This summer I was delighted to review Nancy Campbell’s award-winning 2022 memoir Thunderstone for the Lady Margaret Hall alumni publication, The Brown Book. I wanted to share the review on my website as I loved the book and it meant a great deal to me when I read it last year.
Nancy Campbell, Thunderstone: A True Story of Losing One Home and Discovering Another (London: Elliott and Thompson, 2022).
Sometimes a book comes along that feels like a safe harbour in a storm and last summer, for me, that book was Nancy Campbell’s exquisite memoir Thunderstone: A Story of Losing One Home and Discovering Another (2022). I couldn’t put it down. Not in the usual sense of wanting to race through it (although I did inhale it like a swimmer gulping down air) but because once I’d finished it, the book had taken on a talismanic quality, rather like the thunderstone of the title. Campbell writes that ‘it was believed lightning would not strike a house that held a thunderstone’ (p.44) and her book took on that quality of protection. I carried it around with me for days after finishing it.
In its pages− that deal with a difficult lockdown, the health problems of Nancy herself and her former partner, and her challenging new life in the caravan– I found the kind of readerly intimacy and restorative courage that makes you feel as though a hand has been held out to you. Campbell writes beautifully and compassionately (with the true etymological sense of fellow feeling, ‘to suffer with’) about her former partner’s stroke and how Anna’s severe aphasia radically altered both of their experiences with words. She explores housing precarity, ill health, and relationship breakdown in ways that are raw and honest, but never mawkish, and the book is brimming with hope and comfort. Moving into a second-hand caravan on the river in Oxford, an experience that tests both her practical and emotional resilience, Campbell shows us how we can live well and live richly through an interwoven tapestry of literary texts and the inspiration of nature. I felt that I came away from the memoir with real, tangible tokens with which to sustain me, most especially from the diary part of the book as life in the van takes shape following the aftermath of a heart-breaking lockdown. Early in the June part of the diary, Campbell writes a haiku: ‘Wren returns to its nest / and flies out again, in and / out in out all day’ and she reflects, ‘Old habits must be shifting. Usually I can’t write a word before my first cup of coffee, but the wren distracted me, pulled me forward into the day’ (pp.59-60). Thunderstone pulls us forward into a life more attuned to nature, forging generative new communities on the margins and inviting us in.
Campbell is an especially nuanced and thoughtful writer of place and for those of us may still find the Oxford of the ‘dreaming spires’ rather aloof and forbidding at times, Campbell’s alternative Oxford offers a new kind of magic. Her new friend the Assassin tells her this part of the canal had once been called the Gates of Hell but before that it was ‘Joy’s Field… and you’ll make it that again if you choose’ (p.39). This is still the Oxford where ‘rifts in the fabric of this world might lead us into other worlds’ (p.37) but rather than fantastical, those worlds feel radical, authentic, and necessary. Campbell concludes her diary with a photograph of her van, nestled in the undergrowth, and a quotation from Bashō: ‘I jotted down these records with the hope that they might provoke pleasant conversations among my readers and that they might be of some use to those who would travel the same way’ (p.225). It’s a privilege to have travelled with Nancy Campbell in Thunderstone and if I could press a copy of this book into your hands right now, I would. In the opening chapter Anna tells Nancy that what she wants from life is to ‘live with grace. It is hard to have grace now, but I will do my best’ (p.20) Thunderstone is full of grace and I am deeply grateful for it.
Laura Varnam (matric. 2004)
[review first published in the LMH Brown Book, summer 2023)
Dr Laura Varnam 