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I read this over the last couple of days (wife and I are sailing for 3-4 weeks at the moment so have plenty of reading time but not much internet :-)) and it was among the most enjoyable autobiographies I have read for some time. It also presented an interesting picture of life in an isolated English village and its people around 1920 where a 5 mile walk was the radius of familiarity and communication (it turns out that in a country where no where is very far from the sea, Lee had never seen the sea until he headed to Spain in his follow on autobiography).
A few of my observations:
For me Lee's prose rolls along very nicely with well balanced sentences, and his wide but non-grating nor hackneyed use of figurative language, often in short tight sentences, gave the book its special value from a reading perspective. I think that in the like of the chapter "Winter and Summer" where, in my view, Lee borders on running away with himself with the use of metaphors, similes, and onomatopoeia, but succeeds; many writers, I feel, would have turned out a pretentious job if they tried to emulate him.
Lee comes across in his writing here, to me, as being a person of good humour with a positive and balanced outlook and, for example, that is typified in the "Winter and Summer" chapter where winter was just as enjoyable for him as summer despite rigors the like of "Wash-basins could freeze, icicles hang from the ornaments, our bedrooms remained normally unheated..." This tone is present throughout the book. I could not help contrasting the writing from such a person with the recent read of "Mrs Dalloway" in which, for me, the tone and prose reeked of being a product and evidence of the author's personal real life psychotic episodes (so pseudo-autobiographical?) with the gloom of the tolling, the many allusions to waves (in which she eventually ended her life), etc. that I felt put the reader at risk of just being a voyeur, for reading enjoyment, of Woolf's mental illness.
Lee also, for me, gets away with the quite heavy nostalgia felt throughout the book; but in the end I think he demonstrates he is a realist not dislocated from change by, for example, in the last chapter balancing the death of the squire, the effects of the last days of village isolation, the family's fragmentation, etc. against the impending marriages and moving on of his sisters and the sense that he is ready to move on himself.
Furthermore, anticipating his moving on producing as good a read, I am now into Lee's follow on book "As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning". It is quite different in that his use of figurative language is much subdued in comparison and having no real flavour of nostalgia, more weighted towards being a travel dialogue.
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