toronto Island Park which comprises five or six very pretty islands, sort of Kings Park on a lake. There were lovely views of Toronto from the ferry.

It’s a bucolic place and it’s easy to forget you’re so close to Toronto – until you see the Skytower:

On Thursday we took a bus trip to Niagara Falls, which were spectacular,as you can see from the photos.

We took the Horatio Hornblower boat trip – formerly the Maid of the Mist, which was a much more evocative name – and went into the spray of the falls, all decked up in our red plastic ponchos.

The town around the Falls, unfortunately, has fallen victim to its success. I remember visiting in the mid-eighties and the Canadian side was rather boring, but lovely with pretty gardens. Now the street up from the Falls is all themed amusement parks and cafes, including…

But at least some of the parks remain.

Next on the itinerary was a very pretty 19th-century town called Niagara-on-the-Lake. It was at one time the capital of Ontario and it is where the British defeated the Americans in the War of 1812. It burned down a few years later and was rebuilt and luckily it didn’t get re-rebuilt which means it’s very authentic place. Nowadays it’s all tourist venues, unfortunately – you know the thing, Christmas Every Day shops, themed cafes, gift shops and ice-cream parlours. Toby and I had “Polar Bears’ Paws” which were raspberry ripple and chunks of white and milk chocolate! Yum.

Surprisingly there’s a wine industry in the district around Niagara, which produces a specialty wine, “ice wine”. It’s very sweet dessert wine. The grapes are picked after the temperature drops below minus 8 degrees. We bought a bottle, of course!