The Hare with Amber Eyes - Day 11

The author traces his family history easily - even his great grandmothers lovers are a matter of ribald knowledge in the Austrian genealogical society's restricted (members and guests, only on  Weds evenings) open evening.  You can feel his excitement, and has he admits, slightly English embarrassment, that so much is laid bare. I begin to think about my own family stories - the two alcoholic brothers whose horse and cart knew the way back from the pub by itself - they would be found sleeping it of in the early morning outside the house, the horse patiently waiting.  Or the great-grandfather who owned an inn in Somerset (which?), but was an enthusiastic amateur chemist, blowing his laboratory up twice (true? apocryphal?).  Canon Waskett in East Anglia, my grandmothers family name that died out in this branch as Canon Waskett had only daughters. That name I keep on as a character for walkabout, a louche, drunken vicar type, a long far call from the slightly starched impression of the old photograph that I have seen.  I begin to appreciate the enormous amount of work and research that must go into a book like this.

And to have the netsuke as a theme sits well in the book, these small perfect carvings from another culture that perfectly inhabit a child's world in early 20th Century Vienna, alongside Andrew Lang's fairy tales.  His grandmother tells of this in a short memoir she wrote in the 1970's.