The discreet shape of tears

Mothers and memoirs are fashionable at the moment. We’ve had Edward St Aubyn’s novel Mother’s Milk and few respectable books’ pages appear without a brand-new set of tragic, comic or tragi- comic reminiscences, leaving us grateful, if apologetic, for our own drearily staid lives.

Yet it is a fact that a really good memoir usually owes less to life than to the author’s shaping imagination. Indeed, the best are often largely fantasy (Trollope’s captivating autobiography is a case in point). Rarely does a completely authentic recollection make compelling reading. Too often, as Henry James’s great short story on this theme reminds us, compared to art the ‘real thing’ disappoints and ultimately fails to enchant.

Brian Thompson’s Keeping Mum, the account of his wartime Cambridge childhood, is therefore both refreshing and unusual. The downbeat, deadpan style conveys an air of authenticity (it’s hard to say exactly how one makes that judgment but it is a judgment which can be made); but at the same time he entertains and enthrals with a story of deprivation which neither boasts nor moans, while escaping the deadliest memoir sin of all, the self-consciously ‘cheerfully brave’. (Cheerful courage should mostly be kept for life, where it is much needed; it takes genius to make it work on the page.)

Much of the charm of the book lies in Thompson’s drily unsensational style:

I had often noticed two white scars on my mother’s breast, the shape of tears … At some time when I was young enough to be in a pushchair my father had come across her kissing a man in the street — more accurately, in the passage that ran beside the Regal cinema. He had beaten and kicked this poor devil unconscious and that night my mother plunged an open pair of scissors into her chest.