Page 28 - Phonebox Magazine September 2014

Book Review
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Her meeting with her birth mother is equally unsatisfactory. It is clear Elizabeth, her mother, has psychological problems and she is in the early stages of dementia. Married with adult children, she is now living alone. Jackie portrays her rather more sympathetically than she does her father, but it is clear that there is no bond between them. On the other hand, her portrayal of her adoptive parents is filled with affection. They are all she has known since birth, they have brought her up; they and her brother Maxwell are her true family.
One of the consequences of discovering she was adopted, and imagining what her birth parents were like, is that Jackie Kay turned to writing. It was an extension of making up stories about those two unknown people who brought her into the world. It was a childhood hobby which became a career. This is a fairly light-hearted and enlightening account of a young woman wanting to know more about her origins. There are undercurrents of hurt and rejection, but it is an optimistic and pleasant read.
Thelma Shacklady
Red Dust Road, Jackie Kay
Sandra Metcalf
There are some novels that read like memoirs and some memoirs that read like novels: Red Dust Road falls into the latter category.
Born of a Nigerian father and a mother from the Scottish Highlands, Jackie Kay was adopted at birth by a Scottish couple who had already adopted a boy of mixed race. She was seven years old when she learned that she was adopted and, when she reached adulthood, she decided to find her birth parents.
She begins her memoir with an unsatisfactory meeting with her father in Nigeria. Now a member of a fundamentalist Evangelical Church, he is more concerned with saving her soul than getting to know her as a daughter. Her description of him whirling, dancing and singing, interspersed with reading large chunks of the Bible, does not place him in an attractive light. The rejection she feels continues throughout the book, although her relationship with her half- brother (coming as it does towards the end) is much more heart-warming.
The Road to Le Tholonet: a French Garden Journey, Monty Don
Starting in the south of France at Jas de Bouffan, Cezanne’s family home for forty years, and ending in the Pas de
Calais, Monty Don journeys through France taking in gardens large and small – from the eight hectare Potager du Roi at Versailles to the allotments at Aubervilliers, a “sink estate” north east of Paris; from Arles and the Camargue, via Josephine’s Malmaison and Monet’s Giverny, to the battlefields and cemeteries of the north.
But this isn’t a book about gardening – or even a book about visiting gardens in the conventional sense. Although it covers many of the gardens included in Don’s successful television series made in 2012, this isn’t the ‘book of the series’. There are no colour photographs, no garden plans, no planting schemes. This is, rather, Monty Don’s personal response to a series of gardens and his ruminations on what they say about France and the 28 Phonebox Magazine
French – the French love of concepts and intellectual debate, French landscape and climate, its transport and food – because “gardens are the most constant and immediate point of contact with the natural world for almost all societies... How people shape, tend and think about them can say as much about the society as it does about the gardens.”
Part travelogue, part memoir, part history lesson and part social commentary, this is a very personal ‘ramble’ through France with someone who writes extremely well and is not afraid to express their opinion. He has visited France often over the years, and it has obviously always had an impact on him. And who wouldn’t want to go on a ramble with someone well- informed, articulate, who likes surprises and diversions (everything from religious persecution under Louis XIV to Van Gogh’s stay in Arles) and who believes that ‘the best way to see things is to get lost.’