November 1959
Of all the books that have come my way since I began writing about them, this has given me the most pleasure. It is a poet’s recollections of his childhood, beginning at the age of three when the carrier’s cart dumped him outside the cottage in a village in Gloucestershire which was to remain his home until he was grown. Mr. Lee’s father was already a widower with four children when he married again, added four more to the family of whom Mr. Lee was the youngest but one, and then departed for a safer, more suburban life. His mother took seven of the children to this cottage and waited patiently for his return, but he had gone off to Greenwich in a bullet-proof vest and never came back. The early years are packed with the pangs and comforts of a large family crammed in a cottage alternately flooded with water pouring down the hill, or glowing with smoky warmth, and crowded with the traffic of eight separate lives. The author’s three half-sisters and his mother brought him up and he was content ‘to be bullied, and tumbled through the hand-to-mouth days, patched or dressed up, scolded, admired, swept off my feet in sudden passions of kisses, or dumped forgotten among the unwashed pots’. His village was in a small unvisited valley, and in the ‘twenties it was still a poor, self-sufficient, almost feudal pocket of life, ruled by a rheumy Squire, the Vicar and a village school; with its own outings, and festivals, legends, laws, and a structure made entirely of necessity and experience; where the follies, joys, disasters and amusements all took place within its orbit.
It is perhaps idle to speculate upon whether poets make their childhood, or whether the right kind of childhood would make a poet, but there is an extraordinary inevitability underlying this book - a feeling that all the ingredients were right: the large warm-blooded family set in the small village in isolated and beautiful country; the privations real ones, the pleasures natural, the life all on a scale in which a child could find his place and grow. At any rate, Mr. Lee has made full use of it, rather as though in this book, he has opened his memory and it is revealed like a chest of treasure - dazzling, overflowing, so stuffed with the rich ornament of his mind and the enchanting workmanship of his language that it is difficult to pick out any particular piece of it. The portrait of his mother is wonderful - true and round and unsentimental and charged with affection.
‘She was muddled and mischievous as a chimney-jackdaw … was happy in the sunlight, squawked loudly at danger, pried and was insatiably curious, forgot when to eat or ate all day, and sang when sunsets were red … With her love of finery, her unmade beds, her litter of unfinished scrapbooks, her taboos superstitions and prudishness, her remarkable dignity, her pity for the persecuted, her awe of the gentry, and her detailed knowledge of the family trees of all the Royal Houses of Europe, she was a disorganised mass of unreconciled denials, a servant girl born to silk. Yet in spite of all this, she fed our oafish wits with steady, imperceptible shocks of beauty … an interpretation of man and the natural world so unpretentious and easy that we never recognised it then, yet so true that we never forgot it.’
Then there are the Grannies who lived beside each other and the Lees, ‘rival ancients who lived on each other’s nerves and their perpetual enmity was like mice in the walls’. The old Browns who had lived together for fifty years, until they were discovered lying on the floor, both of them too weak to stand and the old lady trying to feed her husband with a spoon, when they were cruelly divided by authoritarian kindness - separate parts of the workhouse; ‘they would see each other twice a week’, but they both died of this division in the first week. Getting up in the morning with his brother: ‘we both stood at last on the bare wood floor, scratching and saying our prayers. Too stiff and manly to say them aloud, we stood back to back and muttered them, and if an audible plea should slip out by chance, one just burst into song to cover it’.
A great deal of this book makes one laugh; the author has that charming view of the ludicrous which makes one love what one is laughing at, but through all of it, the times of day, the seasons of the year are the rhythm of the book, and one sees how carefully noted and absorbed they were in his childhood, so that now they are an integral part of his poetry - of everything he has to say. But perhaps the most striking feature of this work, and the one that gives it its unique quality and flavour, is the way in which Mr. Lee uses language. After reading it one feels that the rest of us have been muddling along for years with words that have been, so to speak, bottled, canned, tarnished, frozen and knocked out with casual and repeated misuse, and that he has picked and collected them fresh, so that they taste and smell - have their natural shape and sound and life and are a blessing to all the senses. There is nothing dithering, pretentious or obscure about this writing; it is prose like fresh bread - crisp, succulent and memorable - in fact, the stuff of language in a world that today is sated with the ready-mixed cakes of slogans, clichés and jargon. This is the Book Society’s admirable choice for November, but for what it is worth on a smaller scale, it is my book of the year.