'mrs catherine'

One very rainy summer in the late 1960s, a neighbor gave my mother a brown paper grocery bag full of volumes of the Reader's Digest Condensed Books. I was about eleven years old and my sister just turning thirteen, so many of the books included in the volumes held no interest for us. And it really must have been a long stretch of rainy weather that led us to pore over the whole bag looking for likely reading material to supplement the bags of books from the public library.

Among such gems as abridged versions of To Kill A Mockingbird and Up From Slavery were two novels that immediately interested my sister and me. Those novels were Mistress of Mellyn and Kirkland Revels by Victoria Holt. If you're not familiar with Victoria Holt, who also wrote as Jean Plaidy and other noms de plume and who produced an incredible amount of writing - most of it historical fiction - then allow me to share a bit.

Beginning with Mistress of Mellyn, my sister and I were captivated by the mildly spooky and broodingly romantic stories of intelligent young women who invariably and quite predictably against their better judgment fell in love with men who were often described by the author as 'sardonic'. At eleven, I wasn't sure exactly what sardonic meant, but it certainly sounded more interesting than anyone I had ever met.

I absolutely loved the clever repartee between the protagonists, and the settings which were often in Cornwall seemed wonderfully exotic while also having the trappings of nineteenth century England.

In short, I had found some mighty good escape reading.

Victoria Holt (aka Jean Plaidy, et al), was very good at description and one scene I can clearly remember from Kirkland Revels details a Christmas celebration during which the female protagonist, Catherine, who is by now pregnant by her short-lived husband who has died under suspicious circumstances, wears a tea gown of 'mole-colored velvet...with ruffles of lime-green lace at the neck'. For those unfamiliar with moles, they're little rodents who come in a variety of shades of grey. So, we are talking grey and lime green here. What a fashion statement over the mulled wine! I was entranced!

Also present at this Christmas dinner is the (sardonic) male protagonist who calls Catherine 'Mrs Catherine' in an attempt to demonstrate familiarity and respect at the same time. He is, of course, in love with Catherine and she is in love with him but, also of course, she does not realize this or admit it to herself until the stakes are as high as the parapet from which her husband is said to have jumped to his untimely death.

By this time, you've either clicked away from this page thinking that I really have given over to complete drivel or are wondering what on earth all this has to do with knitting. Let me tell you.

I listen to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts while I'm knitting or spinning and I wear my old-style iPod nano in a little knitted pouch that hangs from an i-cord around my neck. I've been using the same pouch since my daughter gave me the iPod for Christmas several years ago and it's lately begun fraying from use. When I was digging around in the odd bits of leftover fingering weight yarn, looking for something to knit a new pouch from, I came across a tiny ball of Louet Gems in the color they call Pewter. I suppose some might say that it's 'mole-colored'. Now guess what color my iPod is. I suppose some might say it's 'lime-green'.

I was knitting the pouch and slipped my nano in to check for length. When I saw that bright green next to the grey yarn my first thought was 'it's Mrs Catherine's tea gown!'

Nowadays, I read a pretty wide variety of fiction and nonfiction and I can't say that romance novels figure at all in my book choices. But I'd be lying if I said that I haven't read any Victoria Holt novels since those early days in the 1960s. I ended up buying paperback editions of a number of her books and those books have been traveling with me since the 1970s. Every few years I reread several of the books when I'm craving pure escapism and a soothing trip down memory lane. No sardonicism, either intentional or unintentional, implied.