Portrait of love
Olivia Manning
Wood brook David Thomson (Barrie and Jen kins £3.75) David Thomson writes like an angel, telling his story of lost love. His green misty countryside is so vividly evoked, one can smell the grass and the scent of burning turf. Partly a memoir, partly a history of Ireland's sufferings under the English, the book is full of nostalgic poetry but a harsh thread of reality runs through it as it runs through the minds of the Irish today.
The author went to the Boyle country as tutor to the Kirkwood girls and fell in love with the elder, Phoebe. She was eleven when they amdeotrainngd fsolary The the tutor was his pupil's
girl, beautiful and sweet
natured, responded but had the good sense to keep the attachment under control. When the war came, the author tried to enlist and was rejected because
of his short sight. He returned to Woodbro
ok and stayed there until the Kirkwoods, unable to keep up the old, over large, decaying propertY, moved to a Dublin flat.
The Kirkwoods belonged to the Ascendancy, the Anglo
-Irish who displaced the original owners of the sland. In this case the owners were Maxwell, the only family in the district to survive the horrors of '4'7, and it is the Maxwell family that takes over Woodbrook when the Kirkwoods go. This is a Story of servival: the survival of the old race, the survival of love but not of the beloved. When the author returned to London, the two net lovers because only one was really in love _ wrote to each other until Phoebe could write no more. She was ill but how ill? Her Mother, writing in her place, had to admit that her daughter was very ill: I remember my acute anxiety, my watching the doormat for the post. t came at last near the end of the month on a ggy. day, a single letter white on the doormat and the right shape. There were only a few
i
words n the letter. It said what I knew it would say up from the mat that Phoebe was
when I picked it .
Not even the chaotic mis-binding of the last pages of this book can destroy the poignancy of its ending. :.t remains with one long after the story is told a haunting sadness, a memory and a dream.
Olivia Manning has most recently written The Rain Forest
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