Appointment With Death

Holidaying in Jerusalem Poirot overhears Raymond Boynton telling his sister Carol ‘You do see, don’t you, that she’s got to be killed?”

Raymond and Carol are Americans on holiday with their step mother and siblings, Lennox (with his wife Nadine) and Ginevra. Also at the hotel are Jepherson Cope, an old friend of Nadine’s, Sarah King, a newly qualified doctor and Dr. Gerard, a French psychologist. Luckily, Sarah and Dr. Gerard are very nosy and Jepherson Cope loves to chat; because it’s through their conversations, while they busily observe, that we find out the Boynton family secrets.

Hatred is the motive for this months ReadChristie challenge and Mrs Boynton, the family matriarch is nothing but hateful. A domineering sadist who worked as a prison warden she keeps her grown up children as prisoners. No school when they were young, no friends, no social life or any life outside of their home. With no stimulation they have become scared, introverted and ashamed; Genevra, the youngest is disappearing into her own world. So why then are they on this holiday? Why has Mrs Boynton decided to let them see the world?

A Film For September: Daughters of the Dust

Written, produced and directed by Julie Dash in 1991 Daughters of the Dust is set in 1902 among members of the Peazant family, Gullah islanders who live at Ibo Landing on St Simons Island off the Georgia coast.

Focusing primarily on the women we watch the family as they prepare to leave the island and travel north to live on the mainland. Viola (Cheryl Lynn Bruce) and Yellow Mary ( Barbara-O) have already been living on the mainland and arrive by boat with a photographer from Philadelphia to record and help with the preparations.

Only 50 years after the end of slavery the family matriarch Nana, remembers her ancestors and is not prepared to leave the freedom of the island; but devout christian Viola and free living Yellow Mary aren’t interested in her old ways and beliefs anymore. Narrated by Nana’s unborn great grandchild, the past, present and future overlap and conflict as they debate how the communal memory of those who survived and thrived will be kept and told once they have left the island.

White Teeth

Back in North London, back in the 70’s and back in the world of Zadie Smith is a good place to be!

Two families are joined together by the friendship of the dad’s who first met in a tank in Greece at the end of the 2nd world war. At the end of the war Archie Jones returns to England and Samad Iqbal to Bangladesh but the two meet again when Samad arrives in England in the early 70’s and looks Archie up as he’s the only person in London he knows. Their friendship is rekindled and blossoms over egg and chips at O’Connell’s Pool House, an Irish pool house run by Arabs with no pool table that’s set to become their home from home.

Hortense Bowden, a devout Jehova’s Witness, arrived from Jamaica in 1972 with her seventeen year old daughter Clara, and is waiting and planning for Judgement day. Knowing it’s going to be on the 1st of January 1975, Clara decides to greet The End of the World at a New Year’s Eve party and that’s how she meets Archie. The two are married six weeks later and the only other people at the service are Samad and his wife Alsana. Archie and Clara have a daughter, Irie and Samad and Alsana have twin boys Majid and Millat. The story is divided by years and characters from 1974 to 1999 but the families tumble and bump into each other’s plot lines with their shared life that encompasses a vast scope of 20th century culture.

Nora Webster

The Ginger Tree by Oswald Wynd and Greengates by R.C.Sheriff have always amazed me that they’re written by men, they seem to write about women with a level of insight that I wouldn’t think possible, and now I have to add Colm Tóibín to my list, with this study of bereavement.

The novel opens in medias res as Nora is seeing out yet another well meaning visitor, calling because her beloved husband Maurice has died. Only 40 and facing a future that was never meant to be.we follow her over three years from 1969 to 1972 as she finds a way to build a life with her 4 children; the 2 girls in Dublin and the younger 2 boys still at home with her in Wexford.

Tóibín gets right under her skin to the point that she could be accused of being self centred in her grief, we seem to be thinking about the boys, more than she is. But this close observation means that it isn’t a depressing read because its focus is on her living.

“So this was what being alone was like, she thought. It was not the solitude she had been going through, nor the moments when she felt his death like a shock to her system, as though she had been in a car accident, it was this wandering in a sea of people with the anchor lifted, and all of it oddly pointless and confusing.”

Latchkey Ladies

When I think of latchkeys I think of Lucy Honeychurch in A Room With A View realising that she knows nothing of the world and could perhaps move away from Windy Corner, to live in London, perhaps even share a flat with some other girl. ‘And mess with typewriters and latchkeys’ explodes a hurt Mrs Honeychurch. To Lucy having her own latchkey means freedom and independence.

Marjorie Grant writing in 1921 sees things rather differently. Set in 1917, Anne Carey lives in a boarding house and works as a clerk in a government office dealing with the Canadian military, full of the dreary repetitive work that she sees as silly and trivial. Unlike Lucy Honeychurch who is about to come in to her money, Anne needs to work and to her being independent means a dismal room that’s never her own under the prying eyes of a nosy landlady.

Anne is a member of the Mimosa Club, a charitable club founded, owned and run by Mrs Templeton, a widow who knows the value of a ‘home’ and uses her own home to provide working women with somewhere to go for conversation, a wholesome meal and warmth. It’s through the Mimosa Club that we meet a range of different women from the confident, fun Maquita to the petty snobbishness of the Hon Mrs Bridson to the exquisite Petunia Garry who they first meet at one of Simon Meebes’ parties. Not quite bohemian, not quite an Englishman and not quite a gentleman but fabulously wealthy, he specialises in discovering young girls and making them his protégé’s. And it’s here that Anne meets Philip Dampier, a playwright, poet and editor of a literary magazine and her life changes.