MISCELLANY

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28080, 22 September 1956, Page 3

MISCELLANY

I Am Fifteen And I Do Not Want To Die. By Christine Arnothy. Translated from the French by Antonia White. Collins. 128 pp.

When the author of this book was 15 she spent several terrible weeks with about a dozen others in a cellar on the edge of the Danube while the siege of Budapest raged overhead, finally emerging after the German defeat to experiences almost as terrifying under the Russian occupation of Hungary, and eventually maKing a dramatic escape with her parents over the border into Austria. She describes these events with the skill and detachment of a born writer, the vividness of detail no doubt owing much to the diary she kept during the nightmare weeks in the cel Jar, writing with a stub of pencil by the light of a candle made of string soaked in lard. Her book, which has won the “Prix Vente” m France, is to be followed by a novel whicn Antonia White is also translating.

Playground in the Sky. By Bill Gotch. Hutchinson. 124 pp.

Those who have never flown themselves can have little real appreciation of the exhilaration that can be obtained from piloting aircraft. The powered machine offers unlimited scope but more exciting and challenging is the flight without power in a gluier. Success in remaining airborne then depends on the search for the unseen lift in the form of standing waves, thermals or a rising wind on a hillside. Standing waves can be likened to the surface waves formed bv a rough bottom in a fast flowing stream. Such waves are only ripples, are not easy to recognise and have their limitations relative to the lift they provide. Thermals are rising bubbles of hot air and provide the most satisfactory forrn of lift The rising current of air off a hillside permits hill soaring which would be regaioed as small beer by the experienced glider pilot. These and many other facts about gliding are provided in this primer on an exhilarating and exciting sport. True to the function oi a primer the author provides ar elementary explanation of the theory of flight and aerobatics. He also ncludes some of his own experiences with powered aircraft. He ends with a chapter on gliding clubs and some appendices listing member clubs of the British Gliding association and the appropriate certificates and regulations To be complete, space should have been given to a simple explanation of modern theories of air mass analysis as a basis for the understanding of the air movements which make gliding possible. Written in an informal and friendly style the book provides a useful background to gliding for the layman.

Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. Bv D. Marshall Lang Allen and Unwin. The Republic of Georgia in the US.S.R. was originally called Iberia The Georgians or Iberians were known to the Crusaders as a Christian nation living in the Caucasus between the Black Sea and the Caspian The Georgian Church goes back to the time of Constantine the Great, and has been a bastion of Christianity in the Orient. It was in the lives of its saints that the aspirations of the Georgian nation found its earbest literary expression. Specimens ot those biographies are given in this book: the story of St. Nino; of the nine martyred children of Kola; of Petei the Iberian; of David the Garesja; bl St. Eustace the Cobbler: of Abo the Performer: of Gregory of Khadnyla. of the Georgian monks of Mount Athos and of the Passion of Queen Ketevan These tales are very naive and full of incredible marvels, in the tradition of early hagiography. Students of church history will find this s very useful book for the light it throws on the mode of thought and ways of life in an obscure corner of ancient Christendom.

My Aunt Lucienne. By Rose C. Feld. Gollancz. 172 pp.

Chic is the word for Rose Feld’s sketch of her Aunt Lucienne—chic spiced with wit and flavoured with tender pathos. It took two American cocktails to break down Aunt Lucienne’s thin veneer of genteel re straint and then Rose had won a staunch friend for life in her uncle’s amazing Parisienne wife. Middle-class in outlook, wily when she wanted something, Aunt Lucienne was quite illogical but adamant in argument, a stickler for convention, thrifty to the point of being mean and completely captivating. Rose soon found that Aunt Lucienne’s sense of propriety might vary according to the needs of the moment, but her thrift? Never. She would shop at the market at 5 a.m. to save a few sous and only travel by taxi in a crisis (she hired one after the American cocktails) yet it was Lucienne who slipped a thousand-franc note into her niece’s pocket “to make the voyage on the ship back co America more pleasant.” No tourist, a week-end in Britain was too long for Lucienne and too far from her beloved France. It was the throb of Paris that echoed in her heart-beat and what she thought of the English, their food and habits is much better not mentioned. A woman in slacks was one of her pet aversions and in 1939 she loudly expressed the view that victory in war was assured a nation to the extent that its men became more masculine and its women more feminine. Her horror was hard to conceal when Suzanne, her aloof daughter-in-law, rushed into uniform before the fall of France. But w’th her inborn genius for steering distressing situations the way she wanted them to go. Aunt Lucienne saw tc it that Suzanne greeted her husband on his first leave wearing a glamorous golden evening gown. “I shouldn’t be at all surprised if a grandchild came of this,” she wrote her niece. Aunt Lucienne’s cleverest and most humorous ruse was concocted when in her seventies and by it she just escaped her son’s plan to put her in a home for elderly women. So victoriously she stays in her meagre apartment and there the author leaves her with a neatly stacked pile of firewood and full of highspirits ready to face another winter. The book is generously illustrated with attractive black-and-white drawings by Suzanne Suba.