Library of Wales

Jampot Smith

Author: 
Jeremy Brooks

His fiction aspired to, and often achieved, a Chekhovian mixture of comic concision and pathos. Jampot Smith is a small classic about the delight and pain of sexual awakening; it will outlast its period and provincial setting.
- Michael Kustow

 

Brooks explores ephemeral relationships with delicacy and charm.
- The New York Times

 

A novel to be savoured…it is hard to suggest the originality, the illumination of this novel about adolescent emotions in years of World War II in simmering Llandudno.
- The Times

 

Jeremy Brooks has come to considerable stature in Jampot Smith.
- Anthony Burgess

 

Synopsis:

Jampot Smith is story of a group of friends as they edge towards adulthood in the sunshine and shadow of Llandudno during the years of the Second World War.

For Bernard, the eponymous Jampot Smith, Kathy, Epsom and Dewi it is all held in an exquisite balance of emotion and restraint that promises both love and danger. It is a time which will shape their lives against a war which will define it.

 

About the author:

Jeremy Brooks was born in Southampton in 1926. He was educated at John Bright School in Llandudno, after being evacuated to North Wales in 1940. He enlisted in the Navy and spent time at Magdalen College, Oxford before seeing active service in the Mediterranean. After the war he studied Stage Design at the Camberwell School of Art. He moved back to North Wales in 1953 with his wife, the painter Eleanor Brooks, where they rented a cottage on the estate of Clough Williams Ellis at Llanfrothen. They would have four children. To support himself while writing fiction he occasionally worked as a wine waiter in the restaurant at the Portmeirion Hotel and was later to write a novel, The Water Carnival (1957), satirising the Italianate village. Jampot Smith was published in 1960, Henry’s War in 1962 and Smith as Hero in 1964.

He later embarked on a theatrical career, which included a period as the literary manager of the Royal Shakespeare Company with Peter Hall from 1962 to 1969. He was responsible, with Kitty Hunter-Blair, for a number of ground-breaking adaptations of plays by Russian dramatists including Maxim Gorky and Nikolai Gogol. An adaptation of The Government Inspector, in which Paul Scofield starred, was particularly well received. He worked extensively for theatre, television and radio producing many original works and adaptations including (with Adrian Mitchell), a version of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. He also wrote poetry, children’s books and worked extensively with Theatr Clywd at Mold, producing a notable adaptation of Medea. He was renowned for helping the careers and development of younger writers and was a founder member of the Theatre Writers’ Union.

His last published work was a collection of short stories, entitled Doing the Voices (1986). He died in 1994.

 

Short extract:

Throughout our youth in Llandudno, Gregory was ever the nasty prophet of our loves. Like a woman, he seemed to know in advance what shifts might be expected in the changing pattern of our relationships and never failed to heighten the embarrassment of any dying affair by recalling to all parties the accuracy of his earlier predictions. Yet he was himself so socially inept, so clumsy, gauche, obvious, that we regarded him as a sort of clown, placed among us as a warning of what might happen if we, too, took ourselves a little too seriously.

 

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In the Green Tree

Author: 
Alun Lewis

Synopsis:

Through his letters home and six short stories, Alun Lewis paints a vibrant picture of life in India as a British serviceman during World War II. Intimate, vivid, observational and always filled with emotion, In The Green Tree is a rare literary example of one Welshman’s experience of empire and war.

 

About the author:

Alun Lewis (1915-1944) was one of the generation of writers born in the first two decades of the twentieth century who contributed significantly to Welsh literature through the medium of English.

His first volume, Raiders’ Dawn and Other Poems, was followed by The Last Inspection (and other stories) in 1943. A second volume of poems, Prepared in India, appeared after his death in 1945 as Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets.

In the Green Tree was published in 1948.

 

Short extract:

November, 1942

I’ve got a little while before I plunge into a sweating hold to see that a piano accordion sing-song is in progress, and then up to the wireless cabin for ‘On Board Tonight’. I’m in my hot little cabin and I thought I’d be alone but in come Tudor and another batman called D.O. Evans who is known everywhere as Bugger All Evans! They pretend they’ve got work to do in our cabin but really it’s simply to have somewhere less unbearably sweltering than the crowded hold in which they are forced to exist – what places they are!

 

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I Sent a Letter to my Love

Author: 
Bernice Rubens

Intensely dramatic... extraordinarily funny... an exceptionally original and disturbing achievement.
- The Daily Telegraph

 

Perfect mastered skill... gentle and pungent style... compassion and humour to modulate her often steely-eyed observation.
- The Sunday Times

 

Synopsis:

Amy Evans retained all her life the squat nose of her childhood, stubbed on to her face like a plasticine afterthought, a chin too long for any practical purpose, and eyes so close together that it seemed the sole function of the bridge of her nose was to keep them apart. For comfort she would go down to the beach, where the breeze from the sea blew into her face her share of the beauty to which her brother had so liberally helped himself. The gulls would wait for her to leave, no matter how long she stayed, for they were real gentlemen – the only gentlemen she was ever to meet in her life.

Now in her late fifties, Amy faces a struggle on two fronts. Loneliness looms the larger as the chance of finding love grows more remote. Survival depends on the outcome of her search for a love object, and I Sent a Letter to My Love, set in Porthcawl on the coast of South Wales, tells the moving and unsentimental story of Amy’s bold play for happiness, and her dangerous success.

The richly comic gifts, the wit and inventiveness that distinguished all Bernice Rubens’ work are reinforced in this novel by a maturity and depth of compassion for her characters.

 

About the author:

Bernice Rubens was born in Cardiff in 1928, the second daughter of Eli Rubens, a Lithuanian Jew fleeing anti-Semitism who established himself in the clothes business and Dorothy Cohen whose family had emigrated from Poland. She grew up in the large musical family in the vibrant Cardiff Jewish community. Music remained a passion throughout her life and sometimes she liked to describe herself as a failed musician. She was one of the most successful British novelists of the second half of the twentieth century and won the Booker prize in 1970 for The Elected Member. She read English at the University of Wales in Cardiff, before marrying Rudi Nassbauer, a wine merchant who also wrote poetry and fiction.

Bernice Rubens had two daughters. She taught English at a Birmingham grammar school from 1950 to 1955, before entering the film industry. Her documentaries were well received, one entitled Stress winning the American Blue Ribbon award in 1968. She began writing fiction based securely on the intricacies of her own Jewish family in her late twenties. She achieved early critical and commercial success with her first novel Set on Edge (1960) which allowed her to maintain a long career which would encompass 24 published novels. Her autobiography published in 2003 was her first work of non-fiction but she had often used incidents in her own life such the break up of her marriage in her work.

Her second novel, Madame Sousatzka (1962), became a film starring Shirley MacLaine and directed by John Schlesinger; her seventh, I Sent A Letter To My Love (1975), was also filmed, with Simone Signoret.

Rubens enjoyed the respected place she had achieved in the literary world. She was an honorary vice-president of International PEN and served as a Booker judge in 1986. She maintained close friendships with a chosen group of colleagues, including Beryl Bainbridge, Paul Bailey and Francis King.

She was a compelling storyteller, weaving her novels from many strands: her own vivid experiences, her friends’ and family’s lives, centuries of Jewish tradition and history; above all, her remarkable and disturbing imagination. In everyday places - a suburban villa, an English public school, a home for the elderly - Rubens showed the horrors that can lie behind net curtains and cosiness, polite conversation or an unexplained wink.

Though her novels possess many themes, she admitted that she really only wrote about one thing. Human relationships were the core material of her books, especially within a family. In later years her work moved to a larger historical canvas as she connected strongly with her Jewish heritage. She considered her strongest book to be Brothers, a sweeping historical novel that follows several generations of a Jewish family through a fight for survival that takes them from 19th-century Tsarist Russia to Western Europe and Nazism, then back to modern Russia and its continued persecution of the Jews. It was the best she insisted: “because... what it is about matters”. She died in London in 2004.

 

Short extract:

1990. We’re on a beach in Mallorca at the end of a long family holiday in a villa Bernice has taken to write the ‘novelisation’ of an American mini-series, a compelling epic sweep of twentieth-century Russia which she gleefully disparages as Mother Rubbish. Bernice emerges from the sea after an hour’s swim, black swimsuit rolled down to her waist, revelling in the sunshine. Grandchildren are sandcastling, the rest of us loll about with cuba libres and stories. A man comes up. He’s in his sixties; her age. He’s clearly intent, troubled, and oblivious to the rest of the beach. He says, with a South Walian trace, and no real question: “You’re Bernice Rubens”. She lights a cigarette, cocks her hip and says “So? I’m with my family….” He says one word: ‘Treblinka.’

 

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Home to an Empty House

Author: 
Alun Richards

...a crackling and sizzling read, with all the verbal liveliness, the thrusting polemical athleticism of the highly articulate South Wales mind at its best ... a novel, above all, full of life ... of character and vitality.
- The Sunday Times

 

His people are real, rounded and running over with life ...
- Daily Telegraph

 

Synopsis:

Home To An Empty House tells in Alun Richards’ incisive style the story of a marriage that has long since lost its sparkle. Walter, the wisecracking paranoiac and Connie, teacher of the ‘backward class’, are a couple who know a lot about sex but little about each other.

The industrial revolution is over and the South Wales valleys are slowly but surely losing their identity. Walter is forced through illness to reflect on his flaws while Connie attempts to sate her wanderlust.

 

About the author:

Alun Morgan Richards was born in Pontypridd in 1929. He wrote six novels from 1962 to 1979 and two scintillating collections of short stories, Dai Country (1973) and The Former Miss Merthyr Tydfil (1976). Plays for stage and radio were complemented by original screenplays and adaptations for television, including BBC’s Onedin Line. As an editor, he produced best-selling editions of Welsh short stories and tales of the sea for Penguin. His sensitive biography of his close friend, Carwyn James, appeared in 1984 and his own entrancing memoir Days of Absence in 1986. Alun Richards died in 2004.

 

Short extract:

The white spot of the ophthalmoscope moved in close, unblinking like a ferret’s eye, an unnatural button brightness moving closer, right in close so I couldn't blink away the tears, but I saw his jowl then, filmy behind the instrument, his smooth, clean-cut, pretty boy’s jaw, then smelt his lime aftershave sweet to the nostrils against the antiseptic clinical smell, wincing for a moment as he grasped my forehead with his other cold hand and turned me round to get another angle. I was sweating, icicles trickling under my armpits, my good shirt coating and bowels near emptying with fear, but just managing not to get a knee shake which would have been a giveaway because in order to get in close, his knee was between mine, jammed up close to my crutch as he kept looking down that peeper of his.

 

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Dai Country

Author: 
Alun Richards

Wales which still command serious attention.
- The New Companion to the Literature of Wales

 

Synopsis:

At the heart of Dai Country - the central valleys of twentieth-century South Wales from the 1930s to the 1970s - was the metropolis of Pontypridd, and it is from this vantage point in time and space that Alun Richards casts his baleful eye on the personal relationships and social ambitions of the inhabitants of this much-fabled country. In this compendium volume, the best of his short stories, as funny and savage as they are scathing and compassionate, are combined with his entrancing autobiographical memoir Days of Absence to take us to the core of those incomparable valleys, with their lived experience stripped bare for once of their usual cloak of cliché and sentiment.

 

About the author:

Alun Richards was born in Pontypridd in 1929. From the 1960s he was, and successfully so, a full-time writer and published novels and collections of short stories as well as plays for stage and radio, original screenplays and adaptations for television, including BBC’s Onedin Line. He died in 2004.

 

Short extract:

On 8 May, 2004, a blue Saab 9.3 pulled to a stop on the lower end of Michael’s Road in Blaencwm, and from the passenger side door a tall man, a broad man, dressed in a dark suit and dark glasses, stepped out onto the road and waited for the other occupants to join him on the street. From the driver’s side appeared a significantly shorter man, with close-cropped grey hair and moustache, an equally dark suit and dark glasses; and their wives emerged, elegant in tight dresses, no less charismatic, the whole vision like a valleys version of the Corleones. The women walked beside their husbands up the road toward a small crowd gathered in front of a house; the terrace of which it was a part was framed by an arc of mountain, cliff and waterfall under bright-blue, late-spring sky: a fusion of Rhondda and Hollywood, much like the prose – fiction and autobiography of the taller of the two men, Alun Richards, writer and raconteur. He’d come to unveil a commemorative plaque to his fried, the Rhondda prose gangster, Ron Berry.

 

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This title is also available as an ebook: http://thelibraryofwales.com/node/68

 

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Cwmardy & We Live

Author: 
Lewis Jones

Lewis Jones produced two novels that remain classics of international industrial fiction and testify to the oppressed but resistant and creative character of industrial South Wales.
- Stephen Knight

 

Synopsis:

The epic industrial novels of the 1930s, Cwmardy and We Live are published together for the first time.

In Cwmardy, Big Jim, collier and ex-Boer War soldier, and his partner Siân endure the impact of strikes, riots and war, while their son Len emerges as a sharp thinker and dynamic political organiser. Len’s tale is taken up in We Live, in which he is influenced by Mary, a teacher, and the Communist Party, which becomes central to his work both underground and in union politics, and to his decision to leave and fight in the Spanish Civil War.

Cwmardy and We Live paints a graphic portrait of the casual exploitation, tragedy and violence as well as the political hope and humanity of South Wales industrial workers from the 1900s to the 1930s.

 

About the author:

Born in Clydach Vale in 1897, Lewis Jones began work underground at the age of twelve. He worked for the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, was elected a County Councillor in 1936, and died in 1939 after a day of speaking at numerous public meetings in support of the Spanish Civil War.

 

Short extract:

Big Jim, known to civil servants and army authorities as James Roberts, stopped abruptly and let his eyes roam over the splendour of the mountain landscape. A coat hung uncouthly from his arm and a soft breeze played on the hairy chest that showed beneath his open red-flannel shirt.

His small son, Len, stood near by wondering what had caused this sudden halt. He saw Big Jim open his mouth as if about to say something, but instead of words came a smacking sound and a large mass of tobacco-stained saliva.

 

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Country Dance

Author: 
Margiad Evans

Phenomenon in border country writing, and pretty rare in any writing.
- John Powell Ward

 

Written with terse incisive power... the novels of Margiad Evans glow with a dark... passionate light.
- Derek Savage

 

Synopsis:

At the heart of Country Dance is Ann Goodman, a young woman torn by ‘the struggle for supremacy in her mixed blood’, Welsh and English. In this story of passion and murder set in the border country, the rural way of life is no idyll but a hard battle for survival.

 

About the author:

Artist and writer Margiad Evans (Peggy Whistler) was born in Uxbridge in 1909. Her work includes Country Dance (1932); The Wooden Doctor (1933); Turf or Stone (1934), and Creed (1936), as well as non-fiction, short stories, autobiography and two collections of poetry, Poems from Obscurity (1947) and A Candle Ahead (1956).

 

Short extract:

A fellow writer once showed me a set of ten beautifully bound diaries she had discovered in a second-hand bookshop in Hayon- Wye. Written in elegant copper-plate script by a farmer’s wife during the first thirty years of the twentieth century, they were decorated with pictures of royalty, flowers and Gibson girls cut from magazines. The pages were perfumed with the scent of long dead, pressed summer flowers, which added to the seductive promise of a glimpse into a vanished world. The diaries emphasized the narrow confines of rural life in Wales during the first half of the twentieth century. Possibly the most dynamic entry was written on Saturday July 1st, 1916: Rose early, milked cows. Weather fine. Packed cart. Changed into second best dress. Took bacon, plucked chickens, butter and cheese to market. Bought new hat. Nothing, not even the Great War, existed for that woman outside of her husband’s farm and its immediate vicinity. She noted the passing of the seasons, the vagaries of weather, prices at local markets and the purchase of every garment. National and international events passed her by. For her they held no relevance.

 

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Congratulate the Devil

Author: 
Howell Davies

Congratulate the Devil is a delightful comic novel by forgotten Welsh fantasy writer Howell Davies. Rescued from obscurity by the Library of Wales this amusing tale of mind control proves to be something of a lost gem. ... the most surprising... addition to the Library of Wales series so far.
- babylonwales.com

 

Synopsis:

Starling knows a chemist called Roper, who knows a painter called Jourbert, who knows a man in Mexico who works for the government. Mescal has always had its routes into the world. There has been a new shipment, but not quite what anyone expected. This is a new drug. It opens the doors of perception for a man like Roper hiding away in his north London laboratory. He can make people work for him, turn his friends into fools or murderers, if only he could control his own mind.... Anita is such a beautiful woman but she could never love a man like Roper...

Power, pleasure, always corrupt...

 

About the author:

Howell Davies was born in 1896 on a farm at Felingwm near Carmarthen. He joined the Royal Welsh Fusiliers on his 18th birthday in 1914 and served throughout the First World War, being wounded twice and commissioned captain. Educated at the Sorbonne, Oxford and Aberystwyth University, he became a freelance journalist and editor for a wide variety of publications and organizations. He was editor of The South American Handbook, from 1923 until 1972. His best-known works are the three novels published by Gollancz just before the outbreak of the Second World War, most notably Minimum Man (1938), which was widely serialized. This was followed in 1939 by Three Men Make a World and Congratulate the Devil. He died in 1985.

 

Short extract:

‘No, no, I’m Welsh actually’ is always my riposte when accused of being English, partly to avert the cliché of being just one more Englishman living in New York, but mostly as homage to the very Welshness of my grandfather Howell Davies. This notable Welshness was not a question of mere nationality, though he was born on the hills of Felingwm, nor of language, though he indeed spoke and wrote Welsh with pride and accomplishment, but rather of character and attitude, his unique approach the whole thing of it.

‘For that was the worst of being Welsh, once you got into the spirit of a thing, and though you began by acting, in a moment, quick as anything, you were serious and inside the skin of the song, mournful as midnight and feeling a black sort of ecstasy...’

 

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Border Country

Author: 
Raymond Williams

Compassionate, imaginative and accurate- brilliantly done.
- Sunday Times

 

I do not think I have ever been so moved by a modern novel... It has made me take stock of my own position.
- Dennis Potter

 

Synopsis:

When railway signalman Harry Price suffers a stroke his son Matthew, a lecturer in London, makes a return to the border village of Glynmawr. As Matthew and Harry struggle with their memories of social and personal change, a beautiful and moving portrait of the love between a father and son emerges.

 

About the author:

Raymond Williams was born in 1921 in the Welsh border village of Pandy. He taught at both Oxford and Cambridge, and in 1974 was appointed as Professor of Drama at Cambridge. His best-known publications include; Culture and Society (1958), The Long Revolution (1961), The Country and the City (1973), Keywords (1976) and Marxism and Literature (1977).

 

Short extract:

I first read Border Country when it appeared as a Penguin paperback in 1964. Its author was familiar to me for his pathbreaking critical studies Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), but an undergraduate from the Rhondda at Oxford did not buy hardback novels, and I had only been made aware of the existence of Raymond Williams’ 1960 novel from biographical blurbs. I shelled out my five shillings and took it home. For me it crackled with the excitement of a discovery I had somehow known all along. I did not stop reading until, some time the next day, it was finished, and I have never stopped rereading that original copy since.

 

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A Rope of Vines

Author: 
Brenda Chamberlain

Synopsis:

A Rope of Vines - This journal from a Greek Island is a beautiful and personal account of the time spent by Brenda Chamberlain on the Greek Island of Ydra in the early 1960s.

Sea and harbour, mountain and monastery, her neighbours and friends are unforgettably pictured; these were the reality outside herself while within there was a conflict of emotion and warring desires which is also vividly brought to life. Joy and woe are woven fine in this record: the delight of a multitude of fresh experiences thronging to the senses, the suffering from which she emerges with new understanding of herself and human existence.

Both in the intensity and force of the writing and the eloquent island drawings, A Rope of Vines- Journal from a Greek Island is a distinguished achievement.

 

About the author:

Brenda Chamberlain was born at Bangor in 1912. In 1931 she went to train as a painter at the Royal Academy Schools in London and five years later, after marrying the artist-craftsman John Petts, settled near the village of Llanllechid, near Bethesda in Caernarfonshire. During the Second World War she worked with her husband on the production of the Caseg Broadsheets. In 1947 she went to live on Bardsey (Ynys Enlli) where she remained until 1961. After six years on the Greek island of Ydra, she returned to Bangor; it was there, depressed and with financial problems, she died from an overdose of sleeping tablets in 1971. A Rope of Vines was published in 1965.

 

Short extract:

I have returned to the good mothers of Efpraxia while my friend Leonidas serves sentence for manslaughter of an English tourist in the port of Ydra.
I am putting my thoughts together, for here the mind can clear itself. The nuns ask only simple questions, I have freedom to come and go as I please, no games of pretence are being played as they are every day of the week on the waterfront, I can take a siesta in a juniper tree if I feel like it.

 

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