Spacious Days
When I was a Child. By Edward Hulton. (Cresset Press. 18s.)
CHILDHOOD memories begin, for most people, with a series of isolated snapshots, stills rather than moving pictures ; and of the snapshots themselves it is generally hard to tell how many are truly and immediately remembered and how many are indirectly recalled mem- ories of memories, offprints, as it were, of the original impression. The difference between the direct and the indirect recollection is vividly, , though rarely, made plain when in middle life a very early memory is roused for the first time by an encounter, a scent or a taste. It is even more rare for the very early snapshot to become a sequence, for the immobile image to take on that lively continuity of action and relation to surroundings which characterises later memories. And it is rarest of all for childish memories to be recalled in later life with just the same impact, unsophisticated by later knowledge, as that of the events which they embody.
Mr. Hulton's book of childhood reminiscences is an amalgam of rarities. Connected and quite obviously genuine memories, originals rather than offprints, sequences rather than snapshots, running back to the age of three or less, make him at forty-five surely the youngest of first-hand authorities on the days before the first Great War. They are recalled with the directness of the innocent eye, while the adult author, a skilful impresario in the background, places them in that setting of which the innocent eye itself must necessarily have been unconscious. Child and impresario grow nearer together as the book progresses, and something of the special quality of the earlier chapters is accordingly lost ; but by that time the interest has in some measure shifted from the small Teddy Hulton and his family circle to a wider social scene, and though its nature has changed its intensity remains.
This is, indeed, a fascinating book. It lacks one element— poetry ; Mr. Hulton's early-rising sun, illuminating so steadily and brightly what to most people remains dim or fitful, seems to have dried the dew on the grass. But it is fascinating as a character study. The formidable and on the whole dislikable "Dada," the enchanting and no doubt exasperating " Mama " would either of them make a novelist's reputation ; fascinating as the picture of a more highly-coloured age, near yet infinitely remote. (Any tendency to nostalgia on the part of a feminine reader is, however, firmly checked by Mr. Hulton's frequent references to the clothes of the era. Today it would take quite a severe chronic illness to inflict as much sheer physical misery as did Mrs. Hulton's corsets and shoes and strangulating high-boned collars.) It abounds in excellent anecdotes and vivid vignettes. It is written with a total lack of self-importance or egotism, with great warmth of sympathy, with tolerance and with humour. It will appeal, one imagines, to a wide circle of readers, but particularly to those of two age-groups ; to Mr. Hulton's close contemporaries, reflecting with some astonishment on the world which they unwit- tingly and semi-consciously shared with him, and to his elders, comparing the child's-eye view of that world with their own adult or adolescent recollections. It will also serve as a cautionary guide to parents, to whom the notion of being perhaps so very well remembered by the very young may come as a salutary shock.
HONOR CROOME.
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