Mary Rizza

National Poetry Day this week saw the publication of an anthology of poems about trains, Train Songs, edited by Sean O’Brien and Don Paterson. The poems cover a wide field, representing American Blues and the troop trains of two world wars among childhood favourites such as Auden’s Night Train.

The descriptions of the anthology refer to the celebration of carriages, platforms, waiting rooms, and ‘the poetry of departures and brief encounters’. I have explored these ideas in previous posts (search for Railway Romantics in the search box at the top of this page) and it’s great to see more about the impact of train travel on the national collective consciousness and imaginative sensibility.
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Autumn Term by Antonia Forest (published 1948)

Decades before the genre of Young Adult fiction was identified, Antonia Forest’s series of books about the Marlows, a family of six girls (one set of twins) and two boys, explores the world of young people with clarity and a sometimes shocking lack of sentimentality.

The characters’ intense inner lives are put under a microscope which reveals moral ambiguities, shifts and compromises, self-interest, conflicting loyalties, jealousies and tensions in a prose style which is lucid and entertaining.

Little wonder that critic Victor Watson said that Forest was Jane Austen for the young. She even uses Austen’s technique of free indirect speech, where the reader is brought straight into the characters’ heads and identifies with their interior monologues.
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Crime writer Sophie Hannah’s novel, The Monogram Murders, featuring Agatha Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot has just been published and is getting a good reception.

Hannah says reading Christie as a young teenager made her fall in love with mystery fiction. You and me both, Sophie.

The first Agatha Christie novel I read was Death on the Nile, which plunged me into a grown-up world of passion, sex, jealousy, greed, exotic places, even more exotic characters and, of course, murder.

I gasped at the ingenious plot and the clever twist. I marvelled at the audacity with which the author baffled my expectations and assumptions.
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David Frost was a TV pioneer who was one of the major forces behind the ground-breaking satirical TV show That Was The Week That Was, or TW3 as it was quickly dubbed.

The show could be seen as defining the spirit of 1963. Its first outing was at the tail-end of the previous year, and the second series ran throughout 1963 before being halted because of the forthcoming general election. At any rate, that was the reason the BBC gave.

The show had a pop at politicians, the Prime Minister, public figures, Britain’s declining global power, farmers, restaurateurs, public relations people. It satirised religion and class and social attitudes. The programme delighted in puncturing stuffiness and pomposity. Ted Heath blamed the show for ‘the death of deference’. You couldn’t give it a better compliment.
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Hats in the ring for songs

about Elvis Presley:

The Colonel and The King

v

Elvis Presley Blues

v

Apparition in Las Vegas

MANY SONGS NAME-CHECK OTHER SINGERS. SOMETIMES THIS is done convincingly, sometimes it seems an easy way to become part of a mythology that belongs to someone else, or a blatant piggyback on to someone else’s fame and achievement.

Elvis, who died 36 years ago this week, must hold the record for the number of songs that have been written about him, that name him or that reference him explicitly or implicitly. All these years after he finally left the building, Elvis’s name still resonates and tugs at our imaginations.
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Paddy Roberts’ album Strictly for Grown-Ups is a satirical look at the British character

YOU MIGHT SAY – ACTUALLY PHILIP LARKIN MORE OR less did – that the 1960s as they are popularly perceived didn’t start until 1963.

The 40th anniversary of that tumultuous year is being marked by exhibitions and other revisitings, including a new musical from Andrew Lloyd-Weber called Stephen Ward, The Scandal That Shook Society.

The scandal is the Profumo Affair, and Stephen Ward was one of the key figures in, and the main victim of, the affair which shook and changed the British establishment. Until this point, Britain was stuck in a never-ending 1950s, and social concepts we take for granted, such as youth culture, sexual freedom, social mobility and equality, were disturbing and threatening undercurrents whose power was about to be unleashed.
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THE CHOICE OF JANE AUSTEN TO GRACE THE Bank of England’s £10 note is a triumph for the representation of women on English currency and highlights Austen’s status as a great writer.

Jane Austen’s place in the galaxy of literary stars has always been secure and her popularity has increased in recent years with the production of hundreds of film and TV adaptations, spin-offs and reworkings of her novels. Some of these adaptations are excellent and offer lively and accessible approaches to the original texts.
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Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road turned round the image of Marys in popular song.

THE NAME MARY COMES FROM THE HEBREW LANGUAGE and is said to mean bitter, beloved, wished-for child, or of the sea. It is the name of the Blessed Virgin and was bestowed liberally on female children until the 1960s.

In those years, if you called out the name in certain areas of town or in certain school playgrounds you would be swamped with responses. It’s a lovely name, I think now, resonant and timeless.

For girls named Mary growing up in my generation, though, the name lacked cool. There were admirable women in all walks of life who had the name but they didn’t cut much ice with those of us who wanted to be Beat Girls.

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Precinct pioneers: Christine Cagney (right) and Mary-Beth Lacey set the pace for female TV cops.

THIS SHOWDOWN IS BETWEEN TWO COP SHOWS WHICH focus on strong female partnerships and friendships, separated by the Atlantic Ocean and a quarter of a century. Christine and Mary-Beth versus Janet and Rachel. Manhattan’s 14th Precinct versus the Manchester Metropolitan Police Force.

Tough act to follow: Rachel Bailey (left) and Janet Scott (right) with their guvnor, Gill Murray

The characters of Cagney and Lacey grew and developed over the course of seven series, from 1981 to 1988, whereas Scott and Bailey have had, so far, just three series in which to establish their characters and situations. In both shows, the women are tough professionals with contrasting personalities and home lives.
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