This is an ambitious book. Andrew Motion set out to write a memoir of his childhood but not from the standpoint, and distance, of a grown-up looking back; he set out to write it in the character of a child and teenager living through his experiences. The result can be startling.
Of his father, a third-generation brewer and a colonel in the TA (a rank he used in private life), he says: ‘every time my dad said “Surrey” he made a tsk noise, because he’d once met someone from Esher who wore a Gannex coat like Mr Wilson’. In other words, Motion Senior was a hair-raising snob. The county of Surrey was written off because of one man’s mac. His son makes no comment of any kind. You don’t when you are 16.
So this is a family memoir where the grown-ups, especially his parents, come and go in a haze of acceptance, for Motion has chosen to write from a time before rebellion. No judgment, no bitterness, even though by sending him to the usual crazy prep school they prompt the unhappiest days of his childhood, and little characterisation beyond the fact that the Colonel puts Bay Rum on his hair, and his mother is beautiful. For all these, you have to read between the lines.
The trouble is that, when you do, you feel guilty, for this was a family to whom something terrible happened. When Andrew Motion was 16 his mother suffered a hunting accident, from which she did not recover: the book ends with her still in a coma. And with that accident the family life he had known was over.
To review an autobiography is always a problem, and the more personal it is, the more of a problem it is, all those doors being opened, however guardedly, for your inspection. What if you don’t like the curtains? If you don’t, do you say so? But how much more difficult it is when you know you are about to come up against something as awful as that hunting accident.
The Motions shadow the paradigm of English social mobility, the founding-father of one generation giving way to the businessman to the country gentleman to the aesthete, but not quite. In their case three stages of the process are achieved in one. Great-grandpa, a baker’s son, makes the money as a brewer, buys the hall (with its entire contents), installs the horses, then gets a coat of arms with a motto. Only his son, Grandpa, then blues most of the cash by taking too seriously what he conceives of as his responsibilities as a country gentleman.
‘Hunted, and hunted, and hunted,’ Motion’s own mother told him, foxes, salmon, deer, for there was also a Scottish baronial home. And of course there were nannies, Mrs Motion went on, nannies who from time to time brought her husband down from his nursery to show him off ‘like a prize vegetable’. A doctor’s daughter from Beaconsfield, she brings a whiff of common sense with her, though the hunting is to be even more of a nemesis for her.
The result, with Grandpa an MFH for 30 years, is that the social mobility is put into reverse, and Colonel Motion, Andrew’s father, is back in the brewery again, a Home Counties businessman who goes to work each day in a Daimler; houses called the Hall become houses called the Old Rectory. There seems to have been a social anxiety about the Colonel, as though he is afraid the family decline might accelerate.
His son senses some of this in a man who is just a bit too eager to do everything expected of him, the TA, the hunting, the employment of a nanny, private education for his sons. But even his wife, whom Andrew adores, supports him in all this. The word ‘patio’, she advises her boy, is ‘suburban’, and when he asks what a friend’s father does for a living he is told ‘something to do with coal’, from which you can deduce that he didn’t deliver the stuff.
So off to prep school Andrew is sent, to an establishment where beating, like cocoa, is a nightly event, and where showers are a good place for crying. A perceptive boy, he notices that awkward family farewells at stations are like a rugger scrum, but it does not occur to him that his parents might in any way be responsible for this little English Hell.
I married into a family that also did all these things; even so, seeing them set down in such detail, I felt I could be reading about a lifestyle as alien as that of the Aztecs. Especially as, when prompted by the eager Colonel, the MFH smears the blood of a fox’s carcase over young Andrew’s face. At that moment it does not seem to be that far from Much Haddam to the pyramids of Yucatan, with the bodies being rolled down to the waiting families: ‘There, Andrew, you can have the man’s liver.’
He is just beginning to distance himself from all this, he has discovered poetry and is rather nervously suggesting that perhaps he will not hunt or shoot again; he has even, through illness, found himself at home from school, when the accident occurs. In terms of structure this is handled well: it starts the book, and ends it, and is very moving, especially in its depiction of how the young Andrew reacts. His main emotion is one of confusion.
My only unease is the way he seems to remember from time to time that he is the Poet Laureate, and feels the need to add imagery. The Colonel’s breath is ‘like a miniature sea rushing in and out’. One boy looks like a slug, another like a seal; someone has a ‘face like a sparrowhawk’, someone else ‘a face like a walrus’. There are shadows ‘slicing at me like bits of smoky glass’. This is just over-writing.
Also the memories can be over-exact. She ‘turned away to turn up the Today programme, which meant I could see the sunlight lying along her shoulder like wax.’ How can he remember something as precise as that over almost 50 years? It chips away at the verisimilitude of what is a harrowing story.
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