Mistress Masham's Repose

Toying with the next blog button in an idle moment, something mainly useful for turning up recipes, babies and other children, I came across a glowing review of a childrens' book by T. H. White called 'Mistress Masham's Repose'. As a child I had been fond of the 'Sword in the Stone' (the first part of what became the 'Once and Future King') and somewhat older I had read the 'Goshawk' which I remember, for some reason, as being rather a sad book, perhaps because of the author's mixed feelings about attempting to hold a wild and beautiful bird captive. In any event, there is quite a lot in this book about how one should not try to hold captives, to take hold of people, however virtuous the motive. That aside, it seemed fairly clear that White was a bit odd.

But I had never heard of this book, so poked Amazon and about a day later the thing popped through the letter box, now read, although sadly without the illustrations puffed in the review (the reviewer was an illustrator himself). An entertaining fantasy, not without some odd colours here and there, the product of much the same sort of expensive education as '1066 and all that'. Lots of echoes from preparatory and boarding schools. Lots of nostalgia for the death of the big country house, not unlike that in the almost exactly contemporary 'Brideshead Revisited'. A sprinkling of Latin.

I learn along the way that monopteron is a fancy word for a cupola on legs, an example of which is to be found in the Commonwealth Memorial not that long erected in Constitution Hill. White is not pulling our legs as the word is confirmed by OED, which also points out that, oddly, the 'opt' bit of the word is the same as that in coleoptera, the fancy word for beetles.

The book is dedicated to one Amaryllis Virginia Garnett, for whom google turns up quite a long article from the 'Daily Mail'. It seems that she was a daughter of a Bohemian & Bloomsbury family, a grand-daughter of the Garnett who translated so much Russian fiction, very gifted as a child, but failed as an adult and drowned herself at the age of 29, a ghastly echo of the death of her great-aunt, Virginia Woolf. Presumably White, when he was not being reclusive, moved in that set.

I marked the occasion with a Mediterranean bigos.

Stew some garlic, onions and tomatoes in a little olive oil. Coarsely chop some left over potatoes into the mix. Coarsely chop some saucission sec (ex Sainbury's) into the mix. Leave overnight to settle. Cook some white basmati rice and leave that overnight to settle. Mix the two halves of the dish together, add some mushrooms and some finely sliced cabbage. Simmer the whole lot for about 10 minutes and serve. Very good it was too, if only a fairly distant relative of the Polish original.

PS: see http://vinpauld.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/mistress-mashams-repose.html#disqus_thread thread for the review which kicked all this off. The disqus bit being another story.