Page 33 - Phonebox Magazine May 2013

BOOK REVIEW
By Oxfam Bookshop, Olney
Tel: 01234 714592
“Sandra Metcalf
This is an entertaining combination of travel book, historical research and a personal quest to discover where some of the colours used in producing works of art came from, before the invention of synthetic dyes in the nineteenth century. It’s not a book about the science of colour, although there is a short and very readable explanation of physical and chemical colour in the book’s preface. Books dealing with art history are usually about the people who made the art – sculptors, architects, painters - but these people, particularly painters, could not have produced their works without the people who discovered and made the pigments they used. The story of how people mined, dug, grew, harvested and dived for the raw materials which yielded pigments and dyes for the paint box is told much less frequently. Victoria Findlay had thought about where colours might have come from for years before deciding to find out. She uses the colours of the rainbow (as defined by Newton) as a framework for her research which involved travelling the world to find the sources of colour pigments and trying to discover the traditional ways they have been made. Along the way she looks at the historical impact of colour production on different cultures and how they have been affected when modern synthetic colours took over from traditional pigments. She explores amongst other things prehistoric painting, Australian aboriginal art, the Lake District pencil industry, the violin makers of Cremona, the lapis lazuli mines of Afghanistan and the medieval cultivation of saffron in Essex. Weaving into her narrative information about some firms who produced colour commercially and the kind of anecdotes which lift a narrative - such as the possibility that Napoleon died not from cancer but from the poisonous green dye released from his wallpaper by a wet climate, - she uses an engaging style which carries the reader along and leaves them wanting more.
‘
was one of three children born
into the family of Sir William Hayter, legal and financial advisor to the Egyptian Government. They lived in a pleasant large house, employed several servants, and the children were cared for by a much- loved Nanny and a nursery maid. Each summer, with their mother, they travelled to England and enjoyed the company of various cousins in Sidmouth, a journey which became increasingly hazardous during the early years of the First World War, filling the young Priscilla with almost catatonic terror, until journeys by sea by women and children was finally forbidden by the Government. The memoir begins with Priscilla aged two, as the writer strives to remember what thoughts she had at that age. ‘Do very small children have thoughts?’ she asks. She describes the scene out of the day nursery window – the pyramids and the desert hills and the conversations a small child might have with the person in charge of them – in this case, Nanny. Her description of their daily lives is vivid – the clothes they wore, the places
’
Thelma Shacklady
P
they visited – as are the fears small children have in common; the night time terrors, the consequences of small acts of disobedience. It is the writer’s ability to convey the reader into her world which makes this book so fascinating. She describes, not only the daily life of a child in a foreign country but also the country itself – the people, the scenery, the noise and bustle of a large city. She remains with her family until the age of twelve, when she is sent to boarding school in England and, her preface informs us, she never returns to Egypt. As she gets older, the signs of change which came after the end of the First World War are already in evidence; Egypt desires independence, and the end of the Protectorate is in sight. Priscilla allows herself to reflect upon what is happening in a more mature way, childhood at an end. ‘The war, in some way or other, had affected us all,’ she writes. ‘We shall wear its wounds for life.’
This is a little gem of a book. It is full of insight, humour and a real ability to bring that era to life. For the most part seen through the eyes of a child it has both richness and depth. It delights, entertains and informs, all with the lightest of touches. It is well worth reading!
Phonebox Magazine 33
riscilla Napier might be said to have had a privileged childhood. Brought up in Egypt at the end of the Edwardian Era, she