[fantasyfan]

I very much enjoyed this book.

Certainly, Lee does not sentimentalise his childhood. Though the language is often strikingly beautiful there is darkness in his portrayal of both the village people and the poverty of his upbringing. However, I think that the total message is that the awful conditions can--in a strange way--be a kind of inspiration for the spirit.

I was re-reading an old 1961 edition which has an extended "Afterword" by J.B. Priestley. You might be interested in one of his insights which, however you might disagree with it, does raise some interesting questions:

"This is an account of what was, in contemporary terms, a shockingly limited, downright 'under privileged' childhood. . . . These children were fed anyhow, poorly dressed, hardly ever went anywhere, obtained such scraps of education as they could pick up, and there in their remote, old-fashioned village, might almost have been living in the Middle Ages. In theory the limitations of their life were appalling. But in practice they were not entirely a bad thing. As I suggested before, there might have been some loss, as well as gain, when the change, the improvements, the progress finally arrived. To begin with, these children made the most of their family life. They may have seen little but the village and the surrounding countryside, but--and this is certainly true of Laurie Lee himself--what they saw and knew they really saw and knew, as many urban people now never see or know anything. The colour, the flavour, the richness, the wonder of life, were all experienced and enjoyed.

"What seems to me chiefly missing now for vast masses of people--and in much of the writing about these people--is a whole dimension in depth. Their lives may be broader, free from the severe limitations, the old rural narrowness we discover here, but they are also much shallower. Their actual experience, not what happens to their bodies but what happens inside their heads, is therefore less exciting, stimulating, satisfying, spiritually rewarding.". . . [italics in text]

To illustrate his point Priestley quotes a passage which describes the uncles:

" . . . I think of them still in the image they gave me: they were bards and oracles each, like a ring of squat megaliths on some local hill, bruised by weather and scarred with old glories. they were the horsemen and brawlers of another age, and their lives spoke its long farewell. Spoke, too, of campaigns on desert marches, of Kruger's cannon and Flanders mud: of a world which moved at the same pace as Caesar's, and of that empire greater than his--through which they had fought, sharp-eyed and anonymous and seen the first outposts crumble. . . ."

Priestley's comment is:

"It is this dimension in depth, with its sense of time and feeling for what is symbolical, that gives such passages as this, of which there are scores in these chapters, their beauty, their poignancy, their magic."

And in that last comment, I think Priestley has isolated the spiritual spring that makes this book so memorable.