Getting to Grips with Life
Face to Face. By Ved Mehta. (Collins, 16s.) Mermaid Singing. By Charmian Clift. (Michael Joseph, 18s.) With Adventure in My Rucksack. By Arne Hirdman. (Jarrolds, 21s.)
Life's a Short Summer. By Gordon Cooper. (Jarrolds, 21s.)
Joy in Living. By Dugald Semple. (Maclellan, 15s.) Insisting upon being regarded as a normal boy, he fought with his friends, taught himself to cycle, and scrambled with the others over the rooftops after fallen kites. And, when he had exhausted what educational facilities were open to him in India, he tried to enrol in a Western school. He kept being refused—mainly on misguided human- itarian grounds—until, when he had almost given up hope, he was accepted by the Blind School at, of all places, Little Rock, Arkansas. Leaving be- hind what a blind person must value most of all, understanding friends and familiar surroundings, he set off alone, at the age of fifteen, for America. What follows is a modest account of academic success, and a happy ending; not that he has ever in the story asked you to be depressed on his account. He writes with a complete absence of self-pity or even of self-regard. He misses little of what goes on around him; and when you read his descriptions of his sister's wedding, of the Lahore massacres, of the students at Little Rock, it is hard to remember that he never actually saw them.
Charmian Clift decamped because she and her husband were fed up with Fleet Street, were 'civilisation sick, asphalt and television sick,' in fact, because they most emphatically did pot Like It Here. They sailed away with their two children to Kalymnos in the Dodecanese Islands 'to seek a source, or a wonder, or a 'sign, to be reassured in our humanity,' to hear, as she puts it in the title, a Mermaid Singing. They rented a house, had a terrible time with the leaking roof, made friends with their neighbours and wrote a novel. And, although they spoke no Greek when they arrived, phrases like "'Nitta mou," he grins,' were soon coming smoothly on to the page in her account of their adventures. It rather turned me up, the fascination the sponge-divers had for her. It was they who kept the island going, but every time they dived to the bottom of the sea they ran the risk of being permanently crippled. She seemed more to admire them as symbols of un- sophisticated, heroic virtue than to pity them for being so wretchedly exploited. And there is some- thing complacent about her view of her child- ren's growing callousness towards animals. Is that supposed to be another basic lesson that must be learnt?
Another journalist, and another of these adven- turous Swedes, Arne Hirdman, is more reticent about the impulse that took him on an expedition up the Amazon, and, the moment he left hospital after that lot, across the Atlantic, through West and Central Africa and down the Nile. If it was just to write With Adventure in My Rucksack, he certainly went ahout it the hard way. The South American section is the most entertaining, being
lection of sketches. It has a memorable portrait of an elderly female anthropologist bartering her own ragged, cast-off underclothes for precious souvenirs, arguing that it would not do to spoil the Indians since this would destroy the great contentment that was part of their charm.
'At one point Arne Hirdman engagingly de- scribes a group of Gambian natives watching the film The Jungle Pirates in an outdoor cinema, and thinking to themselves such was life in Europe. Is the African scene in Gordon Cooper's Life's a Short Summer any more recognisable, 1. wonder? Mr. Cooper emigrated to Rhodesia after the Great War to avoid returning to the life of an engineering trainee in Scotland. But although he lived there off and on for sixteen years he could never settle down. He carried around his own prison of self-dissatisfaction and resentfulness. When he could afford it he went around the world to escape, and those were the times when he 'felt most alive.' Unfortunately he had already written . them up, and all that was left as material for this rather depressing book were the periods of monotony, unhappiness and failure that provided no stimulus at all.
Few people can have settled for less than Dugald Semple. He left home to live in the open (The situation was ideal, right in the heart, of the country amongst peat bogs arid near ,a pine wood') as a vegetarian (This interested Ghandi very much, especially when I told him about' our home-made nut butter and soya substitute for milk') and to, do .,as little work as was needed to keep body and soul together; and now, fifty years later, he can claim success for his experiment. Joy in Living has no literary merit, but a certain'
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