It was with warm feelings that I read this lovely memoir of Dodie Smith, which tells you about her early life up to the age of 14. I savoured it bit by bit as if revisiting my own childhood and smiled to myself to find the “origin” of many idiosyncrasies of Cassandra Mortmain in I Capture the Castle here and there.
The fact that this was written by someone who lived in the period that followed the tight-laced Victorian era astonishes me because Dodie Smith is very open about boys and “the facts of life” stuff. It changed my idea of the Edwardians a bit, which had been mostly based on Downton Abbey.
Although I was not born in Edwardian England nor did I have three eccentric uncles like Dodie’s (always referred to as “the boys”), her description of her childhood/girlhood experience felt curiously familiar. Her thoughts and feelings strike a chord with me so much that, if there were such things as spirit writers (like those spirit animals in Harry Potter or daemons in His Dark Materials), I am pretty sure mine would be a Dodie Smith spirit.
Dodie is talented at capturing those forgotten sentiments of one’s childhood that are too subtle to be recognised in retrospect but were certainly there once. I totally understood what she said about there being “the other-world quality” about a familiar sight seen upside down when you are on a swing or seen in a mirror. She then adds “there was a feeling of liberation, which becomes increasingly difficult to come by as one grows older.” (p.88) How true! (I am afraid none of these might make sense if you haven’t read the memoir yet though.)
The chapter on a family holiday at Tenby in South Wales is packed with hilarious anecdotes. I couldn’t help giggling all the while, but Dodie adeptly finish the chapter with the following bittersweet scene:
"Later, we went to the sandhills, in the sunset; I slid down the biggest on my stomack, but the sand was already losing its warmth and we settled, high up, to watch the last of the sun. I built a little pile of sticks and stones and said I would come back and find them when I was grown-up, but her mother said they wouldn’t be there; she thought some of the biggest sandhills might, but even they would be changed by the winds, and she added that it was often sad to revisit places. I remember feeling suddenly chilled; for the first time an inkling of beauty’s evanescence, of relentless change, dawned on me”. (p.202)
After reading this part, I was left with an overwhelming sense of poignancy. I think Dodie’s writing strikes a balance between humour and pathos. One moment you are laughing out loud, the next you are struck dumb with the stark realisation that those moments don’t last forever, and they are destined to become part of the past.
The part where Dodie is in doubt as to whether she is in love got me laughing hard. So I feel I ought to quote snippets of it here for future reference.
"Was I in love? I hadn’t known I was, but I had read somewhere that girls did not always know, at first. I had also read that Nature looks particularly beautiful to those in love – and never had I seen a finer sunset." (p.244)
"I found his nose less romantic than I had hoped. And I proceeded to fall in and out of love with him for a week; ‘in’ when I was away from him, and ‘out’ when I saw him." (p.245)
Such a shame that the rest of the series - there are three books following Look Back with Love - are out of print and only sold second-hand at an extortionate price.