Weddings 3

It seems that everything I pick up to read at the moment has a wedding theme!!

'Marrying Absurd' from 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' (a Flamingo Sixties Classic)

by Joan Didion describes weddings Las Vegas syle in 1967. A work colleague of mine got married in Vegas and all I could think was what's the point? If you are going to go to all the trouble and I do mean 'trouble' of getting married at least do it as if you mean it. But then, reading this, I realised a lot of people getting married in Vegas do mean it as one bride underage and seven months pregnant sobbed,

'It was just as nice as I hoped and dreamed it would be'

'The Group' by Mary McCarthy (Virago Modern Classics but originally published in 1963) begins with the wedding of Vassar college graduate Kay in 1930's New York attended by the seven other female graduates whose lives the rest of the novel follows.The groups experiences of sex,marriage,motherhood,ambition and career versus family are all as relevant to women as much today as in the 1930s and 1960s.

Discovered on the Withdrawn/For Sale shelf of the wonderful Bishopsgate Institue -

'How We Lived Then-A History of Everyday Life During the Second World War'

by Norman Longmate The chapter entitled 'Cardboard Wedding Cakes' details the hardships and shortages of war time weddings in Britain-a best man suddenly posted elsewhere,'The Sugar (restricted use of) Order of 1940' resulting in cakes made with powdered eggs being iced in chocolate and pet white rabbits slaughtered and passed off as chicken in aspic.

.

This is an actual cardboard wedding cake from 1943

- a highlight of the collection from the Museum of Richmond

Weddings 2

Two short (and equally shocking in their own way) stories about the before and after the wedding.

'The Wedding of Zeina' ( from the novel 'Aisha') by Ahdaf Soueif

Set in Egypt, Aisha's nurse Zeina, recounts how she was brutally 'tested' at the age of 15 before her wedding night by both male and female members of her family.

'Child's Play' by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Six weeks after her wedding,feeling that her marriage is already in trouble,18 year old Shirley returns home for a visit to her parents.Abandoned by her husband, indulged by her father and envied by her mother Shirley, young,spoilt,disillusioned;thinking that marriage would be 'candlelit dinners,friends dropping by,using all the presents,setting the table as perfectly as she did her face' is also brutally treated, in this case psychologically by family members.

Both stories from 'The Secret Self;Short Stories by Women selected by Hermione Lee,pub J.M.Dent & Sons 1985

Weddings

Two titles vying for my attention on the subject of weddings:

'Cassandra at the Wedding' by Dorothy Baker set in 1960s California and 'Cheerful Weather for the Wedding' by Julia Strachey set in 1930s England. About a third of the way through both but decide to concentrate on 'Cassandra' as it has to go back to my local library who rather wonderfully tracked it down.It's rather strange & slightly depressing but I am enjoying its strangeness.It has a fine recommendation from Carson McCullers,author of a favourite I read in my 20s ; 'The Member of the Wedding', so I'm hoping it

will be great!!!

Quilts 1

Saw the exhibition 'Quilts' on Friday at the V & A, in advance of which I read

'A Widow's Quilt' by Sylvia Townsend Warner from 'The Oxford Book of English Short Stories'.

This is the dark tale of Charlotte who decides to make a black and white widow's quilt, 'narrow,you see,for a single bed', inspired by a visit to the quilt room in the American Museum in Dorset.

On the journey back to London, 'in a dreamlike frenzy ', Charlotte plans the construction of her own widow's quilt: the choice of fabrics of 'that lustreless soot-black,dead rook black'; remnants of the black out curtains used in the war, a shawl bought in Avignon,velvet, taffetta, sateen shaping the design of a 'trebbled ring of black velvet hexagons massively enclosing the primal hexagon of white wedding dress brocade. Extending to the four corners....., long black diagonals, the space between interspersed with star-spangled black hexagons not too close together.....; a border of a funeral wreath of black hexagons conjoined'.

She sets to work,soothed yet purposeful,referring to it as a magpie quilt,when her husband,who is still very much alive, returns home to find her busily stitching on Christmas Eve.

This is a poignant yet ironic story in which the elements come together like the quilt to tell the emotional account of a marriage and a life all down in black and white for all to see if you care to look.