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Halfway to Venus

At her most disarming

Sarah Anderson
Umbrella Books, 13a Blenheim Crescent, London W11 2EE, £12.99, pp. 264, ISBN 9780954262426✆ £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655, 264pp, £12.99,

Byron Rogers reviews Sarah Anderson's memoirs

I think it was Evelyn Waugh who said that in the best writing there should never be what is called a literary style. What he meant by this was nothing showy, no tics of metaphor or punctuation should come between you and what is being said. When sentences have a perfect balance, paragraphs a structure, all you are aware of is someone talking to you.

Listen to these opening lines:

I was born in St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, the eldest of four children, and grew up in Trevor Place in Knightsbridge. Our nanny was rather antisocial, so we kept very much to ourselves, only occasionally meeting other children in Hyde Park for a picnic tea of jam sandwiches and tepid milk. Maybe it was because we didn’t meet many other children that Elisabeth, my next sister down, and I created a world of imaginary friends, all of whom we both knew intimately. But this was very much our own world, and something we didn’t share with anyone else.

It is a neat, effective prose, much like a stainless-steel electric kettle.

The family life she describes will seem extraordinary to most of you. Emotions were bottled up, the children being discouraged from talking about their feelings, and never allowed to criticise anyone. They were left alone with their mother only on a Thursday afternoon, this the half-day off of their nanny, with whom they even went on holiday. It was into this family that news came of Sarah’s cancer.

She writes movingly about her stock- broker father, badly hurt and then a POW in the war, who was to suffer prolonged ill-health for most of his later life, something she blames on her operation:

He had few friends and found it very hard to communicate . . . my heart aches for this thoroughly decent man who was probably never able to express his distress to anyone at what was happening to his child.

Her mother behaved in what you might think a monstrous way. The day before, she took Sarah to buy a new dress, then insisted that the sleeves be made longer. When the shop assistant demurred, she said in her daughter’s hearing, ‘She’s going to have her arm cut off tomorrow, so they will need to be made longer.’ All this, of course, in Harrods. But the woman wasn’t a monster. An earl’s daughter, she had herself been brought up in this odd upper-class way, and it must have just burst out of her, just as, much later, on the way to a dinner party with her husband, she suddenly burst into floods of tears at Hyde Park Corner, and the two went home. God knows how any of us might have coped with it, but it is how this one family, at the end of its tether, did. And it is details like this that make the narrative so vivid — like Sarah, hearing the conversation in Harrods, and feeling such shame that a stranger could be admitted to this family secret that she felt like running away, only it was a December afternoon and already getting dark. These are the reactions of a ten-year-old child.

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