Page 53ever after
Daily Mail, Friday, August 16, 2019BOOKS
THOMAS
CROMWELL
by Diarmaid
MacCulloch
(Penguin
£12.99, 752 pp)
IN HER Booker
Prize-winning novels Wolf
Hall and Bring Up The Bodies,
Hilary Mantel depicts her
protagonist, Thomas
Cromwell, as a figure of
astonishing complexity:
brilliant, ruthless, but with
deep reserves of humour,
loyalty and tenderness.
But what is the historical
reality? In the introduction
to his magisterial
biography of Cromwell,
MacCulloch acknowledges
Mantel’s ‘inspired’ novels,
but invites us ‘to find the
true Thomas Cromwell of
history’ in his pages.
Historian Sir Geoffrey
Elton, to whom the book is
dedicated, insisted that
Cromwell was ‘not biograp-
hable’. But MacCulloch
triumphantly challenges
that judgment.
This is a richly researched
and compelling account of
the Putney brewer’s son
who became Cardinal
Wolsey’s trusted servant,
Anne Boleyn’s nemesis and
Henry VIII’s closest counsel-
lor, transforming the gov-
ernance of Tudor England
before Henry sent him to
the executioner’s block.THE PEOPLE’S
FAVOURITE
POEMS
by Gary Dexter
(Old Street
£8.99, 288 pp)
WHEN an
eye condition
made it impossible for Gary
Dexter to continue his
career as a writer and
illustrator, he came up with
an unlikely alternative
money-making scheme: he
learned a repertoire of
poems by heart and offeredto recite them to strangers,
in exchange for a donation.
The initial results were
mixed: the majority of
requests were for the same
few verses — Kipling’s If—,
Wordsworth’s Daffodils,
Auden’s Funeral Blues.
But some people were
‘violently allergic’ to poetry
(with whom Gary confesses
some sympathy — he has an
aversion to the ‘singy-
songy’ recitation style of
some modern poets).
His engaging memoir
reprints the 30 most
requested poems, with
insights into them and
reminiscences of the funny,
but often very touching,
encounters he had when
reciting them.THE TRICK
TO TIME
by Kit de Waal
(Penguin
£8.99, 272 pp)
KIT DE WAAL
grew up in
Birmingham
and her latest novel, long-
listed for the 2018 Women’s
Prize for Fiction, is partly
set in the city, where her
central character, Mona,
who is about to turn 60,
leads a solitary life making
exquisitely crafted dolls for
a very particular clientele.
Her past is gradually
revealed in flashback:
her childhood in Ireland,
her mother’s death when
Mona was eight, her guilt
over leaving her father
and moving to England
where she met her
husband, William, a builder
from Galway, and the
tragedy that inspired her
current occupation.
After the 1974 pub
bombings that killed 21
people, Birmingham was
a hostile place for Irish
people — as de Waal is
well aware.
Her novel focuses sensi-
tively on the ways that loss
and grief affect individuals
and their communities.innocent at Peterloo
PICTURETHIS
WOMEN OF THE HOME FRONT
(The History Press £12.99)
THE ATS, the WLA, the WAAF or the WRNS... with
thousands of the nation’s men fighting in Europe during
World War II, the women of Britain took care of the Home
Front. Frolicking with lambs, warming up for a football
match, legs in the air, or tumbling around on a makeshift
trampoline — this brilliant new book reveals unexpected
glimpses into those women’s lives back in Blighty.PICTURETHISS
his tales of Alice In Wonderland. Born
Charles Dodgson in 1832, Carroll, an
Oxford mathematician, found a safe
place to satirise the pomposity and
privilege of the upper classes in
his books.
Like Carroll, kids see the absurdity
of arbitrary rules and rituals: royalty,
tea parties, court rooms, school.
Carroll never married and enjoyed
the company of young girls —
particularly his muse Alice Liddell,
who he photographed naked. As
Pollard says: ‘It is hard not to be
discomfited by a letter that says:
“One hardly sees why the lovely form
of girls should ever be covered up.” ’
Illustrator Kate Greenaway — afterwhom the UK’s most influential
children’s illustration prize is named
— was also encouraged to strip her
little girls naked by the Victorian
critic John Ruskin.
He was fearful of the mature female
form and, after seeing one of Greena-
way’s illustrations in 1883, he begged
the artist to ‘draw her for me without
her hat — and without her shoes —
(because of the heels) and without
her mittens, and without her — frock
and its frill? And let me see exactly
how tall she is — and how — round.’
Beatrix Potter — whose first Peter
Rabbit book was published in 1901,
when she was 35 — went a different
way, putting clothes on to animals.Although her creations have lives
of wild adventure, Pollard reminds
us that their author ‘spent most of
her life a tamed thing, kept in dull,
expensive isolation on the top floor
of a house in South Kensington,
without any friends her own age’.
Her father was an oppressive
bully and her fiance died of
leukaemia just one month after
their engagement.
Dr Seuss — born Theodor Seuss
Geisel in Massachusetts in 1904 —
lost an 18-month-old sister to
pneumonia when he was three and
never forgot the sight of her tiny
casket. His Cat In The Hat books
were full of equally tiny words.
Green Eggs And Ham uses only 50.
His wife and collaborator, Helen,
struggled with poor health for years,
while Seuss had a long affair.
She took a fatal overdose of
sodium pentobarbital in- ‘Dear Ted, what has
happened to us?’ she began
her final letter to him,
signing off with a private joke,
the name of a fictional law firm,
‘Grimalkin, Drouberhannus,
Knalbner and Fepp’. Seuss then
wrote The Lorax, about a man
who destroys his own world.
Britain’s most widely
enjoyed picture book
author, Julia Donaldson
(The Gruffalo, Stick
Man, Room On The
Broom), had her own
tragedy when her schiz-
ophrenic son Hamish
stepped in front of a train,
aged 25, in 2003. ‘Wired
differently’ from birth, he was
expelled from school at five
and by 16 he had begun to
hallucinate and talk in the
rhyme his mother cherished.
Pollard believes Donaldson’s
book Tiddler, about a fish who tells
wild tales, is about Hamish.
But not every picture book is
autobiographical. Many critics
have tried to decode Judith Kerr’s
1968 classic, The Tiger Who Came
To Tea. Some say the tiger (who
gobbles up all the food in the little
heroine’s house) represents the
Nazis, who drove Kerr’s family from
their own home in Berlin in 1933.
But Kerr, who died aged 95 in May
this year, reminds her readers that
‘sometimes a tiger is just a tiger’,
and the little girl ends up hugging
the creature.
‘I don’t think,’ she said, ‘one
would snuggle the Gestapo,
even subconsciously.’
MUSTREADS
Out now in paperback
Pictures: ALAMY/PA/ ALLSTAR PICTURE LIBRARYJANE SHILLING
was no coward, but he could see the
crowds between him and Hunt. He
said he could not carry out the arrest
without military assistance.
Word was sent to the troops of the
Manchester Yeomanry, who were
waiting in a street off St Peter’s Field.
The captains ordered their men to
draw their swords. ‘They then spurred
their horses and galloped furiously
off... as though they were mad.’
Some of the Yeomanry were
visibly the worse for alcohol. One
‘could hardly sit on his horse, he was
so drunk’.
In Poole’s words, they already ‘had
blood on their hooves’: en route they
had knocked over a young mother
carrying her two-year-old child in her
arms. The boy died later that day.As the Yeomanry tried to open a
path so Nadin could reach Hunt,
chaos erupted.
‘I saw the cavalry charge forward,
sword in hand, upon the multitude,’ a
journalist later reported.
‘The woeful cry of dismay sent forth
on all sides, the awful rush of so vast a
living mass, the piercing shrieks of the
women, and the deep moanings and
execrations of the men.’
The Yeomanry began to panic. The
15th Hussars were now ordered by
the magistrates to disperse the ‘mob’
and rescue the Yeomanry. The
pandemonium worsened. ‘The people
were thrown down by hundreds and
galloped over,’ a reporter wrote.
Within minutes, a peaceful demon-
stration had become a battlefield.Over it ‘were strewed caps, bonnets,
hats, shawls and shoes... trampled,
torn and bloody’.
According to the reformer Samuel
Bamford: ‘Several mounds of human
beings still remained where they had
fallen, crushed down and smothered.
Some of these were still groaning —
others with staring eyes were gasping
for breath, and others would never
breathe more.’
As Robert Poole notes, it is still
possible to be angry about Peterloo
two centuries later.
‘This was not a clumsy exercise in
crowd control; it was an atrocity
which requires explanation.’
His book does just that, throwing
light on exactly how the day’s terrible
events were allowed to happen. KATYA EDWARDS