Despite writing about Simona and her love of Vaughan Williams for nearly two years now, I still had not heard any live performances of his music, so it was an easy decision when I was offered tickets to hear a concert including The First Nowell.
Read MoreThe final section of Pigtails and Pernod takes place during the summer holidays of Simona's second year at drama school, at a time when the English community in Dieppe was diminishing in the years leading up to war. Families were returning to England, 'colonels were cutting down on their drinks...Marie was getting fewer orders for new dresses': it all paints a picture of a town in decline.
Read MoreThe second part of Pigtails and Pernod covers Simona's Easter holidays during her fifteenth year, and continues very much in the same vein as we have come to expect - eccentric characters, Johnny causing chaos, the women of the family very much in charge.
Read MorePigtails and Pernod begins with Simona's regular journey across the channel, heading from Newhaven in December seas to spend her Christmas holidays with her grandparents in Dieppe. Aged just 12 she was already a regular on the ferry, travelling alone six times each year to and from school in Eastbourne.
Read MorePigtails and Pernod is an engaging, warm and funny read, outlining Simona's maturing from excitable pre-teen to a young woman on the verge of adulthood. At the same time it chronicles the changing political and social landscape both among the English ex-pat community in Dieppe and at home, and the burgeoning menace of Naziism and rise of Hitler.
Read MoreSo I've finished Simona's book about Vaughan Williams and his music. I enjoyed reading it and discovered aspects of my grandmother that weren't apparent during her later years, as well as a lot about the music of Vaughan Williams. I will enjoy my continued musical education and will return to the book and Simona's subsequent friendship with Ralph and Ursula Vaughan Williams later in the year. But for now I'm moving on to Pigtails and Pernod, the account of Simona's teenage school holidays in Dieppe.
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