Green is the colour

A mostly wet day today, so I’ve been getting on with other stuff, particularly photographic club things. After having been competition secretary for a number of years I now find myself being webmaster too, due to the sudden stepping down of the former incumbent. We’re getting short of members and committee members, like many other clubs, and are desperately trying to keep things moving.

I haven’t taken many pictures today, so opted for a ‘what I’ve been reading recently ’ Blip. Two fairly recent re-reads are ‘How Green was my Valley’, by Richard Llewellyn, published in 1939, and ‘Listen. The Wind’, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, published in 1938.

The former is a very special novel, I think, which tells the story of a young man growing up in a South Wales mining village in the late 19th century. Llewellyn claimed that it was based on his own life, but after his death in 1983 it turned out that he was actually born in London, tho’ of Welsh parents. Some critics have suggested that it should have been titled ‘How Phoney was my Valley’, but taking it as you find it, it comes across as a lovely, very well written book, with the music of the valleys coming over in the language. He subsequently wrote three follow-ups.

‘Listen! The Wind’, is the account by Anne Morrow Lindbergh of the last ten days of a survey flight around the Atlantic in 1933 with her husband Charles Lindbergh, first solo flier of the Atlantic in 1927. It’s a wonderfully written account by an intelligent and educated woman of their flight from Bathurst on the west coast of Africa to Natal on the east coast of South America. This survey flight took place the year after their eldest son was kidnapped and killed. Since meeting and marrying Charles she had won her pilot’s and glider pilot’s wings and took turns with this flight in their small float plane. Later on she and her husband were accused of being Fascist and Nazi sympathisers through their non-interventionist stance and other ideas in the years leading up to the Second World War, but this apart they were an amazing couple and Anne had a wonderful gift for writing. 

Quote of the Day: 

Anne Morrow Lindbergh - "I have been overcome by the beauty and richness of our life together, those early mornings setting out, those evenings gleaming with rivers and lakes below us, still holding the last light."