Cambridge Edition November 2019

WHAT WE’RE READING ELISHA YOUNG, JUNIOR SUB EDITOR, REVIEWS THE TESTAMENTS BY MARGARET ATWOOD This sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale was one of the most hotly anticipated literary releases of 2019, and was joint winner of this year’s Booker Prize (alongside Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other ). While the first book is an introspective novel, told from the first-person point of view of Offred, I feel this follow-up has breadth rather than depth. Fans of Aunt Lydia will enjoy finding out more about her back story, while the book’s other two protagonists offer intriguing insights into details of the Gilead regime.

Spencer relocated to the quiet Hampshire village in 1926 to continue his work on what would become the Sandham Memorial Chapel – now a National Trust property, which can still be visited – originally built to commemorate Lieutenant Henry Willoughby Sandham, who died at the end of the first world war. Henry was the brother of Mary Behrend, one half of the couple who commissioned the creation of the chapel. The book begins as Elsie joins the household – Stanley, his artist wife Hilda and Shirin, their very young daughter – and documents the shifting relationships and hidden motivations of the trio of adults. “Stanley wrote that when [he and Elsie] were living together at Burghclere, their life was ‘as light as the air’ – and that they ‘blew about like two rooks’ in the cottage… he spoke of her with such fondness and affection that it seemed to show a completely different side to Stanley Spencer – who obviously is not known for his sensitive relationships with women,” Nicola adds. “The friendship between [him and Elsie] and the uniqueness of that relationship – I think there’s something

Stanley Spencer himself, there was very little to go on when searching out the detail of Elsie’s life. “There are a huge number of sketches and drawings of her, as well as the paintings that he and Hilda did - and there’s a paragraph in a book published in the 1970s, which contained reminiscences by Spencer’s friends and associates – and Elsie contributed a paragraph on how much she enjoyed looking after the family – typical, discreet, servant stuff. “But I was also able to track down Elsie’s son, Gordon, and we had a very old-fashioned and lovely correspondence – I sent him lots of questions, and he would handwrite the answers and send them back. He told me lots of detail about his mother as a mother and as a person, all of which has gone into the book – but she didn’t tell them until after they were grown up that she’d even worked for the Spencers – so there certainly wasn’t much in the way of testimony to go on. But in a way, that’s what makes the book: she can be a rich, partly fictional character, as well as including the truthful elements that we do know from history.”

fascinating in writing about a friendship because a lot of people, when they hear the book’s title, think there’s going to be some sort of romantic involvement or affair, and there wasn’t – it was a genuine friendship based on a mutual understanding.” Though the book is clearly meticulously researched, drawing on the vast reams of documents created by

I would start at the Cambridge Arts Theatre: I worked there for ten years and it’s close to my heart. There’s something special in its beginnings in the 1930s – the period that most of my books are set in – and the fact that Keynes built it as a stage for Lydia Lopokova, his wife, to dance and act on is a wonderfully romantic story, and you can still feel that in the fabric of the building. My partner Mandy and I love the Orchard Tearooms in Grantchester and I’ve also drunk an awful lot of coffee in the University Library’s tea room. NICOLA’S CAMBRIDGE

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