Picking up where Melvyn’s memoir Back in the Day left off, Another World finds an 18-year-old leaving his hometown of Wigton and the familiarity of Cumbrian life to travel south on a scholarship to Oxford University.
Sudden grandeur is neatly offset by experiences prior to Oxford, the long tables of the dining hall at Wadham College prompting memories of the long tables eating alongside strangers at Butlin’s, Ayr, in the early 1950s. Even the new confines of college life and the streetscapes of Oxford evoke similarities with Melvyn’s Wigton childhood, with both characterised by the habits and patterns of everyday lives. In Oxford, a tutor’s clothing made by Redmayne tailors of Wigton stitches together the seemingly incongruous worlds of the dreaming spires with Melvyn’s mother’s seven years making buttonholes in ‘in that factory, that sweat shop’.
One of the joys of Back in the Day continued in Another World is the peopling of place, just as you might expect of a seasoned storyteller, observing and deepening the backgrounds of names and faces surrounding Melvyn. Lively potted career biographies of people Melvyn met bubble up. In the midst of these people, we are still given a sense of Melvyn’s own developing personal life, most evident in the strained effect of leaving behind his Wigton girlfriend Sarah, and the sense of a path not taken closer to home.
Countless new friendships and acquaintances emerge, and each encounter navigates post-war Britain’s concerns, and the class divide, in interesting ways. For the most part, Melvyn holds that Oxford suspended the class system, with the university insulating hoe people differentiated, but the collision of town and gown and Melvyn’s northern outlook in intellectual arguments make for rich subject matter.
Relentlessly curious, Melvyn’s critical growth is fuelled by study and leisure in Oxford, as trips to the cinema, particularly to see the films of Ingmar Bergman, contribute to an artistic awakening that leads to his first tentative steps in creative writing. Another notable episode blends the world of the arts, the world of students and the political world recovering from all too recent conflict, when Melvyn takes part in a summer trip to Germany to perform as the jester Trinculo in Shakespeare’s The Tempest at universities up and down the Rhine.
Moving back and forth between a world in flux, and a self in flux, the book is impressive as it recalls both painful and pleasurable memories. Self-reflection is handled skilfully and sensitively through a mix of personal commentary and recreated dialogue. The feeling of time passing over these Oxford years, of friendships solidified, and the evolution of Melvyn’s own relationship with his parents and with his Cumbrian background, all makes for immensely enjoyable reading. I sincerely hope for further writing from Melvyn recalling his early years in television, hinted at near the end of this book through a comic and fascinating interview for a General Traineeship at the BBC.
Another World by Melvyn Bragg
(Sceptre, £22)
The Art of Julian Cooper
Julian Cooper, Foreword by Melvyn Bragg, Introduced by Andrew Lambirth
(Unicorn Publishing, £40)
Melvyn’s foreword to painter Julian’s career retrospective sets him in the ‘lustrous tradition’ of the Lake District in international art and culture over the past two hundred years but also praises the rawness and innovation of Julian’s landscapes for having ‘taken the skin, the pelt, off the landscape’. Julian’s own words accompany this lavishly illustrated collection, allowing us to see the length and breadth of his subject matter and developing artistic approach as he works with the pressures of ‘being part of a dynasty of established Lakeland artists’. From Lancaster Art School and then Goldsmiths’ College School of Art in the early 1960s via residencies in Europe and America, Julian’s commentaries on his work are moving and highlight his evolving ideas of texture, narrative, experience and energy. Several threads interweave through the ideas that drive his art, from the shift in how the Lakeland landscape appears in Julian’s work to his developing physical approach to the scale of mountainous landscapes and the ways in which politics are always present in how we live on and use land. This is a beautiful record of a varied and eclectic artistic career with deep roots in Cumbria’s artistic and cultural terrain.
Will Smith is co-owner of Grasmere bookshop, Sam Read’s, which has been trading in the centre of the village since 1887. Like its Victorian founder Sam, Will also hails from Suffolk. He has a PhD in Canadian Literature. Will has been a Nero Book Awards judge and regularly reviews books for BBC Radio Cumbria and The Bookseller. All books reviewed are available from Sam Read Bookseller.
Sam Read Bookseller, Broadgate House, Broadgate, Grasmere, LA22 9SY 015394 35374 samreadbooks.co.uk @samreadbookseller
