conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is a description for a book titled The Juniper Tree about Warwickshire,where, Heridiosyncratic, Drabble with the genre: Literature & Fiction, British & Irish?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author was born in 1909 and brought up in rural Warwickshire,where she began writing and illustrating stories at the age of ten. Heridiosyncratic novels have been described as "like pictures painted on glass".She died in 1992.Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in1939 and educated at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she studiedEnglish Literature. She has published seventeen novels, most recently
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Juniper Tree
  Bella is used to rejection, racism, and casual cruelty, but under the couple's attention, she begins to heal from her wounds, both physical and psychological. Where the reader may be suspicious of the degree to which our narrator subsumes herself to her patrons' will—becoming a de facto housekeeper and girl Friday—Bella is pathetically grateful. She seems incapable of agency, yielding to the whims of fate and other people with a passivity that's both frustrating and in keeping with the story's ingenuous tone. In time this passivity proves to be Bella's armor: an oblivious resilience that allows her to weather horror and emerge, like the bird of the Grimms' rhyme, with song intact.
  I suppose it's this random quality, as much as her lack of formal literary education, that has led some people to dub Comyns an "outsider artist." Certainly, it's hard to judge the exactitude with which she has plotted events and red herrings. To my mind, however, it's also one of the chief pleasures of her oeuvre. Very quickly, you learn to stop judging and gauging and analyzing—trying to decide what she "meant" or which details are most likely to come in handy later on—and have to give yourself over wholly to the moment. Reading her is a curiously relaxing experience.
  As to happily ever afters, they are very equivocal things indeed. Joy is balanced by heartbreak. If one character finds contentment, another must pay with her life and happiness. Like a child listening to a bedtime story, the reader is beguiled by the simple narrative tone into a false sense of security, only to find herself shocked by the lawlessness of Comyns's universe.
  QUITE soon after I left Richmond station I turned into a quiet street where the snow was almost undisturbed and, climbing higher, I came to a road that appeared to be deserted. Then I noticed a beautiful fair woman standing in the courtyard outside her house like a statue, standing there so still. As I drew nearer I saw that her hands were moving. She was paring an apple out there in the snow and as I passed, looking at her out of the sides of my eyes, the knife slipped, and suddenly there was blood on the snow. She turned and went into her house before I could offer to help. I didn't like to knock on her door. It was a very private-looking one, painted bottle-green and with heavy brass fittings. Facing the wrought-iron gate was a carved bear with sad stone eyes and snow on its back. It appeared to be late Victorian sculpture but the house was much older, Georgian most likely. I thought I saw a dim figure pass by one of the windows and I hurriedly turned away and walked further up the hill towards the park gates, forgetting that I'd come to Richmond in search of work, not to walk in the snowy park among the deer.
  I spent over an hour there. It was a long time since I'd walked in clean snow and smelt its delicate northern smell, a smell so faint it is impossible to describe. Children were tobogganing and sliding down a small hill near the gates. Some had real toboggans and others large trays or pieces of wood. The children were shouting and yelling happily and several dogs were joining in and there was a great holiday feeling although it was a Monday morning in the middle of winter. I noticed a greyhound shivering although it wore a coat, and holding its lead was the beautiful statuesque woman I had already seen that morning. She was intently watching the children rejoicing in the snow, and because of the holiday atmosphere I was brave enough to approach her, even forgetting to turn the scarred side of my face away as I spoke to her. I asked after her injured hand, which was covered by a brightly coloured mitten. She smiled and said the cut wasn't serious in spite of the blood; it was a very clean cut. From the way she spoke I could tell she was foreign, perhaps German. A small boy came running up to us and slipped his bare hand into her warm mittened one for a moment as if to collect its warmth, then ran after his friends. I asked her if he was her son, he had the same colouring, but she said, "No, I like to watch the children playing but have none of my own," and the happiness left her face and I knew I'd said something wrong. She may have had a child and he had died. We parted and I hurried towards the park entrance and the interview I was so late for.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is another paragraph?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Already he was lifting his head and trying to look round the room, and he had the sweetest smile. Bernard loved to watch him and sometimes held out a finger to be clasped in the soft baby hand; but he seldom held him in his arms. On the other hand, I, who loved the child with reservations, often sat with him on my lap or held him against my shoulder with his little face against mine. He was a very comforting baby and seldom cried. Nell looked after him well, in spite of her bare back, which did not appear quite so often now the cold weather had set in.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last four paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: When I left the cottage the spring sun was shining and instead of turning back to the station I made my way towards Richmond Hill, glancing every now and then in the windows of once-familiar shops. Dickens and Jones were already displaying summer dresses, but at that moment clothes did not interest me because I was six months pregnant and growing larger every day. I left George Street and found I was being drawn towards the quieter streets at the back and then up the hill towards the old Forbes house, the place where I had felt so much I'd almost been burnt away, the place that had made me and nearly ruined me. As I stood outside, I could almost feel Gertrude's presence and see her beautiful, brave figure bending over the flowers. The carved bear still guarded the house. It seemed as if he recognized me with his cold stone eyes.
  I felt a strong compulsion to see the back of the house, the wild garden and the thicket. In spite of all it brought back to me I could not resist the desire to revisit the thicket where Gertrude and I used to sit, and look again at the tree where the magpies had built their nest and used to watch us from above as they chattered, and at the juniper tree whose fruit Gertrude used to eat with such abandon and, finally, at the place where those things I would like to forget occurred.
  I slowly walked down a side road where there used to be an iron gate leading into the far end of the garden. The gate was still there, but when I looked in, that part of the garden had disappeared. In its place stood a tall block of flats built in Victoria plum-coloured bricks and with a horribly permanent look. The entire spinney had been built over and only the formal part of the garden remained, though it was not so badly overlooked as it might have been because the windows facing it were small ones, lavatory windows perhaps.
  The new owners of the house must have sold over half of the ground it was standing on. I wondered what kind of people they were and returned to have one more look at the unchanged front of the house. As I stopped outside the wrought-iron gates, the front door opened and a plump dark woman came out, followed by two handsome little boys. They looked like Arabs to me and were excitedly talking in a foreign language. The mother did not speak at all but gracefully scattered small pieces of bread from a brass bowl for the chirping sparrows that immediately appeared. The boys ran to the old bear; the largest one rode on its back and the little one fed him with crumbs intended for the birds. I was glad to see children living in the house again.