So Many Loves. By Leo Walmsley. (Collins. 12s. 6d.)
Tins is a rare kind of autobiography—sedative without being dull. Very simply and unpretentiously Mr. Walmsley tells the story of his enthusiasms, from the age of about four when he began to fish with a bent pin to the first performance of the film " Turn of the Tide," based on a book about his native Yorkshire village. In a sense this fishing village which he calls Bramblewick is the central feature of the book, though the author travels in Italy, in the Pyrenees, to Mombasa and Kenya as a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, and to tropical Africa as a field naturalist, for a film company. It was at Bramblewick that the biological departments of Sheffield and Leeds University opened a marine biological station where Walmsley, who had returned from his secondary school to become an uncertificated village teacher, was given the fascinating, if ill-paid, job of curator. One of the research students, Sam, became his greatest friend, and the account of their discoveries is considerably more interesting than the more hackneyed sketches of the artists' and scteptors' studios where his later friendships took him. It was Sam who first encouraged him to write articles on natural history for the local Press, and the account of his progress as a writer, pot- boilers and all, is not the least successful part of this fresh and happy book.
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