Daily Mail - 23.08.2019

Daily Mail, Friday, August 23, 2019 Page 57

BOOKS

NINE PINTS

by Rose

George

(Granta,

£9.99, 384 pp)

‘BLOOD has

fascinated

humanity since it first

spilled,’ writes Rose George.

‘Yet much about this “amia-

ble juice”, as Goethe called

it, remains mysterious.’

The human body contains

nine pints (hence the title),

and a resting human heart

beats 75 times a minute.

By contrast, the car-sized

heart of a blue whale beats

six times a minute, while a

shrew’s heart beats 1,000

times a minute. ‘The heart

is busy and so is blood,’

George observes. Yet our

ignorance of this vital fluid

is surprising. Many of us

know the common blood

types (A, AB, B and O), but

don’t know our own.

Rose’s lively, accessible

and passionate book

considers the history of

transfusions, the UK’s

infected blood scandal,

menstrual taboo, and the

futuristic realm of blood

rejuvenation. ‘Blood is not

done teaching us what it

can do,’ she concludes.

STEP BY STEP

by Simon

Reeve

(Hodder

£9.99, 336 pp )

SIMON REEVE is

an award-win-

ning broadcaster and

author who has travelled

to more than 120 countries

across the globe, with

experiences from the

surreal to the hazardous.

But his success was hard-

won. He left school without

qualifications and became

so depressed as a teenager

that he contemplated

suicide. The turning-point

came when his father

spotted an advertisement

for a newspaper post-boy,

with the possibility of

journalist training.

Simon applied, along with

5,000 others, and got the

job. From that point, his

story reads like a fast-paced

thriller, packed with bizarre

coincidences, chance meet-

ings with celebrities, and

humbling encounters with

remarkable people.

A KEEPER

by Graham

Norton

(Hodder

£7.99, 336 pp)

ELIZABETH

KEANE’S

mother, Patricia, has died,

and to settle her affairs

Elizabeth returns from New

York, where she lives with

her 17-year-old son, Zach,

to Buncarragh, the small

village in Ireland where

she grew up.

Like Patricia, Elizabeth is a

single parent — divorced

from Zach’s father. But to

have been a single parent

in Seventies rural Ireland

was a shameful thing, and

Patricia never told Elizabeth

about the circumstances of

her birth. All she knows is

that Patricia left Buncar-

ragh, was apparently mar-

ried, and returned soon

afterwards with a baby.

With a characterful cast of

strong women and brow-

beaten men, Graham

Norton’s atmospheric novel

beautifully evokes the

flavour of rural Ireland.

The unsettling mixture of

homeliness and dread that

swirls around Elizabeth’s

story intensifies as Norton

reveals the multiple layers

of longing, sadness, cruelty

and redemptive kindness

that make up this tale.

JANE SHILLING

held in the Gents

him their opinions in the one loca-

tion where she couldn’t intervene.

Jack Brown’s writing reflects his

background as an academic, with

some serious analysis of government

and its processes. But the human

element is there, too.

We see Margaret Thatcher nosing

around in her officials’ in-trays —

one day she found a complaint from

a florist that he was being undercut

by supermarkets, and from then on

ensured that all her orders for flow-

ers went to the man in question.

We see Anthony Eden working

from his bed (meaning important

papers would sometimes get tucked

into the sheets when it was made),

and Clement Attlee resisting the

installation of a ticker tape machine

to keep No 10 up to date with the

latest news.

He was finally persuaded when his

press secretary pointed out that the

machine could give him the latest

cricket scores.

Norman Tebbit, reflecting on

Margaret Thatcher’s decade in

power, observed that: ‘The windows

in this building are very big when

the Prime Minister first comes in,

and every year they get smaller and

smaller and smaller and after ten

years it is very difficult for a Prime

Minister to see the world outside.’

But even when your premiership

has been dogged by disaster, leaving

No 10 still means leaving your home.

John Major asked not to be clapped

out by the staff (as is traditional),

because he didn’t want to face the

press outside with tears in his eyes.

Upstairs he had left the incoming

Tony Blair a bottle of champagne.

Attached to it was a note: ‘It’s a

Power: Theresa May leaving No 10 great job — enjoy it.’

PICTURETHIS

MUSTREADS

Out now in paperback

tried to look after his men in the

camps. When one of them was

being beaten by a guard, Peter

intervened. He was beaten in turn

and was then ‘tied to a stake with

his head tilted upwards and made

to stare into the sun.

As the sun moved in the sky, so he

was rotated on the stake.’ Ordered

to keep his eyes open at all times,

he could barely see by the time he

was cut down, and his retinas were

permanently damaged.

When news finally came of the

Japanese surrender and the guards

laid down their arms — grotesquely

offering to shake hands because

‘now we are friends’ — the prisoners

broke into ‘Land Of Hope And

Glory’, ‘God Save The King’ and

‘Jerusalem’. Astonishingly, they did

not take reprisals against the

sadistic guards. In October 1945,

Peter finally returned home.

Somehow, all the Walkers had sur-

vived the war. The only family mem-

ber who died was Beatrice’s wealthy

American husband, an Anglophile

who had joined the RAF and

was lost in a plane crash over the

Atlantic in 1945.

D

URING peacetime Wal-

ter prospered, ending

his career in a senior

NATO role, and was

knighted. Edward was less success-

ful in his army career. Ruth married

the family friend whom she had

loved for years, but was widowed in

her 40s.

Harold, determined to put his

miraculously spared life to good

use, became a hospital consultant

and a pioneer in the field

of obstetrics.

Peter, unsurprisingly, never fully

recovered from the horrors he had

endured. He suffered terrible flash-

backs and his children wondered

why he was always angry. He even-

tually found happiness with his

second wife and was reconciled

with his children.

He never envied his brothers:

‘Peter carried with him a sense of

quiet triumph and confidence; he

had seen and suffered things that

they could not even imagine.’

Venning, a journalist who contrib-

utes to the Daily Mail, juggles all

these different stories and locations

with ease, weaving it into an

engrossing whole. As well as a

portrait of the world at war, this

marvellous book also depicts a

world that was soon to vanish.

By the time the war was over, the

mighty British Empire was on its

last legs. The views on class and

race held by the Walkers, and by

most other Britons, were about to

be swept away, and a good thing

too. Yet seeing the war through the

Walkers’ eyes, you realise what a

truly extraordinary generation it

was, and how much we owe them.

force moving towards them, Walter’s

disciplined and well-drilled men held

their fire — and realised the approach-

ing soldiers were not Japanese but

men from their own brigade.

Older brother Edward also had a

good war and, like Walter, was awarded

the DSO. Promoted to Lieutenant

Colonel, he was in command of a

battalion which fought in Italy through

a savagely cold winter until the

Germans surrendered in May 1945.

In one town he and his men liberated,

he was greeted by the mayor carrying

a white flag in one hand and a bottle

of wine in the other.

The youngest Walker brother, Peter,

who had no interest in being a soldier,

had nonetheless volunteered,

leaving behind his polo ponies, his

dog and his pet otter. He was one of

130,000 men taken prisoner when

Singapore fell.

Peter’s experiences as a Japanese

prisoner of war, which included

working on the infamous Thai-Burma

railway, make for gruelling reading.

Before the war, an Indian fakir had

told him he would go through the

darkest of times but would come

through. This, along with the Walker

family motto of ‘Nil Desperandum’,

never despair, somehow gave him the

strength to survive. As an officer, he

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FABULOUS FROCKS

by Jane Eastoe & Sarah Girstwood (Pavilion £14.99)

THE late American designer Kate Spade once said, ‘Playing

dress-up begins at age five and never truly ends’, and if this

book is anything to go by she was right on the money. A

wedding dress, a party dress, a little black dress: the frock is

the statement piece in anyone’s wardrobe. Open this book

and celebrate the last hundred years of glamorous gowns all

in one place.

KATYA EDWARDS