The High Path - Ted Walker

The High Path is another of the lovely pocket hardback editions of memoirs published by Slightly Foxed. I'm collecting the memoirs but, of course, have only read about half of them so far. Slightly Foxed Editions are another reason why I don't think e-books will ever totally replace the physical book. They are such beautiful, tactile objects. The size is perfect for slipping in a bag or coat pocket & the paper is the same creamy paper used for the Slightly Foxed quarterly journal. Subtle gold blocking on the spine & a ribbon bookmark complete the perfect book package.

Ted Walker was a poet & it's obvious from this book that poetry was his natural language. The High Path tells the story of Ted's childhood in Sussex until he goes to Cambridge in 1953. Ted's father moved from Birmingham in the early 30s looking for work. Soon he was able to encourage his brother, Jack to join him & he was able to marry Winnie, his girlfriend back in Birmingham. Ted  was born a year later &, after the tragic death of a sister, Ruth, his mother was told she shouldn't have more children so Ted looked set to be an only child. The Walkers lived in a flat that backed on to the high path of the title & soon, Ted's father's family moved in to the flat upstairs.

Ted led the self-contained life of an only child, so much so that his early experiences of school & other children were quite a shock. Schooldays in general were not happy & he's scathing about the quality of the teaching staff at the Grammar School he attended as a scholarship boy. Only a few of his teachers are remembered with affection, most memorably Miss Miles, a stand-in teacher,

I wish I could meet Miss Miles again. I should like to tell her that she taught me more about the entrancing power of words in that quiet lull during the Battle of Britain than any teacher subsequently did...She related the story of Romulus and Remus with such narrative and descriptive skills that I was left with the most vivid sense of having been actually suckled by the she-wolf, of having handled every rough block of stone built on the seven hills of Rome, of having not only sharpened the knife and stabbed Remus but also of having been Remus himself, dead by my twin brother's hand.

That mention of the Battle of Britain is typical of the casual way that the war is mentioned in the book. The main consequence of the war to Ted is that the beach at the back of his house is off-limits as it's been covered in barbed-wire & landmines to fend off the German invasion that was expected at any minute. The joy with which the beach was reopened when the war ended is obvious,

The tide was just out, the sun was just setting. There were hundreds of people strolling, their faces lit with pink delight. This, then, was what Peace was: to stand and gaze at the unsinister sea; to pick up a streamer of bladder-wrack and watch it lift with the wind... We paddled, kicking the water, testing the salt on our lips. And when it began to get dark, I walked back up the shingle and sat for a few minutes on my own, looking at the silhouettes of breakwaters that had not been repaired or replaced for six years.

There are many stories here about the embarrassments & agonies of childhood. I felt for young Ted in the tortuous combination of underwear & straightjacket that his mother made him wear. Then there were the homemade boots that curled to one side & the awful remedies his mother tried on him to cure his constipation. The Walkers weren't poor but they were careful. Ted's father divided his wages into different tins every week, including one tin he called Ted's Start-Up tin with the money for Ted's future career. Ted was always a loner, especially at school. Even the birth of his brother when he was ten didn't change that. As he says, "If you are ten before you have your brother, you remain an only child." He was too old to feel jealousy & his brother grew up to be his best friend.

His closest relationship is with his father. They play a mad game of cricket where the idea wasn't to make runs but to see how many ways they could hit the ball so as to make the both fall about laughing. His father decides that Ted should learn French so they both go along for the initial lesson with Mr Jupp. The first lesson is nearly a disaster as Mr Jupp's frantic gestures at the window as he repeats C'est la fenêtre & father & son look through the window at the passersby & try to work out what he means. Eventually they get it & run home gesturing at every window they see shouting C'est la fenêtre . Mr Jupp teaches Ted from a book depicting the life of a well-to-do family & their servants.

I, who sat in Mr Jupp's wizard parlour in my curly boots, was supposed to identify with the monied crowd, clapping my hands to attract the attention of Mr Jupp, who played the eternal lackey. I would summon him (a waiter swatting imaginary flies with an imaginary towel) to bring me an aperitif; command him (a fawning tailor in the Rue de Rivoli) to make me a redingote. Ever-present was the lady whose invisible form by the passage door was to be bowed to before we practised the third person singular.

The memoir ends with Ted on his way to Cambridge. Ted has started writing poetry & destroying it all. He writes to T S Eliot & gets a kind reply. He spends his holidays as a builder's labourer or falls on his feet helping a rich couple travel around Europe with his French learnt from Mr Jupp. He has met Lorna, his first serious girlfriend who will become his wife, & they are miserably contemplating years apart while he studies at university & then does his National Service & she goes to training college. The High Path is a quiet memoir told with humour & affection - & occasional anger & frustration. It's another lovely addition to the series of Slightly Foxed Editions.

Look Back with Love - Dodie Smith

Fifty thousand bloggers can't be wrong, can they? Dodie Smith's charmingly funny memoir, Look Back with Love, has received rave reviews on several of the blogs I read. Simon loved it at Stuck in a Book, Elaine adored it at Random Jottings & so did Geranium Cat. They're right. This is a lovely memoir about a happy childhood in early 20th century Manchester. One of the things I love most about Slightly Foxed editions (well, the ones I've read so far) is that the memoirs they publish are not misery memoirs. There may be poverty, misfortune & heartbreak but these are memoirs written with affection & restraint.

Dodie Smith's memories of growing up with her mother's family are full of fun & mischief. Her father died when she was just a baby & her heartbroken mother went home to live with her parents, two sisters & three brothers in a house in Old Trafford. The family lived in a series of houses in Manchester & Smith describes the houses beautifully. Dodie & her mother usually shared a room & often another little room, usually the boiler room, would be fitted out as a playroom or later a study for Dodie. Dodie & her mother were devoted to each other.

Of all the women I have ever known I liked my mother best. Of course I loved her, but most children love their mothers and it is no particular compliment. True liking implies a reasoned judgement and I have come to believe it is more important than loving; it wears better. Now, so long after my mother's death that I have no emotional sense of loss, I still find myself wishing to share things with her.

As the only child in this household of adults, Dodie was loved & indulged but not spoilt. She was a mad performer & reciter, encouraged by the example of her Uncle Harold who was a star in the local amateur dramatic society. Dodie would recite at the drop of a hat & her family & later her schoolfriends, provided a willing audience. The uncles were all great teasers & Dodie was as credulous as most children. She could be frightened almost into fits by one uncle who would solemnly tell her that he thought he was going mad & get madder & madder until he suddenly decided that he wasn't going to go mad today.

Her Aunt Bertha was eccentric. She had strange ideas, for example, that her teeth would go soft if she was left alone for more than three hours. She couldn't bear to throw out anything that might be useful to someone at some time & took this to extreme lengths when they were clearing out Dodie's grandmother's room after her death,

The only times Auntie Bertha accepted anything with a good grace was when it had been discarded as useless and put in the rubbish pile. Then she would rescue it and happily make plans for its future.
'Don't love, you'll make me laugh.' Nan kept saying sorrowfully. At last Auntie Bertha pounced on an ancient bodice which must have been used for patching, for little of it remained.
'It's got one good sleeve, anyhow,' she said defensively.
Nan and my mother began to laugh and soon we were all laughing helplessly, apologising to God, my grandmother and each other. Nan kept saying, 'We mustn't, we mustn't,' but we went on laughing, while Auntie Bertha smoothed out the solitary leg-o'-mutton sleeve.

There are so many hilarious scenes in the book. I laughed out loud many times. Dodie has such a sense of the ridiculous & her schooldays, birthday parties, games with friends & family excursions to the old family home at Darley are described with a sense of irresistible fun. Dodie was an aspiring writer from early childhood. She didn't want to play with her dolls, she sat in front of them & invented their characters,

And then there was Ruth, the wax-faced doll, who had belonged to my Auntie Dora, dead in childhood. Ruth could never have been a beauty and by now most of her hair had gone and her almost square face had a corpse-like pallor. At last my mother and I agreed she must be thrown out but I relented and rescued her from the dustbin. My mother then made her a rakish bonnet and rouged her wax cheeks. Rouge was kept locked up and was referred to by my mother and aunts as 'brightening'. Brightening did wonders for Ruth, who now looked like a raddled old trollop and took on a new lease of life.

I could go on quoting passages forever. The scene in the ice-cold swimming baths with Auntie Carrie smoking her ever-present Gold Flake & shouting "Pink it, you children' which was her favourite rallying cry; the dreadful seasick-inducing boat trip across the Bristol Channel when the family were on holiday; the struggles of Uncle Bertie (Aunt Bertha's husband) with his car, a great novelty, even with the threat of being suffocated by the dust thrown up on country roads or falling out of the car altogether when it was going up a hill. Unhappiness, in general, is only hinted at. Dodie Smith's mother's second marriage was evidently a mistake but it isn't dwelt on. This is partly because this book only takes Dodie up to the age of about 14. There are several subsequent memoirs & I'd love to read them. I can recommend that you get hold of Look Back with Love if you want a funny, fascinating, sometimes moving, reading experience.

People who say Goodbye - P Y Betts

People Who Say Goodbye is the latest Slightly Foxed edition, a series of memoirs reprinted by that very enterprising quarterly journal, Slightly Foxed. The books themselves are lovely objects, small cloth-bound hardbacks with the same creamy paper as the quarterly & a ribbon bookmark. I’ve taken a photo of the title page because I have trouble getting a good shot of the spine. The tiny gold writing always looks blurry. It’s difficult to describe the charm of this book. It’s all in the tone of the writing, so mordant & unsentimental. On the surface it’s just a memoir of growing up in a London suburb around the time of WWI but the way it’s written is so engaging that it becomes more than that.

Phyllis was born in 1909 & the memoir ends in around the mid 20s. The family lived in Wandsworth so there was a prison & a military hospital practically on the doorstep. Phyllis used to watch the military funerals go by & watch the crowds outside the prison on execution mornings. Although there is a lot of humour in the book, there are also some passages of great poignancy. Here, Phyllis describes the military funerals of the soldiers who had died of their wounds in the nearby military hospital,

The procession would go by, down the hill into the wintry afternoon with its faint foggy smell that gripped your throat if you were out in it. It was the smell of coal fires and winter. The sky, when the cortege had gone out of sight, would be smoky grey with red streaks over the low-lying ground beyond the cemetery. Those afternoons were very quiet. The road seemed scarcely used. I would wait. Then faintly the bugle would sound, final and sad, the lamenting never-coming-back notes of the Last Post. It seemed to me a dark, smoky, red slash of sound against the quiet grey of the London winter evening coming down. Not long afterwards the soldiers and the horses were to be heard coming back at a smart trot, the coffin and the flag gone from the gun-carriage. The soldiers were hurrying home to their barracks for tea with plum-and-apple jam.

It’s that last detail, the plum & apple jam, that is so poignant & just the thing a child would think of. It makes me think of Wilfred Owen’s line, “And each slow dusk, a drawing down of blinds.”

The Betts family is just fascinating. Mother is almost brutally honest; just after the scene quoted above, Phyllis asks her what happens to all the people buried in the cemetery. They rot, is the answer. Phyllis has to have teeth extracted. Her mother tells her that it will be painful but the pain will be short & sharp. It was & Phyllis was never frightened of the dentist because her mother always told her the truth. She always seems to have employed maids who have a problem (lying, a tendency to be saved by the Salvos, adenoids) & they usually leave the Betts's to "better themselves". Sometimes they come back when the bettering doesn't work.

The doctor her mother always consults is known by Phyllis’s father as Old Whhhen-and-Whhhatski because of the way he spoke. He only prescribes two medicines, brown or red, & he's preoccupied with the state of their bowels. He misdiagnoses her brother's diphtheria as tonsillitis. Mr Betts is a clerk in his father in law’s business & is a plain speaker who doesn’t suffer fools at all. Phyllis’s brother is older & very superior in attitude,

A word, but only a word, about my brother. He was my senior by five years and will be rarely mentioned. The reason for this is that he is still living, in his middle eighties with all his wits about him, capable, and perhaps quite willing, to sue me for libel should a loophole for a libel action present itself. Anyone who has had a brother will understand that it is difficult to write about him without incurring the risk of a libel action. If you can’t say something kind, don’t say anything at all. We have all heard that. So I am not saying anything at all about my brother, or at least not much.

Then there's the contrast between her mother's family (posh but unloving) & her father's (poor but kind). Her mother is considered to have married beneath her & her spinster sisters take a very superior attitude. This grandfather is a very cold man, who Phyllis doesn’t hesitate to say she hated. He had no time for children & regarded her infrequent visits as a trial to be got through. Her grandmother is a more shadowy figure Phyllis describes her conversation with such accuracy that she comes alive,

She spoke of Joseph & his coat of many colours not only as if she had lived next door to Joseph, but had patched his coat. All the Biblical characters were everyday people to her. She had taken strongly against Abraham for his cruel treatment of the ram in the thicket and said it was just what you would expect of a man with a beard like that, she had always disliked a beard on a man.

There’s also the sad story of Uncle Jack, who comes back from the war with a terrible secret & marries a divorcee with two children, putting himself & his family beyond the pale as well. Phyllis’s paternal grandparents are loving & kind. They come to the rescue when Phyllis has to be quarantined while waiting to see whether she has caught diphtheria from her brother. The rich family with oodles of room couldn't possibly have her but her other grandparents don't hesitate.

I was struck by the very realistic view of illness & death, probably typical of a time when medicine was still a matter of hit & miss. A 20 year old girl dies of diabetes because insulin hadn't been discovered & there was no treatment; several childhood friends die of illnesses like black measles, whatever that may have been. And, of course, the military funerals were a constant reminder of the war.

Phyllis was a very self-sufficient child, very matter of fact - or at least, the memoir is written in a very matter of fact way. That’s its charm & where most of the humour comes from. Phyllis is never self-pitying. She changed schools often & her mother would never let her buy the gym kit of the new school before she had grown out of the old one so she was always in the wrong colour uniform. Just as she would get a new gym kit, she would change schools & she would still be in the wrong colour uniform. This doesn’t bother her at all. She puts up with the teasing & because she is unaffected, it soon stops. She describes her childhood as she remembers it.

According to the Preface to this reprint Phyllis Betts was a short story writer in the 30s but dropped out of sight until she was rediscovered in the late 80s & encouraged to write this. I'd love to know what happened in her life between the 30s & 80s.

Blue remembered hills - Rosemary Sutcliff

Blue Remembered Hills is Rosemary Sutcliff’s childhood memoir. It’s a beautifully written story of a lonely child crippled by juvenile arthritis who nevertheless didn’t feel she had had a deprived life. The tone of the book is one of gratitude for life’s blessings & joy at the natural world, her friends, her dogs & her love for her parents. She was born in 1920. Her father was a naval officer, her mother a mercurial woman who, Sutcliff believes, probably had a form of manic depression. Because of her father’s long absences at sea, & her illness, Rosemary & her mother were very close. Their relationship was a difficult one because Mrs Sutcliff was so over-protective of her daughter & so consumed by her disability, that she was reluctant to allow anyone else in. Rosemary was taught at home except for a couple of experiences at school. The first school left her with a love of learning but unable to read. She didn’t learn to read for a long time. Her mother loved to read to Rosemary & she loved to listen so she was reluctant to learn herself as she would much rather listen to Dickens read aloud to her than reading John & Betty-type readers to herself. Eventually, she did learn to read at the second, more conventional school & nothing could stop her after that. Treatments & operations to alleviate her arthritis meant Rosemary spent long periods in hospitals & nursing homes but there’s no self-pity in her descriptions of the pain & loneliness she endured. Parents were only allowed to visit once a week & the children spent the whole visiting time eating the food brought by their families. The food in hospitals was scarce & the children lived for the weekly feast. They had to eat as much as possible during visiting hours because any food left afterwards was confiscated. It’s hard to imagine such draconian rules for sick children. What happened to the children whose families lived too far away to visit or couldn’t afford to bring food? All the treatments didn’t seem to help Rosemary very much as she was only able to walk short distances & spent most of her adult life in a wheelchair. Her mother was determined that she would walk & encouraged her to exercise as much as possible & it was only after her mother’s death that Rosemary’s father agreed that she should have a wheelchair. Her mother had seen a wheelchair as defeat; Rosemary saw it as freedom. The first thing she did was take her father on a holiday as she was finally able to get around with comfort. Although Rosemary’s life was made very difficult by her mother’s mood swings, she writes of her with honesty & love. Her love for her father is much more uncomplicated. He & Rosemary obviously spent quite a bit of time tiptoeing around Mother, enduring the bad times & hoping for sunny times ahead. He was obviously proud of her later success as a writer because in his old age he would say, “Once, Rosemary Sutcliff used to be my daughter; but I’m Rosemary Sutcliff’s father now.” Rosemary went to art school & reluctantly became a painter of miniatures – reluctantly because her heart was never really in it but it was considered a lady-like profession. Her teachers didn’t think she would be able to handle the physical demands of a career as a painter in oils. After an unhappy love affair in her twenties, she began writing. She wrote a series of retellings of Celtic myths & legends &, although this was rejected, OUP said they would be interested in a retelling of the Robin Hood stories. She also began what became her first published book, The Queen Elizabeth Story, the story of Elizabeth I written for children. Blue Remembered Hills ends with the publication of this first book. The memoir was first published in 1983 & my copy is a Slightly Foxed edition, part of a beautiful series of limited edition reprints by the literary journal Slightly Foxed which I wrote about here. It was the first of the series & according to the website it's still available, but I’m sure it’s also available secondhand or in libraries. I wish Rosemary Sutcliff had written another book about her adult life & career. This was a joy to read, full of humour & honesty about herself & her family.