Alastair Forbes
Forbidden by the literary editor to name any but cis-Channel productions, and anxious to show that I follow what the Wrong little, tight little islanders deem the issue of the day, I must declare how much I enjoyed A Spencer Childhood (John Catt Education £6) by Lady Margaret Douglas linnle. She is a great aunt of the Princess of Wales, born ten years after her parents had supposedly drawn stumps for good, her mother dying in this belated childbirth. She clearly made the best of her childhood, enjoying the regular company and friend- ship of the Althorp servants and the rarer visits of Baring cousinage. What a joy to read of the dear old pogo stick, at which she Was a champion! I found this an enchanting book, and one that I hope will be read with pleasure by her poor dear pretty great niece. She has never, alas, been much of a reader, but her fearless eye-to-eye contact with and instant tactile therapy of the sick and unhappy, gifts quite unexpected by herself when she was married off in such thoughtless haste, should enable her to out-Dunant Dunant and out-Nightingale Nightingale in the realms of the Red Cross and Red Crescent. With numberless juniors to remember at Christmas 1 had a preliminary peep into praiseworthy The Book of 1000 Poems for children (0.99), in which I came across Rose Fyleman's 'Mrs Brown', the person a little girl becomes 'As soon as I am in bed at night/ And snugly settled down.' So when I told James Michie, who, with another bright-burning star of The Spectator firmament, P. J. Kavanagh, has edited the excellent Oxford Book of Short Poems (0.99), that my dearly beloved half- Finnish, quarter-Danish eight-year-old granddaughter Miia-Mari Forbes had pre- sented me with the manuscript of her three-verse poem 'Dreams', I was pleased and proud to hear him praise it, especially its last four rhyming lines:
Nordick sun and burning fire, A joker playing on a lyre; Friends are dancing, it's Midsummer's Eve, Dream has come so I must leave.
It will be my constant reading through 1995.
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