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Clay Under Clover. By Thomas Skelton. (Gollancz. 12s. 6d.) NAVVIES have been writers before this, and a few of them have been good writers. But sooner or later they have found there %15 not enough in navvying to provide material for a lifetime of writina Mr. Thomas Skelton, who is a navvy with a most impressive talent for writing, no doubt discovered that truth quite early. The main subject matter of his book is certainly his experience and reflections while working on a factory site ,in Northern Ireland. But from the very start the pure gift for simple writing, to which the natural vividness of his native idiom has added a genuine polish, reaches out to a wider subject-matter. It is not that there is nothing of deep interest in the life of a navvy. Clearly there is, when a man of Mr. Skelton's sensibility and wide sympathies chooses to look closely at it. The world may be as vivid from that point of view as from any other, and certainly it is real and hard enough when it is encountered daily at the point of the pick. But it is equally sure that a taste for reflection and a native ability to get reflections into arresting words are neither of them going to achieve their most effective outlet without the discipline of formal and even academic learning. Mr. Skelton manages to write of the world in general while writing of navvying in particular. Let it be said at once that he is not just a rustic genius. He had the practical ability and education to be an R.A.F. officer in the war. All he seems to need now is a subject of sufficient profundity on which to exercise his natural gifts, and judging by Clay Under Clover he is as likely to encounter that subject in the field of imaginative literature as in the more crudely practical pursuits which have occupied him so far. If he can write a book as intelligent, as readable and as delicately observant as this at the first attempt, and without ever having given much thought to choice of subject matter, then, with due attention to that question of selection— the first element of taste—he could well make his presence felt in the world of literature.
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