Her Place in the Woods : the Life of Helen Hoover by David Hakensen

 

Every year or so I search the internet to see if any new publications have come up on 'my' authors. Which is how I discovered this biography.

Helen Hoover (1910 - 1984) was born in Greenfield, Ohio. After a pampered childhood her life changed abruptly after her father died, leaving her and her mother with no money. Together they move to Chicago where Helen finds a job. She meets Adrian Hover on a double date. It is Adrian who comes up with the idea of "'living in the woods for a while'. They marry in 1937. This is when Helen starts writing, selling her first piece to a newspaper. Slowly their life improves, they can afford a car, a camera and take holidays. By the summer of 1939 they are at last ready to begin their search for the idyllic cabin in the forest. But after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour it becomes clear that Adrian will be called up, while Helen sees more opportunities opening for women.

 

 

It will take them until the late 1940's to discover their ideal spot at Gunflint Lake. They buy a derelict cabin, and later purchase a second one on a neighbouring plot, and in 1954 they leave their jobs to live there permanently. Moving in in the autumn makes it extra hard: most neighbours who could help them have left by now,  and they are not really prepared for the severely cold winter. While getting supplies in from town they have a car accident, leaving them carless and jobless (Adrian was to have met a contact for a lucrative job). 
What will they live on? Slowly, Helen begins to sell stories to magazines, while Adrian designs and sells notepaper. They still struggle to make ends meet. Apart from food for themselves they also buy food for the animals they feed in winter, at considerable expense. During the winter their diet is so poorly balanced that Helen develops scurvy and anemia. For the whole story see this post. 
By the late 1950's Helen's writing is bringing in more money and she is contemplating writing a book.

 

 

 

 

 

Her first book, The Long-Shadowed Forest, is published in 1963. This is a book about the animals she encountered. More books on animals follow. Is is not until 1969 that she writes her book on her and Adrian's life in the forest: A Place in the Woods. The books are beautifully illustrated by Adrian.
While the books are succesful they also cause a stream of visitors, interrupting their paradise and longing for peace and quiet. In the end they decide to leave. They spend time in Florida and New Mexico (where they get into trouble with the authorities for feeding and thus attracting stray cats), before ending up in Wyoming. There, their growing cat colony again becomes a problem.
The Years of the Forest, Helen's second book on her life in the forest, is published in 1973. 
Read my post on this book here.
Helen and Adrian valued their privacy greatly. Once they move to their final house in Laramie they rarely left home.

Helen died in 1984, Adrian in 1986.

 

While I was glad to discover more about Helen Hoover I found this a disappointing biography.  Although in the acknowledgements David Hakensen mentions talking to people around Gunflint Lake  there is little evidence of this in the book. In her letters HH complained about being obstructed by locals. Was this true or just her imagination? I wish David H would have given us some more quotes from people who lived at Gunflint Lake at the time.  
It would at least have made the book more lively, as now it reads more like a report of everything David H. found in HH's lettters. This means we learn, in extreme detail, about her correspondence with her agents and publishers. While David H. tells us what HH wrote in her letters, he rarely quotes from them. I wish he had, because I love HH's writing in her books and would be very interested to read her letters (I wonder if anyone has thought of publishing them?).
The other thing I find odd about this book is that David H. seems to pay more attention to Helen's relationship with her agent and publishers than to her relationship with her husband or his work as an artist. 

The book left me feeling sad for Helen, who according to David H. struggled with her mental and physical health, searching for the ideal place to live but somehow never finding it, or only for a short time.

 

 

 

 

Good news on Rose Cottage

The restoration of Rose Cottage has earned it an award.
So nice to know it's new owners are taking such good care of it!

Irene Soper's house and Rose Cottage, continued

Kind blog reader Lynn sent me some more pictures of Irene Soper's house, taken from a different perspective. 

You can see Irene Soper's house and Rose Cottage in the distance.

 

 

Work is still ongoing at the site.

All other posts on Irene Soper and her house can be found here

Called by the Hills by Anuradha Roy

 

I came across an article on this book and thought I would treat myself to it, and I agree with Chloe Dalton and Sebastian Faulks: it is a gem.

 

Thirty years ago, when Anuradha and het husband stumbled upon a derelict cottage near the hill station of Ranikhet (state of Uttarakhand, India) they decided to make it their home. The book is a collection of tales of life in her new home: the people, the animals, the plants. 

After living in Delhi Anuradha has to get used to the gentler pace of life, the impossibility of some things (telephone connections, fast Internet, getting to the next town quickly) and the unavailability of others (the shops have a very limited stock). 
'The power failed because a tree had fallen on a power cable. "Why do you need bijli (electricity in Hindi) in the daytime when there's sunlight?" people asked us in genuine puzzlement. We waited. The plumber was called away to his village on mysterious business that had to do with a melancholic buffalo. (...) He idled over an apparently limitless supply of smokes because the taps he was to fit still hadn't arrived from Haldwani. How could they? The roads uphill had been washed away by the rains.' 

 With Anuradha we wander the paths around Ranikhet. Carefully, because leopards are a real danger. We meet her neighbours and get to know the dogs that they had no intention of keeping but who just arrived and stayed.

 

 

'Twenty-five years on, I know the precise bend on the road to Ranikhet where the air changes to champagne. We draw deep breaths there. If we were balloons, we would inflate the tips of our toes and fingers.'

We follow her struggles to make a garden, not easy with the dogs running loose, but somehow she succeeds. And we share her sadness at the changes (the building of reservoirs, fierce monsoons owing to climate change) that mean the disappearance of animals.

 

Anurasha is a great storyteller and a wonderful artist, as the illustrations show. A lovely book.

 

I end with a confession. When I bought this book I vaguely thought: 'I thought her name was spelled with a 't', I must have misread it all this time'. A few weeks ago I ordered 'Mother Mary comes to me', by, I thought, the same author. It was not until I started reading it and saw the two books side by side that the penny dropped. I cannot be the only one making this mistake as Anuradha Roy's Wikipedia page starts with: 'Not to be confused with Arundathi Roy'....
(By the way, 'Mother Mary comes to me' is great. I am making myself read slowly, as I tend to rush and that would not do justice to this book)

 

 

Sisters in the Wilderness: The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill by Charlotte Gray (2001)

 

Many years ago I heard a talk on BBC radio on Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Trail. On a subsequent visit to London I bought this book which then languished on my bookshelves until a few weeks ago. More or less stuck in the house with all the snow and ice outside, I decided to clean my bookcase, and so I came across this biography. Time for a read!

Stuck in rural rural isolation and genteel poverty sisters Susanna and Catherine and their husbands emigrated to Canada in the 1830's.  They were leaving 'comfortable, if threadbare, lives and promising literary careers'  and ended up in 'raw Upper Canada, not pastoral England'. Suddenly they had to face the rigours of pioneer life.
As a journalist wrote at the time: 'These delicately nurtured ladies, who had been familiar with the best of London literary society had arrived in the waste howling wilderness and slaved as no servant girl slaves in England.' This much to the mortification of their English sisters who did not relish any references to the circumstances of their Canadian relations. Imagine: living in only a wooden house ...' 

Susanna and Catherine (like three of their sisters) were published authors in England; writing came naturally to them and was also a way of making money. They wrote books on life 'in the Bush' and on Canadian plants. They are now regarded as icons of the Canadian literary landscape.

I am a quick reader but this book made me slow down because there is so much to take in. There is the story of the two sisters and their families, but Charlotte Gray provides a lot of context too, which makes for a very interesting read. Recommended!

 

Hill-Farm Hazard by Mary Clifford (1957)

 

'My family tree having numerous farmers on almost all its many twigs and branches, it was natural that a deep love of the land should run strongly in my veins. I could never quite accept the possibility of a future spent in a genteel suburb, sipping coffee in the mornings and playing vixenish contract bridge in the afternoons. 
My parents are not farmers, on the contrary, though very fond of the countryside, neither has ever shown any interest whatever in farming. My mother has a very real aversion to it, though born and reared ons a well-managed and prosperous farm.
John can also number among his antecedents several land-owning country squires, so it was natural that we should accept as a matter of course the possibility of our taking a farm when we married.'

So begins Mary's story of the first three years on a small hill-country farm, Hollybank, on which she and John keep chickens,  pigs and cattle. The farm is described as being on the Derbyshire / Cheshire border, with no further details as to its location.

It is a straightforward story, but it has a few quirks.

 

To make ends meet John will keep his full time job and Mary will run the farm almost single-handedly.
Before they can move in there is work to be done: laying pipes for the water supply, plumbing, installing heating, a sceptic tank etc. 

The whole book consists of a description of their experiences buying, keeping, transporting and selling poultry, pigs and cattle. I must admit I was getting a little bored when I suddenly came upon the most intriguing list. Mary is telling us how housework has never been a pleasure to her: 'that evident satisfaction which some women derive from sweeping, polishing and furbishing is something I cannot understand.' John is as desinterested in their house as she is. 'As things are, it would appear to be a race for which of us can make the biggest mess in the shortest time. We are both "putters down" of stuff "just for now". That might be for anything up to three years. At one time, on our kitchen cupboard, I listed the following:'

One thing is certain: Mary would drive me crazy, but I do like that list! I was hoping for more of this, but alas, Mary only has eyes for her calves and pigs. These all have names, and she goes into great detail of how they come to choose them.  
A few chapters later Mary is pregnant and has a son. Yes, she tells us about the birth, the problems she has with breast feeding and how she introduces her son to the animals. Does the son have a name? We don't know.  A typical sentence goes:
'We returned home from the christening ceremony to find that my lovely Topsy had calved ...'

 

I would have loved to hear more about how she combined looking after the baby with running the farm. No such luck. The nurse who stayed with them during and after the birth 'had given me every help possible in working out a routine which would allow me to return to my farming activities with the minimum of time spent with the baby .' 'Two hours per day max., the rest of the time is your own.'
She does not mention how she copes once the baby becomes mobile. In fact, except for one 'crying child in the car' the baby is not mentioned again in the whole book.

 

Instead there are pages and pages devoted to the problems of transporting pigs. I must admit to not reading all them all .... 

I have not been able to find any additional information on Mary Clifford and her farm. Of course, there are many 'Hollybank' farms, but I cannot be sure I have found the one from this book.

Irene Soper's house and Rose Cottage, continued

About two years ago blog reader Lynn sent me some photo's of Irene Soper's former home. At the time the property had been recently sold and a planning application for building work could be seen.
Recently I wondered what the situation would be like now, so Lynn kindly offered to take some pictures again.

I was very interested and intrigued to find that, while Rose Cottage seems to have been restored, the Well House (as far as I can tell from the photo) seems to be untouched and unoccupied. I wonder why that might be? 

 

Lynn also took some photo's of the surroundings, explaining that both dwellings overlook the lovely New Forest countryside. The next image was taken when walking just a few steps down the lane from the cottage looking towards Hampton Ridge, which is also shown in the third, more close-up photo.

 

 

 

 

 

She also made photo's of the old well, just a few steps down from The Well House, on the opposite side of the lane.  As you can see from the middle image, the well was first recorded in 1215.  It has one well opening for humans and one for animals.  The open side of the well is likely still regularly used by the commoners' animals that freely roam, i.e. the cattle, ponies, donkeys etc. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you Lynn, and if anybody has further information regarding both Rose Cottage and Well House I would love to hear from you! 

Irene Soper's paintings

I know many of you are interested in Irene Soper, so I was very grateful to receive information from one of her cousins. She told me she owned some of Irene's and Arthur's paintings. Here they are:

 

 

 

She also told me that Irene, who sadly passed away a few years ago, self-published a book in 2000, called In Grandfather's Footsteps.

 

 

People looking for informaton on Irene and Fordingbridge  (where she lived) can also try the local Facebook group 

All my other posts on Irene can be found here 

My thanks again to Irene's cousin!

Good Husbandry: Growing a Family on a Community Farm, by Kristin Kimball (2019)

This is Kristin Kimball's second book. In her first, The Dirty Life, she describes meeting her partner, Mark, and moving to the small village of Essex NY where they start a new farm. This book is about life on Essex farm. Kristin and Mark run it with a mixed bag of helpers.

I have often wondered, when reading books for this blog, how hard life must have been for some of the authors. While the writers may mention setbacks they rarely talk about how hard it really gets, how they suffer mentally or if they are on the verge of giving up.
Kristin Kimball does write about this and that makes a refreshing change. This is the story of the farm, the village, the workers, the cattle, the produce, the horses, the house but most of all of her and her  husband and children. After a 100 pages I was beginning to think: how does she cope, why does she stay with this impossible man, who is obsessed with farming, does not care that the house they live in is in a terrible state (the access to the staircase to the bedrooms is outside), does not care they have no privacy and loves dangerous sports (He tells her: 'Worry is your choice'). 

 

By this time they have two children and, while combining working on the farm with looking after a baby was doable, 'A toddler plus an infant equaled one full-time job, and instead of splitting it between us or even discussing it much, we seemed to assume that job was mine.'

When helpers don't show up she still has to pitch in and the cold and sleep deprivation get to her.
'This was not at all what I had pictured, way back at the beginning, when I imagined raising children at the farm. (...) The winter weeks wore on. Milking was a liberation from the house, but it added to my exhaustion. On nights when Miranda didn't sleep well, it felt nearly impossible to get out of bed at four-thirty and continue all day. The house, meanwhile, seemed to be closing in on us, filling with visiting young farmers interested in our horses and our full-diet model. Mark loved company, new opinions and the constant underlying hum of youth and action, which fueled our winter work. To me, the house felt increasingly crowded and dirty, and there was way too much noise for a family with an infant.'

She decides to get all of the helpers (who, while living elsewhere, had been spending their time and eating in the house) out, and relocate the office to an old trailer. 

'The house was so quiet without the farmers in it. I took all the extra leaves out of the dining table (...) We would set a place for Mark, but most days, he didn't have time to come in. As winter faded, the separation increased.'

'As the baby howled and the rain fell, I looked at the cards on the table and thought: Sometimes the hardest hand to play is the one you dealt yourself.'

She is saved by wise friends ('He is so extreme, I complained. Yeah, you would never be happy with a normal person') and the marriage is saved by a therapist. Slowly she and Mark find a way to be together again.

Meanwhile there are droughts and, in another year, endless rain, when it seems the crops will drown. There is also is the completely unexpected kindness of a stranger who donates money which they use to install drainage in their fields. In the final chapter walls are torn down, new windows fitted, the rooms re-designed so that at last they don't have to go outside to go to bed.

Of course this book also tells the fascinating story of a small farm in the 21st century (especially interesting for those interested in working with horses) but I felt that it is in the personal story that this book really stands out. Highly recommended!

Kristins website can be found here and her farm's website is here

Authors on the map: Northern America

 

Here is a map with North American authors. It includes Kristin Kimball, whose book Good Husbandry  I am reading right now.

I Bought a Mountain by Thomas Firbank (1950)

Some reviews just write themselves, some are a bit harder and some ...
When you don't much like a book and reading it is a struggle, well, what can you say about it.
I can't rememember struggling like this with a book since reading Copsford.

Read the reviews on Caught by the River ,  Senior Reader  and Resolute Reader to get an idea of the book.

Thomas takes us through the farming year at a great pace. If you like to read about keeping sheep in the hills this is the book for you. If however, like me, you enjoy reading about how people learn to run a farm, how they adapt, make mistakes, get to know their neighbours and about their domestic life: there is not much of that here.
I have been struggling to write about this book, but I admit defeat!

Mike Howe writes about managing Dyffryn farm today. The land and cottage are now owned by the National Trust and you can go and stay there.