Autobiography: Andrew Motion, novelist, biographer, poet and, of course, Poet Laureate, can now add autobiographer to the list, having just published In the Blood: A Memoir of My Childhood.
His paternal great-grandfather was a Scot who made good, brewing beer in 19th- century London. His mother's people, English not Scottish, had less money but more culture. The two streams came together when Motion's father bumped into his mother on a Chelsea doorstep after the war. They clicked and married.
Motion's father followed his family into brewing: his mother had no occupation. There were two children, Andrew, and his younger brother Kit, and the family lived in Hertfordshire, in a house felicitously named Little Brewers.
At seven Andrew was sent to a prep school run by a Mr Beak, who beat boys for poor marks when he checked the dormitories each evening. Motion was beaten regularly. He hated the place and it made him into a solitary child, but it also gave him his first aesthetic experiences. There were good paintings on the walls (put up by Mr Beak to impress parents) and he heard English folk songs at a school concert that stirred him profoundly.
This was no surprise really. He was saturated with the country. Both parents hunted and so did the sons as soon as they were old enough. Rambling around with the family's dogs and riding every day with his mother and brother to exercise the horses, plus salmon fishing and deer stalking at the family lodge in Scotland, filled the rest of his time and provided his most important experiences. No wonder he responded to English Folk song.
The family public school was Radley, which Motion went to at 13. After the horrors of his prep, it was paradise. He wasn't academic but instead of punishing him for failing, as Mr Beak had done, the masters at Radley told him just to concentrate on what he was good at. He was fit, so that meant rugby, and his other love was English. He started reading, Hardy at first, and then, guided by a sympathetic teacher with another numinous surname, Way, he gorged on Seamus Heaney, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, as well as Edward Thomas, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke.
All this reading plus the friendship of a Scottish maverick with whom he shared a study, led to a lot of thinking. Motion decided he didn't want to hunt anymore, and that he had finished with the reflex snobbery of his parents and their class, and the way they railed against the despoliation of the countryside by council estates, roads and motorcars. He decided he didn't even like the bellowing that went on at home all the time. He wanted to be cultured, bookish and aesthetic and he even - quite something for a lad of 15 - thought he might vote Labour later.
His parents responded not with incomprehension or derision but sympathy and interest. He was, however, fortunate that his new beliefs coincided with the diagnosis of contro malacia patella, a condition that affected his knees. The treatments, all drastic, included putting one of his legs in a cast, injecting cortisone into the joint and removing his kneecaps. From being a lusty rugby player Motion went, overnight, to being an invalid who had to stay home with his mother.
It gave Motion a golden period with her though. She read his first poems and they talked. His father also took an interest. He brought his son on a tour of the pubs his brewery served, and Andrew saw that his father was a much bigger man than he'd ever realised.
If the world was fair, the book would end at this point, with Motion reconciled with his parents and about to become a poet. But in the winter of 1969, his mother fell while hunting and hit her head on a concrete lane. Motion opens the book with a description of the accident and his own movements on the day: he was 16 and with a girlfriend. Unlike the rest of the book, which is written in the past tense, this is written in the present, which gives the material a vividness and an immediacy quite different from the rest. And because he starts with the fall, the bulk of the book, which describes the childhood and adolescence that preceded, has the shadow of the accident lying over it.
Motion brings the book full circle by ending with an account, again in the present tense, of the days immediately after the accident. This is the book's kernel, moving, appalling, and packed with horrible detail. The return of his father, for instance, from the hospital with his wife's clothes in an M & S carrier bag, her hunting stock lolling out like "a dog's tongue", is something I shan't forget in a hurry.
Motion doesn't, however, allow us to see his mother die. (In fact she never left hospital and died there nine years later, though this doesn't feature in the book). He opts instead to end with her lying in the intensive care unit in a coma a few days after her fall. This is a felicitous decision, because it was at this moment that he became the poet that he is, hurt and full of feeling, but also ruthlessly observant, taking in the I.C. unit itself, the nurse, the curtains, and all those details from which he builds this account. You have to feel to write and Motion can feel like the best of them but to write you also have to have a little sliver of ice in your heart, as Graham Greene said.
This is a marvellous book. It describes rural upper class England with exactness, candour and humour. It is also unashamedly proud of England and Englishness and I am sure it will contribute to the new pride our neighbour is beginning to show. Finally, and most importantly, it's a wonderful read. Every word, sentence and chapter, one drinks down with joy because it is so artfully and beautifully composed.
Carlo Gébler is a writer and broadcaster. His version of Táin, or the Cattle Raid of Cooley, The Bull Raid, was recently published in paperback by Egmont books
In the Blood: A Memoir of My Childhood By Andrew Motion Faber & Faber, 326pp. £16.99