My Crowded Sanctuary. By Clare Sheridan. (Methuen. 12s. 6d.) MRS.
SHERIDAN, sculptor, mystic, pacifist and cousin of Winston Churchill, has written a somewhat effusive book, swarming with clichés. This is a pity because she has some excellent material—e.g., her visit to the Empress Eugenie at Farnborough in 1914; her mother's stories of the Second Empire, of waltzing with the Prince Imperial at Compiegne and the Tuileries, where she was escorted by the coloured nurse who had come with her on the sailing ship from America. In 1942. the author wheedled her pre-occupied and formidable cousin into allowing her to do a portrait-head of him, as he worked in bed in the mornings. She began with some appre- hension, knowing that on occasions he had been rude to artists, but throughout the sittings the Prime Minister behaved with great good-nature and charm whether purring over the intentional emptiness of his engagement sheet, the excellence of his relations with the chiefs of staff, or greatly touched by a miniature of his lovely American mother. The " sanctuary " of the title is the old family property of Brede on the south coast, once owned by the Abbey of Fecamp, which became a strong base for Fifth-Columnists at the time of the Norman Conquest. In this war it was crowded partly with living and rather destructive soldiers, partly we are told, with spirits of the dead—Mrs. Sheridan's dead son, a medieval priest, a wronged servant—with all of whom the author holds some- what unconvincing conversations. The book reflects a courageous attempt to master personal loss and despair, but the reader may be inclined to allow that there are more things in heaven and earth, etc., without extending his indulgence to a fifteenth-century spirit who complains " the fellow did me in," in the strangely brisk idiom of his time.
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