Posted by Chance Encounters and Lasting Impressions
IN THIS TENDER, witty, affectionate memoir, John Randle introduces us to the remarkable women who rented him rooms and opened his eyes to a wider, richer world as he taught ESL / EFL and studied history on three continents.
John went in 1969 to teach EFL in Venice and rented a room in Dorsoduro from the very English, highly cultured Christina Thoresby. Evenings John taught lively Italian adults, and mornings he had coffee with new friends — and also sketched and painted. Late-evening chats with Christina around the cosy kitchen table were highlights. The next year, studying history at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, John boarded with ‘landlady extraordinaire’ Mrs Fiddler, who oversaw her comfortable home from her well-equipped kitchen. Despite intense studies, John found a route into McMaster where he could sketch. “Sure is cold,” was Mrs F’s constant winter refrain, but an idyllic summer followed in leafy Westdale.
Back in England, Lily Hackforth and her niece An Mines shared their rambling home, memories of Cambridge, and vast garden with John, and An’s exquisite viola-playing often permeated his attic eyrie. In the later 1970s, Diana Bryant’s Edwardian-era flat, near London’s Covent Garden, boasted great food and wine, while Diana wrote a syndicated astrology column, drafted romantic novels (John spell-checked), rented out rooms, even guided tours of London. John taught eager ESL students at nearby Pitman’s and started writing for the EFL / ESL market, about Britain.
In the early 1980s, a flat at the “house behind the shrine” in Tokyo, purview of the mysterious, multi-talented Miss M, offered John contentment and constant birdsong. His delicate landlady would replenish his household shrine, and EFL colleagues and students showed him Japan.
John kept in touch with several of these fascinating women and saw some of them again. While he prepared this manuscript for the printers — a long-time dream come true — surprising revelations surfaced.
Author Biography
JOHN H. RANDLE, MA, AKC, grew up in Weston-super-Mare in Somerset and studied history at King’s College, London, at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and at Queens’ College, Cambridge. He is a long-time teacher of English as a foreign / second language (EFL / ESL) and author of more than thirty books, most of them for the EFL market in Japan. He explains in The Landlady Quintet how he came to write the first two such volumes: Understanding Britain (1981), for which he signed a contract while an ESL instructor at Pitman’s in London, and (with Mariko Watanabe) Coping with Japan (1985) — a commission he was offered after witnessing a business meeting gone wrong in Tokyo. John is an accomplished artist, and a number of his sketches and watercolours appear in The Landlady Quintet. He has lived in London for almost forty years, much of that time in Little Venice, on the Regent’s Canal.
Praise
Each of these genial hosts became our author’s friend, confidante, and guide to her city’s secrets . . . A grand tour of a world gone by but, thanks to his lively and evocative words and sketches, never to be forgotten.
Edna Fernandes, author of The Last Jews of Kerala and Holy Warriors
“I don’t think you know how lucky you have been to find a place like this.”
Frank Randle, John’s Dad
8 x 5.5 – 290 pages
Price $29.95
Shipping $11.99
GST $2.10
Total: $44.04
