1959 reminiscence; Lee recalls his childhood in the 1920s, in a
village in the Cotswolds. US vt Edge of Day.
But this is not an autobiography in the strict sense; its
thirteen chapters are separated loosely by subject matter, but for the
most part they are a recollection of impressions rather than of
ordered events. It's clear to me that Lee wrote in part because people
were forgetting how fast things had changed, and didn't know about:
a world of hard work and necessary patience, of backs bent to the
ground, hands massaging the crops, of waiting on weather and growth;
of villages like ships in the empty landscapes and the long walking
distances between them; of white narrow roads, rutted by hooves and
cartwheels, innocent of oil or petrol, down which people passed
rarely, and almost never for pleasure, and the horse was the fastest
thing moving.
It's not bucolic, though: there are loves and hatreds and suspicious
strangers, and a mob of boys roving through the neighbourhood looking
for trouble to cause. Some people read this book and find nostalgia
for a simpler time, but I certainly wouldn't want to live there; it's
not the technology per se, but the idea of a world and a mind
bounded by the edge of the valley, with minimal education and few
choices about what to do with your life unless you get up the gumption
to leave, and criminality ignored because that's just what boys do.
The style is not the conventional narrative one might expect but
rather something approaching blank verse; sometimes the recollections
tumble over each other in long lists, and sometimes they slow down to
allow the reader to get a bit of detail. Lee always gets the right
word, even when it seems like the wrong one.
I suspect that what one gets out of this book depends on what one
brings to it. It's awkward and spiky and does a decent job of
recapturing the childish mind-set. I'm glad to have read it, but I'm
unlikely to revisit it any time soon.
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