Andrew Motion’s memoir of his boyhood and early youth is lyrically and sensitively written, minutely remembered and detailed, and quite exceptionally tedious to read.
Take those details for a start. Motion seems either unwilling or unable to discriminate between those that might have a universal interest and those that could only possibly be of any interest to himself. He describes to us the exact position of his bed at home, “jutting into the room from the left-hand wall, between the door and the wash-basin”; and outside, “In the far right-hand corner of the yard was a faded green door with a latch that never worked properly”; the local village hall contained “thousands of metal chairs in rows”. It’s not exactly Rousseau’s Confessions, is it? These are the sort of trivia and minutiae that you might fondly recall to yourself, or mull over with siblings in a nostalgic hour, but surely you’d never expect total strangers to find interesting? In a list of Ten Things I Really Don’t Need to Know, the fact that our poet laureate’s boyhood bed lay between the door and the wash-basin would come pretty high up the list. Unfortunately, much of the book is like this: quotidian details accumulating like grey little pebbles on a very dull stretch of shingle beach — and under damp, melancholy English skies as well.
For the emotional tone is consistently that damp English melancholy. You long for some flights of wild whimsy, some fire and passion, a sudden belly laugh, a wildly libellous aside, some sarcasm, anger, or the scything down of some poetic peer or predecessor. But no chance. It all remains steadfastly understated and polite and dull.
The reason for this pervading gloom is supposedly the central tragedy of Motion’s early years: the horrible accident suffered by his mother when she fell awkwardly from her horse, hit her head on a concrete track, and was put in a coma for three years. Even after she emerged from her coma she never left hospital again, dying nine years after the accident of pneumonia. The effect of this on any child, let alone a sensitive one, must be almost unimaginable. The trouble is, it happened when Motion was 17, yet he represents it as somehow darkening his entire childhood, prophetically lived under its approaching shadow. Chapters end with lines such as, “When I got out of bed and opened the curtains to look towards the Tree of Heaven, smashed bits of light were spreading across the lawn like a disaster.” This is years earlier, just after his mum has put him to bed with a goodnight kiss.
Was young Motion really such a Cassandra? There are occasional moments when the book flares into life: an all-too-brief appearance by a mad aunt who “had a moustache, and was surrounded by out-of-control spaniels”, and whose thatched cottage “kept bursting into flames”. And I enjoyed the description of the matron at school, Phyllis Gibbon, “PC Gibbon, as though she was a monkey and had been born into the police.” “With her flabby face with a hairy wart where her chin should have been”, and her hands “with their fatty rolls round the finger-joints . . . she was disgusting”.
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He can be finely perceptive, too. Immediately after his mother’s accident he has a bath. “The water’s too cold — but I don’t mind. Everything should be wrong now, even the little things.” His early, adolescent love of the first-world-war poets, “so sad, and so exciting”, rings bells — although he should have spelt “Messerschmidt” right: the world’s first jet fighter was a Messerschmitt, the gorgeous Me262, as any self-respecting schoolboy knows. And I was fascinated to learn that there was a boy at school with him called Burrows, “creepier than the others because he wore a Nazi Iron Cross under his shirt”. This took me back, because we had a creep exactly like that, too. Ours was called Willoughby. Does every public school have to boast a closet Nazi, like a kind of school mascot? Makes you wonder.
Generally, though, any such moments of sprightliness or insight are rare, small rewards after long, grey stretches of tedium. Given these considerable failings, it is surprising that the book comes so handsomely pre-puffed from a number of big literary names. Then again, since Motion is the poet laureate, and a dutiful, hard-working chairman of judges and committees responsible for handing out all sorts of handsome grants and prestigious literary prizes, perhaps not so surprising after all.
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £15.99 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst