MEMOIR: The Hidden Roads: A Memoir of ChildhoodBy Kevin Crossley-Holland Quercus, 230pp. £16.99
Kevin Crossley-Holland is a poet and an acclaimed children's writer, and this engaging memoir uncovers some aspects of his own, largely fortunate, childhood in a pleasant part of England, a village called Whiteleaf in the Chiltern Hills with its vast chalk cross cut into the hillside behind the family cottage, Crosskeys. In Crosskeys, in the early post-war years, lived the Crossley-Hollands, on the surface a perfect English storybook family – father going off each week to his important job as controller of music on the BBC's Third Programme, doughty mother, who'd trained as a potter, two handsome, companionable and enterprising children, Kevin and his sister Sally (three years his junior), a beloved dog, a cat and a budgerigar. But this family, no less than any other, was beset by tensions and troubles only fully comprehended by the author in later life, and touched on very lightly here.
What Kevin Crossley-Holland employs in this book is the snapshot method of autobiography. Click – here we see him walking in the beechwoods with his father and sister; click – into focus comes his stupendous birthday cake in the form of a battleship, devised and baked by his mother. Excavating his own upbringing has resulted in short, evocative snippets of recollection and reflection, bound together with an amiable understanding of the power of the past, and a good dose of self-mockery.
Crossley-Holland was lucky to have parents who encouraged his musical and archaeological interests, but neither they nor he, it seems, were avid readers. He was more an outdoor than a reading child – oddly enough (he agrees it was odd) in view of his future preoccupations. Going by the works he mentions here – a list of "classics", an old-fashioned history of England called Our Island Story– we'd have to find his juvenile literary resources rather meagre and fusty. No William, Biggles, Bunter or Blyton – the last absence, too, despite being friendly with people who actually lived in a house called Red Roofs, in which, in the author's view, a sympathetic atmosphere prevailed. They were a proper family. He adds: "We were not."
Whatever the shortcomings of the Crossley-Holland household, though, the son of the family had plenty to keep him occupied and alacritous. Brass-rubbing, bicycling, cricket, summer holidays (the sands of Norfolk, or elegant excursions abroad), digging for Roman coins, even setting up in the garden shed a small but authentic museum. The last is quite an achievement for an under-12 – and even more of an achievement is to have the adults around him take the project seriously, donating valuable objects and offering advice. We see the young Crossley-Holland as a sturdy, self-possessed, tractable child, only given to minor rebellions, and with a strong but unsentimental affection for his sister, Sally. Sally joined him in due course at his first local school, Lady Mede, but later, at nine, he was sent to an uncongenial day-school and then as a boarder to Swanbourne House in north Buckinghamshire, where some of the facts of life were revealed to him. His final school destination was Bryanston, into which he scraped by the skin of his teeth; but his memoir ends before he gets there.
The title of this memoir can be taken in a number of ways. There were plenty of hidden roads in Kevin Crossley-Holland's charmed childhood surroundings, ways through the woods and into secret glades. But over and above the literal application, there are hidden roads leading to crucial perceptions, to ancestral illuminations, to the deepest connections with earlier times and ancient places. Crossley-Holland's "Arthur" trilogy has its origin in the author's fascination with varieties of English myths and legends – perhaps Our Island Storywas all he needed to set his imagination going, after all – and with a sense of continuity stretching backwards and backwards. Two quotations preside over The Hidden Roads(though one is affixed as an afterword and the other only appears in the final section). One is by Edward Thomas, from The Icknield Way, and begins: "To-day I know there is nothing beyond the farthest of far ridges except a signpost to unknown places." The other has the 10th-century scribe Æthelfrith identifying the boundaries of his land in Monks Risborough (" . . . From the foul brook to the west of the ash tree on the bank . . . "). With these, Crossley-Holland gains a touch of the numinous, and, more robustly and very appropriately, claims for his book an Anglo-Saxon benediction.
Patricia Craig is an author. Her most recent book is a memoir,
Asking for Trouble
, published by Blackstaff in 2007