In the last couple of weeks, the heat has finally returned to our little patch of Hampshire earth. Some of the plants (clematis, salvia, nasturtiums) have reached the stage where you feel you can see their growth daily. And with the sun’s return, I too seem to be waking up.
Since November, I have had a list above my desk labelled ‘for winter’. It includes things like ‘mustard yellow woolly socks’, ‘vitamin D tablets’, ‘fire pit’. It quotes a favoured line from a Jenny King poem, ‘The midday peace is warm and edible’*. And it reminds me to keep reading.
There have been a lot of books through winter (a season I understand intellectually but rage against to my bones). These are three of them. Three books, three women, three contexts; the stories they weave join dots in my mind and are manifold. They are all part memoir, but they are also much more. Tracking the history of land, of roots, of connection. Of learning and of changing. They have been good for me. You may like them too.
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Julia Kendal 