December 1959
Mr. Potter opens his autobiography with the idea that one is born grown up, but tied in a parcel, the wrappings of which are much too tight for one. He implies that in the unwrapping some maturity gets spilled and that it isn’t until the other end of one’s life that one recovers it. This volume takes the author up to the age of nineteen, when his parents suggested that he might like to go to Oxford, and these nineteen declining years are very well described: there is an aura about them, which is extremely pleasant - a general feeling of blue skies, highly polished linoleum and very good home-made food, of order, kindness and rather long Sundays. It took him all this time, he says, to realise that his home was a jerry-built brute with cardboard walls, but from the first, it seems, he was surrounded by such a wealth of affection that it would not really have mattered where he had lived. His parents seem to be of a kind no longer in existence: throughout the book there is a most endearing quality of trustful innocence in all their behaviour and dealings with life. His father was a chartered accountant who first became aware of his future wife when he heard her singing in the Messiah. She had a beautiful voice and was dressed in white, and as Mr. Potter’s father felt like Samuel Butler about Handel, it was not long before he requested a private interview in a letter accompanied by two bunches of violets. By the time the author was born his father had lost all his private income on the advice of a subsequently accredited lunatic - but there was a piano alternately endured and enjoyed by the whole family, and they all read books worth reading, much as their equivalents today would read newspapers. The author’s education begins at the Girls’ Public Day School Trust and involved a walk across Clapham Common, which was perfect ground for the kind of dreamy erratic invention with which he bolstered himself up before a possible Bad Day: it continued at Westminster, which he says was ‘financially heroic’ of his parents. But the events of this book simply provide a solid, unobtrusive frame for this sunlit picture of a quiet, happy Edwardian childhood which underlines the fact that it does not matter what parents have or do with their children as much as it matters simply what they are; and to make this truth so eminently readable and charming is not only a tribute to the author, but perhaps provides his parents with their posthumous reward.