A Home for All Seasons

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A wonderful meeting of memoir and landscape, both rigorous and freewheeling, expansive and intimate, rendered in dreamy prose. I almost felt that I had somehow been tricked into reading it by a “false description” given by the publisher and even those who had reviewed and blurbed it.

I really hate giving up on books I start reading, especially expensive hardback books like this one, but after persevering for days, I started skimming for information on the purported subject without luck and decided I’d wasted enough of my life on it. His efforts involved bringing in experts to assess the tree rings in the beams as they can accurately date a building. I assumed (like other reviewers) that this would concentrate on the house and surrounding areas of Herefordshire where author Gavin Plumley lives. With passion and precision, Gavin Plumley pushes the boundaries of memoir and scholarship and shows that the chronicle of a house can contain the grand history of a whole world as well as the sweet, urgent story of a life: all that intimacy within the vastness of historical time. Unfortunately, it veered away from that and turned into an odd sort of history of the English village and a discussion of one particular artist’s set of paintings.Finding the date of construction takes Gavin down many rabbit holes through the seasons, and cycle of the year as well as the historical context of the home from the 1500s and beyond. It had some interesting details but I didn't enjoy Gavin reading it as there was no shading in his narration. The book is supposed to be about the history of a house in Pembridge, Herefordshire, (near where I live), that the author bought with his husband, according to the blurb and insinuated by the title and dust wrapper illustration, but the information assembled is so meagre that, I’m afraid, I felt that I had been conned. From a simple question about the age of a house, this book takes you on a much wider journey, encompassing art, literature, history and nature, as well as the inescapable fragility of life.

As a final thought, while I was reading this the author posted a comment by a reviewer that said they weren’t able to continue reading the book due to the prevalence of references to his alternative lifestyle. For younger bookworms – and nostalgic older ones too – there’s the Slightly Foxed Cubs series, in which we’ve reissued a number of classic nature and historical novels.Features about Gavin’s home and life in Pembridge have also appeared on Inigo, Sphere and in Herefordshire Living. But I have a love of art, literature, gardening, architecture and history (all represented throughout the book) and yet I still felt long portions overly tedious and at times pretentious. All this gleaned while he tried to establish the age of his Tudor-looking property, for which there was no definitive record. The author is entitled to his opinion, but I bought the book for the house not an essay on modern climate change, criticism of government officials’ handling of the pandemic, or the merits of socialism. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review.

Mrs Woolf, wife of the manager, is a very celebrated author and, in her own way, more important than Galsworthy. Working with several interlocking cycles chiefly the seasons in art, farming and Elizabethan England, this book is also an extended meditation on the big issues of today and their effects on village life. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal.

Those involved Protestants escaping mainland Europe and the consequent difficulties they had in integrating with the existing population. Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual. He also delved extensively into the art of the Tudor period and came across the 16th century immigration issues. That simple question set them off on a discovery process, delving into the house's mixed and varied history, and expanding out from that (via a lot of medieval art, especially Breughel; the author is an art historian) into the rhythms and processes of the countryside generally, and how to live within them. I listened to the audible audio edition but it isn't on Goodreads yet and I can't find the asin number to add it.