The Captive Reader

I have been collecting Slightly Foxed Editions over the past few months but The High Path by Ted Walker is the first one I have actually read and, I have to say, it sets a very high standard.  A memoir of Walker’s Sussex youth, the book begins in 1932, two years before Walker’s birth, when his father moved south from Birmingham in search of work, and continues on through to 1953, just when Walker is getting ready to leave for Cambridge.  The working-class Walker family had their hard times – multiple generations lived in one cramped house, money was scarce, and Ted’s sister Ruth died when she was only a few weeks old – but this is the memoir of a very happy childhood.  And there are few things I love more than happy childhood memoirs.

Born in 1934, Walker’s childhood memories really begin during the war.  He was an only child until he was ten and, in the absence of any brothers or sisters, his favourite companion was his father.  He had school friends and admired other male relatives but his father was the center of his world.  One of Walker’s earliest memories is the evening routine of welcoming his father home.  His description of it gives a sense of how much he adored his father – getting so much pleasure from being carried by him and watching him eat – and also how beautifully detailed his writing is:

…in the kitchen, even had I been blindfolded, I could have recognized him: for he brought into the house an entire anthology of smells I associated with nobody else: the hair-oil smell of his cap; the open-road gustiness of his flapping coat; and then the redolence of his trade: sawdust and shavings of pitch-pine and mahogany, a toolbag rankness of nailsacks and creosote, carpenter’s pencil and linseed oil.  With water scaldingly hot from the kettle on the hob, straight away he would wash his hands as methodically as a surgeon; and then I would nuzzle at his own essential fragrances – sweat and Nut-Brown shag at the nape of his neck – when he carried me through to the living-room table.  Here his dinner would be waiting for him (my mother and I would already have had ours) and I would watch him, cat-like, eat every mouthful.

What is particularly interesting is that all this was written when Walker’s father was still alive.  The High Path was published in 1982 when Ted Walker was only in his forties and he refers to his father several times in the present tense, still always in the admiring terms of his childhood memories.  As the book wears on, you realise how far apart the men’s lives drifted – Ted advancing on to a university education and a writing career that his carpenter father could not easily relate to – which makes it all the more poignant.  The easy companionship that existed when Ted was a child – when he and his father shared a French tutor and played cricket in the backyard – may have disappeared but the love and admiration definitely remained.

Walker was a poet and perhaps it is his poetic nature that occasionally leads him to contemplate the “what ifs?” in his life.  I love when writers do this.  It is why Making It Up is my favourite Penelope Lively book and I would be thrilled if every memoirist devoted a good third of their book to such questions.  Few do but I am happy to content myself with a couple of paragraphs from those whose minds wander down such paths.  I was particularly moved by his thoughts on his sister Ruth and what life would have been like for them had she lived.  There is something about the potential of unknown siblings that is unsettling but endlessly fascinating.  As adults, Walker and his brother (who was ten years younger, so their childhoods did not really overlap) were good friends but their relationship is very different from the one he imagines he and his sister, so close in age, might have had:

…the notion of my having had a sister often disturbs me, and I cannot drive past that cemetery without thinking of Ruth.  Had she lived, she would now have been a woman in her mid-forties, perhaps with a family of her own; one with whom I could share a confidence: a woman, I mean, who might be spoken to not as a man may speak to his wife, mother, daughter, mistress – all of whom have understandably vested interests when it comes to the intimacies of his heart.  Only a sister, much of an age, might be expected to take a neutral, unsentimental yet not unsympathetic stance about a man’s conduct or his state of mind.  There have been many times in my life when I could have done with knocking on Ruth’s door of an evening and having a chat in her kitchen.

The bulk of Walker’s memories are from the war years but the war plays a remarkably small role in them, not particularly impacting his school days or friendships, the things that really matter to a small boy.  To him, having been so young when the war began, a lot of what the older children viewed as novelty and the adults viewed as terrifying was normal.  If you only know rationing and blackouts, there is nothing noteworthy about them.  Still, there are moments when the war surfaces: he recounts how his uncle was killed by a mine and how he felt when his father showed him the pictures from Belsen.  He also remembers how he got hooked on the fudge given to him by Canadian soldiers stationed nearby, which he would do almost anything to get more of.  One of the strongest images of the books, for me, was of Ted and his friends rushing down to the beach the day it was reopened in 1945 – not even pausing to take off the roller skates they had been using when they heard the news:

When we reached the stony road by Glazebrook’s off-license, we did not stop to remove our skates.  Absurdly on our wheels, we trod across the shingle and down to the sand we sank into.  The tide was far out, the sun was just setting.  There were hundreds of people strolling, their faces lit with pink delight.  This, then, was what Peace was: to stand and gaze at the unsinister sea; to pick up a streamer of bladder-wrack and watch it lift with the wind.  We took off our skates and ran about crazily.  We paddled, kicking the water, tasting the salt on our lips.

How strange and wonderful, after years of living by the sea, to finally be able to enjoy it.

The book continues through Walker’s teen years, touching on his academic progress, his growing love of languages, and his first love, Lorna.  Lorna and Walker met at a dance when she was sixteen and he almost fifteen but that was it.  First love was true love and they married shortly after finishing university, had four children and remained together until her death in 1987.  Walker’s second memoir – The Last of England – deals with Lorna’s painful final illness and Walker’s difficulty dealing with her death.

I knew nothing about Walker before I began reading – well, I knew from Slightly Foxed that he was a poet but I have never read any of his work – so I had no particular attachment to him but I loved him by the end.  The writing is strong but simple, full of rich images but no excessive flourishes or sentimentality.  This book is simply the fond remembrances of a man thankful for his happy upbringing and, as such, it is perfect.