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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Loving Attitudes by Rachel Billington Loving Attitudes by Rachel Billington. ‘One Summer is a real emotional roller-coaster of a read, and Billington expertly sustains the suspense.’ Daily Mail. Available to order. One Summer is unashamedly a tragic love story. Great passion is a theme I return to every decade or so. (For example, my earlier book, based on Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Occasion of Sin.) Of course it is a theme recurring in all fiction over the centuries. In this case the man, K, is twenty four years older than his love object who is still a school girl – and a naïve school girl at that. I have, however, not just written about the love affair but about its consequences fourteen years on so that the story is told in two different time-scales. It is also told in two voices – the male and the female. Part of the book is set in Valparaiso, Chile, where I stayed with my daughter, Rose Gaete, and my Chilean son-in-law just as I started writing the novel. Chance experience always plays a big part in what goes into my novels, although my characters are virtually never drawn directly from life. ‘Writing with grace and unflinching intensity, Billington acknowledges the complexity of cause and effect in a novel that is as much about the sufferings of expiation as the joys of passion.’ Sunday Times. ‘One Summer is a real emotional roller-coaster of a read, and Billington expertly sustains the suspense.’ Daily Mail. ‘Reading One Summer is an intense, even a claustrophobic experience: there is no escape, no let up, no Shakespearian comic gravedigger to lighten the tension. Rather the progress of Claudia’s and K’s love – and the long term psychological damage it wreaks – is anatomised minutely and with an absolute-seeming veracity by Rachel Billington.’ Spectator. Heartily sorry for these and others. The title of Teresa Waugh's third, and resolutely down-beat, novel comes from the Book of Common Prayer, and refers to `our misdoings'. The comic success of the book derives from the author's deftness in turning the humdrum anxieties of a specta- cularly ordinary suburban family into a subtle satire on the emotional platitudes of our decade. Nancy Potter is a housewife married for some 30 years to a literal-minded banker, George, who catnaps under his newspaper at weekends and is waiting for retirement. But Nancy, who makes excellent short- bread, thinks he is 'perfectly extraordin- ary'; when not fantasising about David Owen, or recalling her earliest lover, she is consumed by guilt about everything in her life — the death of her hideous granny (in whose Bromley abode she was brought up on seedcake and repression, a past evoked with a splendid drabness worthy of Paul Scott), or the insidious nature of her son Roddy, for which she blames herself after an incident concerning a tulip-bed. The nervous, benevolent, rather silly turbulence of Nancy's view of the world has its effect on her daughter Claire, a social worker with a 2 CV and a caring mission, whose profession as an emotional troubleshooter belies a personal life that is racked with indecision. Like her mother, she bends over backwards to be under- standing about the appalling weakness of others, especially the feckless torpor of her asthmatic lover, Francis, a layabout whose unrealised projects range from a history of suspension bridges to a replica of Bucking- ham Palace done in matchsticks. Although there are darker intimations in places, these characters are mainly con- cerned with trivial problems of responsibil- ity and fair play; lassitude, fantasy, mild lust, and an uncharitable view of the sensitivity of others are the extent of their misdoings, but although these cause them terrible anguish they are small deer in the menagerie of sins, and big game Cardinal Vices seldom wander into the open. The female Potters are fuelled by a generalised sense of pity, that becomes a choric refrain — 'Poor Francis', 'her poor mother', 'the poor fellow', 'Poor, poor Francis', 'Poor, beautiful Francis'. As her characters swerve this way and that, Teresa Waugh spins a yarn of social realism shot through with subrisive humour. Her creatures are vulnerable, suffering from emotional rickets, and the vagueness of their apprehension of things is only heightened by their belief in the inadequate formulae of popular psychology. These well-meaning delusions end in tragedy, for which the book, like some Problem Com- edy, has largely prepared us by its focus upon constant misunderstandings of mo- tive. The result is both entertaining and pathetic, and it is a finely modulated achievement. Where Lady Teresa throws emotional clichés into relief, Lady Rachel allows them to stand on their own, and Loving Attitudes suffers from a singular lack of implicit irony. While the premise of the title looks workable enough (there are several different types of love that one may be capable of sustaining simultaneously) the psychological method of the novel is incoherent and novelettish, and when genuine distress comes to the plot it is too laboured, and too late. It reads from the start like a down- market teleplay, and none of the internal references to scenes resembling those out of fiction or drama serves to suggest this is parody. The opening shot is of Mary Tempest, 40, successful broadcaster, mar- ried to David (leading barrister), on holi- day in Somerset, 'sucking cream off her right index finger'. The telephone rings. Out of the blue, she is contacted by her illegitimate first child Elizabeth, adopted at birth by an American couple 22 years earlier, and now intent on confronting her natural mother. This cue-ball initiates a snooker session of passionate rebounds and realignments for the Tempests, involving their own daughter Lucy, a spoilt student, their country neighbours Ian and Helen, and Mary's rekindled love-lust for Elizabeth's father, a cold fish named Richard Beck. Hypocrisy and self-interest, loneliness and deceit are jostled around off the cushions of Oxford, London and New York, but the action is stagey and contrived, and as a novel it is utterly unconvincing. The reason for this is simple enough. Rachel Billington has not enjoyed the services of an editor who could launder from her saga the worst excesses of her prose. 'Lucy agreed fervently, smiling and smiling till her legs buzzed' is absurd. Swathed in her habitual red cloak, the heroine attends a barbeque in the snow `Poor Mary, standing there with glazed eyes and flushed cheeks' — and one pities her for being a victim of such twaddle. Poor Mary. Poor, poor Francis. Oh, dearie me. The forgotten female writers of Play for Today: 'If you failed, it was pretty public' E stablished by the start of the 1980s as a writer for Coronation Street and the creator of the nursing series Angels, Paula Milne was pleased but fearful to be invited to write her first single play. A Sudden Wrench, in which a woman fights to be taken seriously in the male world of plumbing, went out in March 1982 as a Play for Today, a BBC One strand that could reach audiences of up to 12 million in its heyday, and averaged 5 million. “There’s a line in the script,” Milne remembers, “where the husband says to his wife, when she goes to work on a construction site: ‘Just remember, there’s no allowance for failure out there.’ And that pretty well sums up how I felt about writing for Play for Today. If you failed in that slot, it was pretty damn public.” Looking back through the archives, ahead of the 50th anniversary on Thursday of the launch of Play for Today, it becomes clear that the plot had another external resonance – women single TV playwrights were almost as rare at the time as female plumbers. Although there had been about 250 Plays for Today before Milne’s (the series occupied two dozen slots each year), she was only the 20th woman to have been commissioned in 12 series. Paula Milne: ‘I didn’t want to write a patronising feminist piece.’ Photograph: Mark Large/Daily Mail/Rex. “While there were two or three gifted female producers in the BBC plays department at the time,” Milne remembers, “it definitely had a prevailing Oxbridge-macho ethos that was pretty damn intimidating. The fact that so few women writers contributed to the huge output of Play for Today bears that out. It’s not just that women didn’t get the breaks, but that our voice wasn’t heard during such an intense political period.” Play for Today had started on the third Thursday of October 1970, (Tuesday later became its regular night), replacing The Wednesday Play, which had run for six years on the network. That midweek series had included at least two masterpieces of social-realist TV – Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction and Jeremy Sandford’s Cathy Come Home – but was caricatured as leftist miserabilism by rightwing critics and politicians. Reviewing the first Play for Today in the next morning’s Guardian, Nancy Banks-Smith wrote: “The reason BBC changed the name Wednesday Play, and therefore the day of transmission, was a conviction, based on audience research, that people were avoiding the plays out of prejudice.” In time, conservatives would have the same objection to the new strand, but, on the first night of transmission, it seemed to be aiming for warm inclusivity. The Long Distance Piano Player by Alan Sharp was a fable about a child prodigy who sets out to play the piano for four full days and nights.

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