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All Change Here: Girlhood and Marriage
- GenresMemoir
158 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1975
26 people want to read
About the author
Naomi Mitchison
163 books136 followersNaomi Mitchison, author of over 70 books, died in 1999 at the age of 101. She was born in and lived in Scotland and traveled widely throughout the world. In the 1960s she was adopted as adviser and mother of the Bakgatla tribe in Botswana. Her books include historical fiction, science fiction, poetry, autobiography, and nonfiction, the most popular of which are The Corn King and the Spring Queen, The Conquered, and Memoirs of a Spacewoman.
Mitchison lived in Kintyre for many years and was an active small farmer. She served on Argyll County Council and was a member of the Highlands and Islands Advisory Panel from 1947 to 1965, and the Highlands and Islands Advisory Consultative Council from 1966 to 1974.
Praise for Naomi Mitchison:
"No one knows better how to spin a fairy tale than Naomi Mitchison."
-- The Observer
"Mitchison breathes life into such perennial themes as courage, forgiveness, the search for meaning, and self-sacrifice."
-- Publishers Weekly
"She writes enviably, with the kind of casual precision which ... comes by grace."
-- Times Literary Supplement
"One of the great subversive thinkers and peaceable transgressors of the twentieth century.... We are just catching up to this wise, complex, lucid mind that has for ninety-seven years been a generation or two ahead of her time."
-- Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Gifts
"Her descriptions of ritual and magic are superb; no less lovely are her accounts of simple, natural things -- water-crowfoot flowers, marigolds, and bright-spotted fish. To read her is like looking down into deep warm water, through which the smallest pebble and the most radiant weed shine and are seen most clearly; for her writing is very intimate, almost as a diary, or an autobiography is intimate, and yet it is free from all pose, all straining after effect; she is telling a story so that all may understand, yet it has the still profundity of a nursery rhyme.
-- Hugh Gordon Proteus, New Statesman and Nation
Mitchison lived in Kintyre for many years and was an active small farmer. She served on Argyll County Council and was a member of the Highlands and Islands Advisory Panel from 1947 to 1965, and the Highlands and Islands Advisory Consultative Council from 1966 to 1974.
Praise for Naomi Mitchison:
"No one knows better how to spin a fairy tale than Naomi Mitchison."
-- The Observer
"Mitchison breathes life into such perennial themes as courage, forgiveness, the search for meaning, and self-sacrifice."
-- Publishers Weekly
"She writes enviably, with the kind of casual precision which ... comes by grace."
-- Times Literary Supplement
"One of the great subversive thinkers and peaceable transgressors of the twentieth century.... We are just catching up to this wise, complex, lucid mind that has for ninety-seven years been a generation or two ahead of her time."
-- Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Gifts
"Her descriptions of ritual and magic are superb; no less lovely are her accounts of simple, natural things -- water-crowfoot flowers, marigolds, and bright-spotted fish. To read her is like looking down into deep warm water, through which the smallest pebble and the most radiant weed shine and are seen most clearly; for her writing is very intimate, almost as a diary, or an autobiography is intimate, and yet it is free from all pose, all straining after effect; she is telling a story so that all may understand, yet it has the still profundity of a nursery rhyme.
-- Hugh Gordon Proteus, New Statesman and Nation
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 30, 2017
This is the second book of autobiographical writing from Naomi Mitchison and follows on form the first, starting around 1912.
Naomi Mitchison lived from 1897 to 1999 and the range of things she did was breath-taking. She was a feminist who campaigned for birth control, helping to establish the first birth control clinics. Mitchison was a committed socialist and Scottish Nationalist as well as being a renowned historical novelist. A friend of Tolkien, she proof read Lord of the Rings. She also wrote fantasy and science fiction and a series of memoirs. Her early training was in science and with her brother she published the first demonstration of genetic linkage in mammals in 1915. She travelled a great deal and wrote a number of travelogues. Along the way she also had seven children.
This charts Mitchison taking a place at Oxford in 1914 to study science and spending time with her older brother’s friends. She captures a time of innocence and optimism in the summer of 1914 very well. The war intruded inevitably, although for the first few months there was no real sense of what was to come. That changed when members of her group of friends did not return from war. She married one of her brother’s friends, Dick Mitchison, in 1916. In 1915 Mitchison became a VAD at St Thomas’s Hospital;
“In 1915, with Dick away I became more and more impatient with Oxford and my own non-involvement. Girls I knew had gone to do 'war work'; one or two were even in munitions factories. And at least I had passed first aid and home nursing examinations and what was more Sister Morag Macmillan had chosen me as the one to whom she could teach massage, feeling the hands of half a dozen girls and rejecting them before taking me on. Whether she knew I had some capacity as a healer which might be brought out is something else again; had she sensed that she would wisely have said nothing about it.
I nagged and nagged and finally went off to be a VAD nurse at St. Thomas's along with May Douie, an Oxford friend whom I did not know very well. I had no idea what a hospital was really like; I doubt if I had ever been inside one. Our friends and relations would never find themselves in a hospital; they went to nursing homes, especially the Acland at Oxford, though there might well be arrangements there for almost free treatment in certain cases. Some nursing homes or small, special hospitals were quite well endowed. So St. Thomas's was something of a shock; the size, the long, clattering corridors and staircases and the huge, undivided wards. Everything was, no doubt, sanitary, but there were no frills.
Of course I made awful mistakes. I had never done real manual household work; I had never used mops and polishes and disinfectants. I was very willing but clumsy. I was told to make tea but hadn't realised that tea must be made with boiling water. All that had been left to the servants.
Once when lifting a heavy patient my collar stud flew out and my stiff collar opened. Oh, dear! At that time we all wore stiff white cuffs, collar and belt into which we stuck our scissors, so much needed for bandages, dressings and sewing. One's blue skirt was ankle length with a long white apron over it. I ought to have had a proper uniform coat to go out in, but my mother had economised on that, thinking my own old one would do as well, but again I got an official scolding.”
Mitchison’s time as a VAD was ended when she caught scarlet fever. She also talks about nursing her husband after he sustained a head injury in a motorbike accident in France. The account ends with the birth of Mitchison’s first child.
Mitchison is an engaging narrator, not underestimating her naivety and how she had been sheltered from many aspects of life. She also charts the beginning of her move away from the beliefs of her childhood and the seeds of the political and feminist radical she became are clear.
Naomi Mitchison lived from 1897 to 1999 and the range of things she did was breath-taking. She was a feminist who campaigned for birth control, helping to establish the first birth control clinics. Mitchison was a committed socialist and Scottish Nationalist as well as being a renowned historical novelist. A friend of Tolkien, she proof read Lord of the Rings. She also wrote fantasy and science fiction and a series of memoirs. Her early training was in science and with her brother she published the first demonstration of genetic linkage in mammals in 1915. She travelled a great deal and wrote a number of travelogues. Along the way she also had seven children.
This charts Mitchison taking a place at Oxford in 1914 to study science and spending time with her older brother’s friends. She captures a time of innocence and optimism in the summer of 1914 very well. The war intruded inevitably, although for the first few months there was no real sense of what was to come. That changed when members of her group of friends did not return from war. She married one of her brother’s friends, Dick Mitchison, in 1916. In 1915 Mitchison became a VAD at St Thomas’s Hospital;
“In 1915, with Dick away I became more and more impatient with Oxford and my own non-involvement. Girls I knew had gone to do 'war work'; one or two were even in munitions factories. And at least I had passed first aid and home nursing examinations and what was more Sister Morag Macmillan had chosen me as the one to whom she could teach massage, feeling the hands of half a dozen girls and rejecting them before taking me on. Whether she knew I had some capacity as a healer which might be brought out is something else again; had she sensed that she would wisely have said nothing about it.
I nagged and nagged and finally went off to be a VAD nurse at St. Thomas's along with May Douie, an Oxford friend whom I did not know very well. I had no idea what a hospital was really like; I doubt if I had ever been inside one. Our friends and relations would never find themselves in a hospital; they went to nursing homes, especially the Acland at Oxford, though there might well be arrangements there for almost free treatment in certain cases. Some nursing homes or small, special hospitals were quite well endowed. So St. Thomas's was something of a shock; the size, the long, clattering corridors and staircases and the huge, undivided wards. Everything was, no doubt, sanitary, but there were no frills.
Of course I made awful mistakes. I had never done real manual household work; I had never used mops and polishes and disinfectants. I was very willing but clumsy. I was told to make tea but hadn't realised that tea must be made with boiling water. All that had been left to the servants.
Once when lifting a heavy patient my collar stud flew out and my stiff collar opened. Oh, dear! At that time we all wore stiff white cuffs, collar and belt into which we stuck our scissors, so much needed for bandages, dressings and sewing. One's blue skirt was ankle length with a long white apron over it. I ought to have had a proper uniform coat to go out in, but my mother had economised on that, thinking my own old one would do as well, but again I got an official scolding.”
Mitchison’s time as a VAD was ended when she caught scarlet fever. She also talks about nursing her husband after he sustained a head injury in a motorbike accident in France. The account ends with the birth of Mitchison’s first child.
Mitchison is an engaging narrator, not underestimating her naivety and how she had been sheltered from many aspects of life. She also charts the beginning of her move away from the beliefs of her childhood and the seeds of the political and feminist radical she became are clear.
January 29, 2020
This was so interesting -- not the events in themselves, but Mitchison's way of sorting through them and trying to untangle them, with honesty and kindness both, and her fascinating thoughts about the experience of living through WWI with her brother, her husband, and many other young men she knew all in the fighting. I could have read a hundred more pages of her teasing out the complex emotions and memories and thoughts around that time period. I will go back to this later in my life, I think -- for the moment I am going ahead to her next memoir.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews