34—MARYLEBONE JOURNAL BOOKS
Annabel by Kathleen Winter Jonathan Cape, £12.99
In the wilds of Canada in 1968, a child is born who seems to be both boy and girl, his hermaphrodite nature a secret shared only by his parents and the wise, compassionate teacher Thomasina, present at the birth. As the child’s penis reaches a certain arbitrary length, the vagina is sewn up and he is raised as a boy named Wayne. In the hyper-masculine hunting culture of remote Canada however, Wayne never quite fits in. His close friendship with ambitious girl Wally Michelin and an acute sensitivity to beauty disquiets and then enrages his father. As he grows up,
If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home by Lucy Worsley Faber and Faber, £20
Lucy Worsley’s If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home is as fantastically gossipy as its title suggests. The book of a BBC series that I regret to say has passed me by, it explores the last 800- odd years of English social history through developments in the various rooms of the house. Along the way Worsely covers sex, food, marriages, masturbation, medicine, underwear, animals, carpet cleaning, “the important social distinction between being infested with lice and with fleas” and Lord Byron’s habit of “passing round, after dinner, a human skull filled with burgundy”. The sheer amount of unexpected detail, even to a social history junkie like me is amazing, and hard to convey without simply quoting random facts. The English and the French have been playing out their differences through cookery since the 11th century. Fashionable 1930s housewives would host “refrigerator parties” to showcase the capabilities of their new equipment. The late 16th to early
18th centuries are the “dirty” centuries, as people believed washing the naked body to be either dangerous or sexually arousing. Tudors cured female sexual dysfunction with goose grease. Women didn’t wear knickers until the late 18th century. William III favoured green socks with red vests. The Timely Warning was a 19th- century penis-cooling device that used cold water to “cool the organ of generation, so that the erection subsides and no discharge occurs”. (A female equivalent was not mentioned.) I won’t continue, lest I run out of space
to eulogise about the easy familiarity of Worsley’s writing, and the assurance with which she handles her vastly disparate range of material. The joy of If Walls Could Talk isn’t just the facts, but the personal stories that emerge. William III (he of the multicoloured undergarments) slept in a servant’s pallet bed beside his dying wife so as not to miss a single one of his remaining hours in her company. Mehitable Parker’s neighbours complained to her in 1683 because they feared she loved her husband more than God. If this book demonstrates one thing, in all its nosy glory, it’s that some aspects of the human condition don’t change – and some, thankfully, do.
Wayne’s female side (literally as well as symbolically manifest in menstruation and the risk of pregnancy) is nurtured in secret by his mother and Thomasina, and christened Annabel. Wayne/Annabel’s struggle to find an authentic means of self-expression has momentous consequences – not just for the adolescent but for the three adults party to the secret. Winter is from Montreal, and
her evocation of vast, inhospitable landscapes and the men who inhabit them is masterly. But further, Annabel/Wayne’s pain, confusion, courage and gradually emergent sense of self are sensitively handled. It’s a novel about individuality and what it means, self-knowledge and its price, and about the immense resilience of the human spirit.
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