However, I retain enough residual affection for my childhood reading experience to pounce on the semi-autobiographical The Country Child (1931) when I saw it at the op shop. It's still in print, which surprised me, because there's no plot here at all and it seems like the kind of book that would appeal more to an adult audience than to a contemporary child, an adult audience who enjoys lyrical nature writing with a dose of rural history thrown in. Young Susan communes with the trees and the kitchen furniture, she accidentally invites fifty girls home for tea, she observes the rituals of harvest and spring and Christmas with the (adult) household of the isolated farm. I found I had to treat it like a meditation and relax into the lack of incident before I could completely enjoy it.
I also hadn't realised what a tragic life Uttley had. Her husband died by suicide a year before this book was written (partly as an act of solace, perhaps) and her adult son also killed himself, after Uttley's own death. I read one article that subtly blamed Uttley for both these deaths, suggesting that she was 'jealous' and 'bitter' and 'difficult to live with,' using quotes from her diary to support this view, which seems a little unfair to me. If you can't pour out your bitterness into your private journal, then nowhere is safe! Perhaps I'll have to read her diaries and make up my own mind.
I remember having this, and rereading it several times - so I must have liked it. I suppose the descriptions of living on a farm in an older age were as much of an escape for me as fantasy books are for modern children! The Traveller In Time I always found painful to read because she can't change what's going to happen to the characters and their horrible ends.
ReplyDeleteI did enjoy all the details of farm life - it's so educational. And I loved her description of loving being snowed in and cut off from the world, it reminded me of lockdown :)
ReplyDeleteFunnily enough, I'm currently rereading 'Flaxen Braids' by Annette Turngren; a book I first read in my Grandad's house, where it had been left since my mother's childhood. It's an account of a rural childhood in Sweden in which not very much happens but the events of a rural year - harvest, weddings, baking day, the great wash that only took place once or twice a year at the lake, the maypole dancing etc. It has the same slow charm.
DeleteThat sounds lovely, Ann - is there a name for these kinds of books? Slow childhoods, perhaps!
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