After dragging it out as long as I could, I have finally finished reading Blue Remembered Hills by Rosemary Sutcliff. Sutcliff’s memoir of her childhood and early adulthood is delightfully-written but cruelly slim. I rationed myself, reading only little bits at a time, trying to savour the treat as long as possible.
I should admit now that I’ve never read any of Sutcliff’s historical novels, which is bizarre. I am not sure how we never crossed paths during my historical fiction-crazed childhood but we did not and so this was my first introduction to her. I can’t imagine a better one.
[2019 Edit: Lies. As soon as I started reading The Eagle of the Night, I remembered it. I knew the story but hadn’t, in the way children don’t, realised it was by Sutcliff]
The danger of childhood memoirs is always that they might descend into that treacly swamp of sentimentality that can only leave the reader feeling queasy and the author, one hopes, embarrassed. This is decidedly not one of those memoirs. Sutcliff is affectionate in her remembrances but never boringly nostalgic for days gone by or pitying for the circumstances she faced. She has a marvellous sense of humour and wonderful eye for detailing, making the reader feel part of the episodes she shares with us.
Born in 1920, Sutcliff was the daughter of a naval lieutenant and, with the exception of long hospital visits, spent much of her childhood surrounded by other naval families, both in Malta and the UK. She developed Still’s Disease (a crippling and painful form of juvenile arthritis) as a toddler, and though her disability and the pain made her life different from most children’s, she does not dwell on these differences. As a child, she was determined to live as normally as possible, when not in hospitals or nursing homes.
While young Rosemary casually dismissed her disabilities, the situation was more difficult for her parents, especially her mother who had to care for an extremely sick daughter alone while her husband was at sea. Sutcliff generally speaks of her mother with fondness and admiration, but there are mentions of tensions between them that escalated as Sutcliff aged. The only thing that marred this book for me was my feeling that Sutcliff wasn’t quite as fair to her mother as she might have been. Especially since, from all she shares of herself, Sutcliff can’t have been an easy child to parent! Aside from the unimaginable stress her illness must have had on her parents, she seems to have been frustratingly willful when healthy. She remained determined not to learn how to read for an extraordinarily long time, more than content to listen to the stories her mother told her. This gap in her education bothered her not at all but was deeply alarming to her parents:
…I still had my inability to read. My father now joined the battle, and had small serious talks with me.
‘When you can read to yourself, old girl, you will find a whole new world opening up to you.’
‘Yes, Daddy,’ said I. Polite but unconvinced.
He resorted to bribery. I longed to model things. He bought me a box of ‘Barbola’ modelling clay with all its accompanying paraphernalia, and promised me I should have it when I could read.
‘You can’t go on like this for ever!’ he said.
‘No, Daddy,’ I agreed. I had every intention of going on like it for ever.
‘Don’t say “No, Daddy”.’
‘No, Daddy.’
Obviously, she eventually learned to read. She did so while attending Miss Beck’s Academy, where she had gone despite having “no real desire to learn to read, but the dignity of schoolgirlhood appealed to me strongly.” Miss Beck and her old-fashioned academy was one of my favourite parts of the book and a wonderful glimpse into the peculiar middle-class engine of the empire, since all her students were children of naval or military officers and often remained in that world themselves:
Christmas cards from old boys in big ships of the China Station and dusty cantonments on the plains of India; from fishery protection gunboats tossing in the North Sea; from Camberley and Greenwich and the Persian Gulf. Christmas cards from old girls in married quarters and rooms and small rented houses up and down the world, usually enclosing letters and snapshots and messages of love from small sons and daughters whom Miss Beck had never seen. Miss Beck’s old pupils seldom forgot her, and woe betide any of them who did. ‘I have not heard from Elaine this year. Of course her mother was always unsatisfactory, and they allowed her to use face powder much too young. I shall write to her in the New Year.’ Or, ‘I must say, I did not think Peter would have forgotten me so soon. He was a very affectionate little boy. I suppose getting his regiment so young has gone to his head.’
(Simon, wise man that he is, seems to have been equally taken with Miss Beck and her school when he read this.)
The book follows Sutcliff from her childhood into her twenties, when she worked as an artist before becoming a writer. This period includes a detailed account of her first painful love affair with a dashing young officer who, though delighted with Rosemary as a platonic soul mate, had no idea of marrying her. Not an easy experience for her to live through but an interesting and valuable one that helped her to grow up and helped her along her way to becoming a writer.
I’m not quite sure what I expected going into this but this exceeded my expectations in every way. Sutcliff writes so warmly and affectionately of the people that formed her that you can’t help but feel you have missed out by not having known them yourself and her enthusiasm for life and new experiences is wonderful to behold. A charming book and one that, delightfully, is readily available from Slightly Foxed, who have an unerring talent for picking perfect books.
I’ve never read any of her novels, either – and I can’t figure out how that happened. I loved this book. My edition has a picture of her as a child on the cover, and I never fully understood the effects of the disease until quite late in the book, when I saw one of the pictures. I’ve got the three “Eagle” books on the TBR stacks now – I need to get to them.
I knew nothing about Still’s Disease before reading this either so it was interesting to learn about it from Sutcliff.
[…] The full, enjoyable post is here at The Captive Reader […]
I enjoyed your post/review (and have referred to it at http://www.rosemarysutcliff.com). Better late than never to come to some of the other books, I would say—but then I would wouldn’t I, as the blog-website makes clear, for I am a relative of RS.
As well as The Eagle books as Lisa refers to them (the bestselling The Eagle of the Ninth; The Silver Branch; and award-winning The Lantern Bearers) many readers and critics rate particularly highly also Sword at Sunset (about Arthurian times), The Mark of the Horse Lord (about a Roman gladiator) , The Shining Company, Sword Song (Viking times) and Song for a Dark Queen (about Boudicca)
I’m glad you enjoyed the review. Thank you for linking to it.
Envying you the joy of discovering her books – I think missing them is probably an age thing. A pity you won’t ever be able to listen week by week to The Eagle of the Ninth on Children’s Hour – talked about the joy of that with Terry Pratchett one evening. Among her less well known works can I recommend The Shining Company (her retelling of Y Goddoddin), Flower of Adonis (Alkibiades), and Rider on a White Horse (Fairfax and his wife – a lot of it is Ann Fairfax’s end of things)
It’s so strange that I passed them by as a kid because they were definitely there at both the public library and the school library. I might just have to try them now!
What a wonderful review – I did worry, seeing it in your sidebar for so long, that I’d done a Guard Your Daughters (i.e. thought you’d love a book that you actually didn’t love) – SO pleased to hear that this time it worked out well! You’ve made me want to go and re-read immediately…
I am incredibly lazy when it comes to updating my sidebar images, so please don’t let that worry you in future!
Looking forward to a new discovery! Thank you; it is so easy to get caught up in a cycle of re-reading favorite ‘forgotten’ authors that sometimes we miss a gem right under our nose.
Glad to have brought it to your attention!
I think this is possibly the one book of Sutcliff’s books that I haven’t read. Now do please read the trilogy that begins with ‘The Eagle of the Ninth’ which has to be one of the greatest books for children ever written.
The Eagle of the Ninth books are certainly the ones that appeal to me the most right now!
I loved Sutcliff’s books as a kid, and I’ve introduced them to my kids now. I didn’t now about this memoir, so I’m putting that on my TBR list now.
Wonderful. As a fan of her novels, I’m sure you’ll enjoy this even more than I did.