THE BOTTOM SHELF 2

By Simone Sekers

A wonderful summer for reading; weather too hot for gardening, too hot for doing anything but making use, at last, of the steamer chairs we had given each other last summer (when it rained and rained and they grew mossy with disuse under the walnut tree). The long hot July this year was perfect for catching up with a pile of books. John Banville (The Sea), Ian Rankin (Knots and Crosses), Sebastian Faulks (Human Traces) and Giles Waterfield (Markham Thorpe) entertained wonderfully, but sheer bliss came from a book from the Bottom Shelf, a novel called The Fallow Land by H E Bates, published by Jonathan Cape in 1949 and with its dustwrapper - abstract blocks of contemporary beige and eau de nil - intact. H (erbert) E(rnest) Bates is best known, perhaps, for his Darling Buds of May books about the rumbustious and bucolic Larkin family which later gained blockbuster status on television. The Fallow Land is very different - the Mortimers are a pretty miserable lot, so unlike the Larkins; the women do all the work of propping up father and sons, all of whom suffer from varying degress of hopelessness and bad temper. They are poor, in every sense, farmers. But the writing is beautiful; Bates has a talent for describing the countryside which makes you want to go for a long walk over muddy furrows.

'. . the October sunlight, a warm lemon-colour, made the thistle seeds shine silkier and whiter; the willow-trees swayed gently, dropping straw-coloured leaves; the hawthorns in the big north hedge burned a warm crimson and brown.' A good read on a breathlessly hot day.

Another Bottom Shelf yield this summer, in Bridport, was Edward Bunyard's The Anatomy of Dessert. I had a copy years ago and lost it, so finding it again was like meeting a long lost friend, although one who had upped her price considerably. One of Chatto & Windus's lovely little hardbacks, part of the Phoenix Library of Food & Drink, this edition came out in 1933, when dessert was so often a procession of fruit grown in an old walled garden. Bunyard's lip-smacking appreciation of apples, pears, figs and strawberries recall that lost world with almost unbearable poignancy. Describing the first apples of the season, he picks out Irish Peach, 'its fresh acidity with slight spicy aroma accords well with the warm August days'. Seen any in Tesco's lately? Or when were you last able to enjoy 'the buttery flesh of Doyenne du Comice, which melts upon the palate with the facility of an ice.' I am guarding the half-dozen Comice pears on my juvenile tree with ferocious care in order to test Bunyard's accuracy. If your second-hand bookshop has been taken over by a lifestyle emporium stuffed with Cath Kidston pegbags, look for both books on Abebooks website.

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