Book Review by Joan L. Cannon, Of War, Maturing, and Class: A Bundle From Britain by Alistaire Horne
Predictably, settling into the comparatively informal, warm extroversion of a group of Anglophiles, well-to-do east coast intellectuals with very few pretensions was the predictable culture shock. Horne discovered and quite rapidly accepted the sincerity of his hosts and especially his hostesses. Fitting into small Millbrook School, was an almost unalloyed pleasure. His tales of each year and its friends and teachers make clear how much he valued everything about being where he was, in spite of the disappointments of cool letters from his father, his loneliness so far from the familiar, the despairing reports (followed daily on a map at the school) of the progress of the war, he was able to appreciate his good fortune and enjoy his new friends.
Accounts of how he spent the holidays from school reveal even more about his sponsoring friends. An old brownstone in New York, Washington, DC, Nantucket, New Brunswick, Canada, and other places as far afield as Aiken, SC, are lovingly described, along with the evolution of an English teenager removed from his own class.
That last sentence comes to the point of the remark about the message referred to above. The book was a complete pleasure to read, Partly this is owing to the obvious character of the author, whose humor and humanity are echoed in every chapter. The unintended message is that his background and those of almost every other person in the book and in his life, though he seemed unaware of it, depend on that dirty word of modern liberalism, 'class.'
The kind of privilege to which I refer has little to do with pedigree or finances, and most to do with an attitude towards education and humankind that is not the province of the majority, nor the norm of any society. At the end of this delightful chronicle, with my eyes on the horizon outside my window, I couldn’t help wondering if Alistaire Horne realized how fortunate he was to have experienced the awful separation from everything familiar and familial in a place where the backgrounds and inclinations of all his hosts made them fully aware of him as a person.
After graduation from Millbrook, Horne went to Canada to enlist in the RAF. Like many of his ambitions up to that point, this one was fated for an unforeseen outcome. The book ends with his thanks to America, his "second country." It was lovely to see the copyright date of 1993 on a story finished in 1945. The reader is filled in on what became of all those essential personalities, with whom the author never lost touch over such a long time. There are recognizable names on the list, especially William Buckley.
The book is a perfect lesson of what a truly moving memoir can be. For those of us who can remember the time it encompasses, it's worth finding a copy if you can.
©2017 Joan L. Cannon for SeniorWomen.com
Editor's Note: Although we couldn't find a copy in our local libraries, we did note that the Link Service+ listed two copies. Link+ is open to any library in California, Oregon, Nevada or Arizona.
Another service available is: WorldCat.org: The World's Largest Library Catalog; https://www.worldcat.org/
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