t he real reader’s quarterly
‘Paradise Lost’
no. 87 autumn 2025
Editors: Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
Marketing & publicity: Steph Allen & Jennie Harrison Bunning
Subscriptions, orders & bookshops: Isabel Davies Jones, Rebecca Mackay, Edie Gilmour, Jess Dalby
Cover illustration: Melita Denaro, ‘They shall not grow old, Remembrance, November’ (cat. 56), 2018, oil on panel, 15x19cm
For 30 years, Melita Denaro has painted the landscape surrounding her childhood home in Donegal, exploring themes of exile and belonging and reflecting the memories and friendships that have sustained her. In 1996, shortly after graduating from the Royal Academy Schools, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Since then, the relentless progression of the disease has robbed her of most of her mobility, yet she still retains enough movement in her hands to create intimate, lyrical paintings of breathtaking intensity. For more of her work visit www.jmlondon.com.
Back cover fox by Ella Balaam, design by Octavius Murray, layout by Andrew Evans, colophon and tailpiece by David Eccles
© The contributors 2025
No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. This work is reserved from text and data mining (Article 4(3) Directive (EU) 2019/790).
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Slightly Foxed is published quarterly in early March, June, September and December
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Isbn 978-1-916803-00-8
Issn 1742-5794
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From the Editors
Paradise Lost • samuel saloWay-CooKe
George Orwell, Coming Up for Air
One of the Few • mIChael barber
Geoffrey Wellum, First Light
The Idol of the Odeons • Clara Farmer
Dirk Bogarde, A Postillion Struck by Lightning
Taking the Short View • stephen bayley
Nowell C. Smith (ed.), The Letters of Sydney Smith
Scenes from Parish Life • sue Gee
Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Love Divine
Dancing the War • matheW lyons
Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal
Where Past and Present Meet • melanIe mCdonaGh
Lucy M. Boston, The Children of Green Knowe
How Sweet the Music • ann Kennedy smIth
Lucy M. Boston, Memory in a House
Marriage Guidance • Kate hubbard
Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives
Alice in the Margins • robIn blaKe
Martin Gardner (ed.), The Annotated Alice
Have What Is Beautiful • helena drysdale
Elisabeth Russell Taylor, Tomorrow
The Smell of the Greasepaint • Isabel lloyd
Michael Blakemore, Arguments with England & Next Season
Flying High • tIm pears
Romain Gary, The Kites
Faith, Hope and Decency • martIn WIllIams
Rosamunde Pilcher, September
Glimpses of Paradise • WIllIam palmer
Thomas Bewick, My Life
To Read or Not to Read • martIn sorrell
Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read
Bibliography
The Slightly Foxed Podcast
New episodes of our podcast are available on the 15th of April, July, October and January. To listen, visit www.foxedquarterly.com/pod or search for Slightly Foxed on Audioboom, Apple Podcasts or your podcast app.
Subscriber Benefits
Slightly Foxed can obtain any books reviewed in this issue, whether new or second-hand. To enquire about a book, access the digital edition of Slightly Foxed or view a list of membership benefits, visit www.foxedquarterly.com/ members or contact the office: 020 7033 0258/office@foxedquarterly.com.
From the Editors
The Slightly Foxed office is always busy but there’s something about the arrival of autumn – brisker air, shorter days, everyone back together again after the summer holidays – that brings a burst of extra energy with it. As always at this time of year, we’re finalizing arrangements for Readers’ Day, which is on 8 November at our usual Bloomsbury meeting place, the Art Workers’ Guild in Queen Square. For those who haven’t yet experienced it, it’s always a jolly occasion, winding up with cake and a convivial glass of Madeira. This year we have a great line-up, including Tim Kendall on his edition of the letters between William Golding and his editor at Faber, Charles Monteith; Sarah Anderson and Martin Latham on the art of bookselling; Maggie Fergusson on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins; and Catherine Coldstream on her much praised memoir Cloistered, an account of the years she spent as a nun in an enclosed Carmelite order. We still have a few tickets left, so if you’re interested, do get in touch as soon as possible.
Our Slightly Foxed Edition this autumn is another outstanding memoir, First Light by Geoffrey Wellum (see p. 12), a young pilot who volunteered for the RAF when he was still a 17-year-old schoolboy in March 1939. There have been other, famous accounts of flying in the Battle of Britain and after, but none perhaps that take the reader so close to the feelings of a young pilot facing death several times a day in the skies over southern England and northern France. It’s truly an incredible story told by an exceptionally brave and modest man.
In complete contrast, one of our most popular SFEs, Laurie Lee’s
Cider with Rosie, is now available in a Plain Foxed Edition, illustrated with John Ward’s charming original line drawings. In it, Lee describes his childhood in a remote Cotswold valley in the years during and after the First World War. His father walked out at the end of the war, leaving his mother in a crumbling cottage with eight children, four of whom were not her own. As Laurie Lee acknowledges, village life could be brutal. Yet despite the poverty, for him the village of Slad and the surrounding valley were a small, magical, self-contained world, and his sensuous child’s eye view of the countryside, his warm, huggermugger home and his untidy, indomitable mother, is irresistible.
And finally, a treat in store from Ysenda Maxtone Graham, well known to readers for her non-fiction bestseller Terms and Conditions and her contributions to Slightly Foxed. Love Divine (see p.29), a light-hearted novella with some serious questions at its heart, is set in Lamley Green, a pretty village on the outskirts of London. As the story, and a new year, open there’s a general feeling of unease in the village. Its parish church St Luke’s is without a rector, while difficult experiences and unsettling events are troubling several of the parishioners. Extracts from letters, texts, sermons and parish council minutes dotted through the narrative mark the progress of a year in which, for each of the story’s main characters, much happens and much is learned. It’s a funny, sharply observed little picture of parish life, which also affectionately points up what’s wrong – and what’s right – with the modern C of E. Preorder now for publication on 1 November and cross another present off the Christmas list!
GaIl pIrKIs & haZel Wood
Lou Tonkin
Paradise Lost
The other day, I had what I like to think of as a ‘George Bowling moment’: I had been looking at the face reflected back at me from our small bathroom mirror, telling myself that age had been, so far, not unkind to me, when the sun emerged from behind a gloomylooking cloud on the horizon and illuminated a broad expanse of scalp through my thinning hair. Within the hour, I had booked myself an appointment with my hairdresser, and within the week I had adopted, on their advice, a more flattering haircut for a man of my age.
George Bowling is the narrator of George Orwell’s delightfully pessimistic Coming Up for Air (1939). Bowling is a victim of a succession of disappointments just like mine – the tiny catastrophes of ageing – all in the shadow of a catastrophe that was not tiny: Orwell wrote Coming Up for Air between September 1938 and March 1939, on the eve of war, while convalescing near Marrakesh. With global conflict seemingly unavoidable and desperately missing his comparatively idyllic childhood in south Oxfordshire, it is perhaps no surprise that he chose a plot that centred on nostalgia and disappointed hopes.
We are first introduced to Bowling on the precipice of a midlife crisis: he is 45, overweight, harried by his wife, disappointed by his children and depressed by his job as an insurance salesman. The situation in Europe isn’t helping his state of mind either, and war – with ‘the bombs and the machine guns’ – and what he refers to as the
George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (1939)
samuel salo W ay -C oo K e
‘after-war’ – ‘the coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons’ – are never far from his thoughts.
More than anything, though, Bowling has become intensely (and often hilariously) cynical about modern life. Almost everything, from housing corporations and insurance policies to his own wife and children, is viewed with suspicion. The road on which he lives is ‘just a prison with the cells all in a row’, and London is ‘just one great big bull’s-eye’ for Hitler’s bombers. Food isn’t what it used to be: eating a frankfurter at a milk-bar, where everything is ‘slick and shiny and streamlined’ and the food is ‘phantom stuff that you can’t taste and can hardly believe in the existence of’, gives him the feeling that he has ‘bitten into the modern world’ and discovered what it is really made of. He even looks back nostalgically on homicide, commenting ‘how dull the murders are getting nowadays’.
Bowling is a man at odds with himself – his emotions, his body, his age – and it is his attempts to overcome these awkwardnesses that make Coming Up for Air both outrageously funny and thoroughly depressing at the same time. It was Orwell’s only novel written in the first person and, though Michael Shelden in his 1991 biography suggested this first-person experiment was the ‘one serious defect’ of the novel, I have to disagree: the voice of George Bowling pulls together the tragicomedy of the novel perfectly.
Within only a few pages, it is clear that our narrator isn’t actually a very nice person, and unlike the narrators of other novels that pivot around nostalgia – Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, for instance, or Leo in L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (see SF no.78) – the more time you spend with Bowling, the less you like him. His attitude towards women, for instance, swings from the arrogantly misogynistic to the downright murderous. It is his wife Hilda who bears the brunt of his bigotry, infidelity and financial irresponsibility, yet somehow it is he who has ‘serious thoughts of killing’ her, and not the other way around.
Bowling’s recollections of his picturesque childhood in Lower
Binfield are similarly troubling for today’s reader, as the majority seem to involve torturing the local wildlife with a ‘tough gang of boys’; taking shots at birds with their catapults and stamping on halffledged chicks. As he himself admits,
the truth is that kids aren’t in any way poetic, they’re merely savage little animals, except that no animal is a quarter as selfish . . . Killing things – that’s about as near to poetry as a boy gets.
This is not to say that George Bowling is without any redeeming features. Aside from his dry, brash humour, there are moments of disarming sensitivity that almost make you forget his previous unpleasantness. His memory of reading adventure stories from Chums weekly in the cobweb- and mouse-infested loft behind the yard (‘the quietest place in the house’) certainly resonated with me, as it must with anyone who has been a keen young reader:
I’m twelve years old, but I’m Donovan the Dauntless. Two thousand miles up the Amazon I’ve just pitched my tent . . . I’m watching the mouse and the mouse is watching me, and I can smell the dust and sainfoin and the cool plastery smell, and I’m up the Amazon, and it’s bliss, pure bliss.
Aside from reading, fishing is the other pastime that meanders through Coming Up for Air, offering our narrator some consolation (though even this hobby is ultimately mostly about killing things). In fact, there is rather a lot of fishing in the book and, having never so much as touched a fishing rod myself, I have to admit that a lot of the technical detail went straight over my head; yet, as Bowling describes it, there does seem to be something glorious about it:
Agnes Miller Parker
The still summer evening, the faint splash of the weir, the rings on the water where the fish are
rising, the midges eating you alive, the shoals of dace swarming round your hook and never biting. And the kind of passion with which you’d watch the black backs of the fish swarming round, hoping and praying (yes, literally praying) that one of them would change his mind and grab your bait before it got too dark.
For Bowling, fishing is a lost paradise, something from ‘before the war, before the radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler’, one of those things that ‘don’t belong to the modern world’. In fact, more than the need to escape the pressures of work, family and current affairs, it is fishing that is the final impetus for Bowling’s return to his home town of Lower Binfield, to ‘catch those big carp’ – and to attempt to recapture something of his lost youth at the same time. I won’t spoil the ending but, suffice to say, his ‘quiet holiday’ doesn’t go quite as he expected (though perhaps exactly as we knew it would).
Yet Coming Up for Air is about much more than just a midlife crisis: it seems to contain within it Orwell’s two later masterpieces, Animal Farm (1945, see SF no.65) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949, see SF no. 69), in embryo – a social history of class tensions and a vision of totalitarian oppression, but all rooted in the realistic landscape of interwar Britain, instead of a fairytale allegory or a dystopian future.
Countless ideas echo between the books. Bowling’s reflections on the impact of big business on agricultural England would find parallels in Animal Farm . His fear of the totalitarian results of war foreshadows the ‘Two Minutes Hate’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four : the world we’re going down into, the kind of hate-world, sloganworld . . . the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke.
Agnes Miller Parker
More fundamentally, as D. J. Taylor has highlighted in his perceptive second biography of the author, all of Orwell’s novels, including Coming Up for Air, are ‘essentially about rebellions that failed’. While the consequences of Bowling’s return to Lower Binfield may not be as devastating as those of Winston Smith’s rebellion, both are fundamentally pessimistic about the chances of an individual ever being able to resist control, whether that be the control of an all-seeing, totalitarian state or of the institutions and conventions that define modern life: mortgages, insurance, marriage, children and – above all – war. The real strength of Coming Up for Air is that, by the time you’ve finished reading it, you can hardly tell which vision is more dystopian.
Yet, even in the face of Orwell’s bleak portrayal of suburban discontent, the book’s wry comedy seems to offer a glimmer of hope absent from the conclusions of either Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four. Bowling’s cynical and sarcastic humour is his only defence against the modern world and the tiny catastrophes of ageing. It is a humour he manages to maintain until the novel’s closing pages (and, I hope, beyond).
Though not quite Bowling’s age, and very happily married, samuel saloWayCoo K e is already rehearsing a cynical outlook and heartfelt nostalgia in preparation for his own midlife crisis.
One of the Few
m IC hael barber
The great Australian cricketer Keith Miller was once asked how he coped with the pressures of Test cricket. ‘Pressure’, responded Miller, who’d flown a Mosquito during the war, ‘is a Messerschmitt up your arse.’ I was reminded of this by something Geoffrey Wellum said in an interview: ‘If you were in one-on-one combat and you could see the man behind you trying to shoot you down, you knew the meaning of the word fear.’
Like Miller, Wellum (1921–2018) was a pilot: the youngest of what came to be known as ‘The Few’. Unlike Miller, he remained below the radar for almost sixty years. Not until 2002 did people learn how, less than a year after leaving school, he found himself at the controls of a Spitfire, the youngest British pilot to fight in what became known as the Battle of Britain – though only once, in his Prologue, does Wellum use that term. He ignores the big picture. This is one man’s war.
‘Boy’ Wellum, as he was known, grew up fast. He had to: many of the German pilots he would face had already fought for Franco with the Condor Legion in Spain. Over the next eighteen months we observe his first pint, his first kill, his first car (bought for a fiver) and his first sexual conquest. At the risk of offending his shade by using a German term, I would describe First Light as a Bildungsroman – a story of growing up. Perhaps he did it too fast, because at one point he laments: ‘What on earth shall I find to do when I am not able to fly a Spit any more?’
First Light is based on some notes Wellum made at the time in a school exercise book, which he then put aside. Like many veterans
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Coming attractions
andreW nIXon gets a taste of the Low Life with Jeremy Clarke • laurIe Graham relishes a story of mushrooms and murder • anthony Wells pays tribute to Anne Frank • noonIe mInoGue hears voices from Caesar’s Rome • Grant mCIntyre is haunted by The Turn of the Screw • rose lyddon goes Offshore with Penelope Fitzgerald • rIChard smyth watches the creation of a garden • sarah Wedderburn admires Valley of the Dolls • tIm blanChard revisits the case of the Yorkshire Ripper • posy FalloWFIeld is moved and appalled by The Grapes of Wrath
‘It’s always a red-letter day when the post includes Slightly Foxed – gorgeous new cover, choice list of contents. I always find one title I plan to read – or an old favourite I’d forgotten about.’
Penelope Lively
In this issue
Samuel Saloway-Cooke experiences a George Bowling moment • Kate Hubbard eavesdrops on five Victorian marriages • Michael Barber shares a cockpit with one of The Few • Helena Drysdale remembers the elegant author of Tomorrow • Martin Williams is comforted by Rosamunde Pilcher’s September • Sue Gee enjoys a taste of parish life • Martin Sorrell adopts a new approach to books • Stephen Bayley takes advice from the Reverend Sydney Smith • Isabel Lloyd goes backstage at the National
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