Puppy dogs' tails
Frances Partridge
FIRST CHILDHOOD by Lord Berners Weidenfeld, £12.99, pp. 233 hen I was asked to review this reissue of Lord Berners' record of his child- hood, my heart leaped up. Childhood is a time of marvels — wildly comic for one thing, fresh as a new loaf for another, and this vitality is such that children find it impossible to walk along the road, they have to hop or skip. But of course there are some who will have nothing to do with the subject and adopt the 'little monster' atti- tude.
Gerald Berners had a quiet but humor- ous approach, all his own. He made the most of the complexities that brought together grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts in a house called Arley. His paternal grandfather 'sat all day long in a darkened room and from his lips there came forth groans and cries'. And then there was Aunt Flora, 'from whose lips there flowed an appealing kind of bird-like silliness'.
Berners was an only child, a sensitive boy who often felt lonely and was quite glad of his cousins' company. He also loved the houses he occupied even for a short while and there are more descriptions of them than of the people who lived in them.
When he was seven his mother arranged for a tutor. First came Mr Allen, the local curate, and afterwards a mademoiselle from Geneva. They were not a success. At his prep school it need hardly be said that the first day of term 'ended with the sound of muffled sobbing'.
In the holidays Berners's mother encour- aged the neighbours to come and make friends with him. A chapter entitled `Nesta' gave me a few qualms. Nesta arrived with some ponies and children to go riding, but Gerald simply hated her. Was she too pleased with herself? It's hard to say; in any case when she was standing on a hayrick, he 'gave her a violent push' so that she fell on the shafts of a cart below and damaged her leg. While she was lying there the three boys present 'resoundingly hit her bare bot- tom'. She made for home to mutters of `nasty little cowardly girl!'
The final school before Eton was Elms- ley, and it was here that Gerald fell instant- ly in love with the classical type — the blond hero of the cricket field. It is hard to believe the story that his being hit by Bern- ers with a home-made cudgel in a rough outdoor game brought the two together, but I suppose stranger things have hap- pened.
In his Epilogue Berners writes signifi- cantly of his early years: 'I hardly under- stood at the time that places could be more important than people.' They certainly could be for him.
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