The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise, by Julia Stuart. Anchor Books, 2014. 304 pp.
Our book club picked the book for our January “read” because it seemed it would be a good one for a dreary midwinter day, and we were so right. There is an ongoing sad element, but the book is so whimsical and entertaining with such interesting characters that it works. It is about the Tower of London and the Tower Guards who are required to live there.
The main character (and a real character he is) is Balthazar Jones, a Tower Guard who lives with his wife Hebe in a circular Tower home where the furniture never fits. His wife works in the lost and found where many strange things are turned in. There is also the resident clergyman who writes erotic novels and many more eccentric Tower Guards. There is a lot of information about the tower and some of it is fact, but the fiction is where the fun begins.
The powers that be decide that the animals in the London Zoo that have been given to the Queen should be relocated to the Tower, and Balthazar is charged with getting that done. Well, getting them there and settled in is a story in itself, but the public loves it and thinks it was a wonderful idea.
Even with the sad element, which does have some resolution, it is a wonderful, humorous book and was a great choice for my book club and also one that could be read again; there are so many fun details that could have been missed. – C.M.
A Horseman Riding By. Book One. Long Summer Day by R. F. Delderfield. Hodder and Stoughton Ltd. l966.
This book is an old favorite of mine that I revisit every ten or fifteen years. Reading it is a challenge as some of the pages are falling out, and I have to hold it tight. The story is about England and begins in l902 when Paul Craddock, who had been badly injured in the Boer War, is finally able to leave the hospital and start a new life.
Having received a substantial inheritance, Paul purchases a large area of farmland known as the Shallowford Estate in Devon or what is referred to as the West Country. There are five farms on the estate. The families that run these farms provide most of the book’s characters. Of course there are others. Paul’s wife, Grace, whose primary interest in life is the suffragette movement which threatens the marriage. Then there is Ikey, a remarkable cockney boy that Paul has adopted. It has been said of Delderfield that he “writes of his characters as though they are close personal friends.” And indeed for me reading it again was like visiting old friends.
In the early twentieth century apparently certain areas of the English countryside remained in an aura of the eighteenth century. So it was on the Shallowford Estate which had been neglected by previous owners.It was Paul Craddock’s difficult task to restore the estate to prosperity.
Book Two is Post of Honor, which continues with the same cast of characters into World War I and beyond. – P.M.