Made, marred, mollycoddled and inspired … Philip Larkin, Ian McEwan and Samuel Beckett are among the authors in this lively collection of affectionate and celebratory essays
In a wonderful piece Judy Carver considers the life of her grandmother Mildred, the mother of William Golding, and her “uncanny awareness” of people. Drawing on her father’s unpublished memoirs, Carver paints so detailed and vivid a picture of this displaced Cornishwoman and her benign “witchcraft” that the portrait seems to overrun the frame and become a study of aspiration and social mobility: “If class weren’t so serious a matter in England, it might be thought of as the national hobby.” Class is an invisible engine in these pages. Margaret Drabble’s account of Samuel Beckett’s relationship with May, his formidable mother, brings to life a prosperous Dublin household of artistic striving, frequent illness and severe Protestantism. May was an “ill-tempered” matron who quarrelled with her servants as well as her son, cosseting and constricting him at once. Psychologically he never eluded her sway, and much of his work sprang from their antagonism.
Warning: don’t insist on living with your child when they go to university, as Margaret did with John Ruskin at Oxford
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