11 APRIL 1941, Page 20

Retirement

Two charming light-weights: Mr. Lockley's a postcript to an earlier book, I Know An Island, Mrs. Nicholson's a vivacious, dry little vignette of a country house, its garden and the life that is possible on the salary of a retired Colonel of the Indian Army. Mr. Lock:ey was attracted very early in life to the idea of living on an island, and, unlike the literary gentleman in Lawrence's story, began in a small way and worked himself up. His mother kept a small private school in Wales, but the bonds of home-life, as usual, seemed hard, and a very striz:l Locidev, together with two other adventurers, set off on a hopeful trek to the battlefields of Flanders, via Cardiff, on the proceeds of a pawned bike. Things went dismally wrong, and Lock:ev re- turned home for a good hiding and bouts of pneumonia and appendicitis. In convalescence he took to bird-study. With spare cash he bought Saunders Manual of British Birds, and at last, on a sickening' summer day, took a sea-trip to Lundy Island and from there mournfully watched, with sea-sick eyes, his first Manx shearwaters heading north towards the islands of the Pembrokeshire coast. One of those islands, Skokholm, was to become his own. He was to lease it, repair its little farmhouse, live on it, breed its sheep, make war on its rabbits and watch its birds. On a wild February day a two-masted topsail wooden schooner, the 'Alice Williams,' was to sail down channel towards Bristol, spring a leak off the island, be abandoned by her crew off St. Ann's Head, and then smoothly and. easily sail past the Trinity House tender and finally beach herself on Skolchoirn on top of the high spring tide. She was Lockley's for five pounds : every boy's dream, complete with salt-horse, smiling figure-head, oak timber and a hundred .tons of coal. The story of the wreck and much of the subsequent- history of the island bird-life is told with light, friendly charm, and the result is a happy book—a modem, minor Crusoe, in, which some very sensible dreams came true.

The conventional seasonal pattern, the old story of retirement into the country, the making of a,., gulden, the problems of domesticity and sewage, the charm" and 'difficulty of country ways are all handled by-Mrs. NichoThon with a kind of amon- tillado charm. This same dry delicacy also induces a regret- for here, it seems to me, is an uncommon talent that should devote its blending of satire and tolerant humour to fiction. Somewhere behind this excellent neat personal vignette of country retirement lies an ironical little novel of a decaying world: the ghastly world of inactivity, falling dividends and eternal hope, of nostalgic memories of Rawalpindi and Hong- kong, magnolias and fireflies, Aldershot and the Divistorul dinner, of trembling social pride and th0se who cannot make do