Country Boy, by Richard Hillyer - review

Under his real name, Charles James Stranks, the author of this little masterpiece wrote on a number of ecclesiastical subjects: the Venerable Bede, Jeremy Taylor, Durham cathedral, where he was a canon. He died in 1980.

Country Boy was originally published in 1966. It is a memoir of the author’s childhood, and there is no reason to doubt the truth of its salient events. However, using a pseudonym, and changing the name of the Buckinghamshire village in which he grew up from Hardwick to Byfield (even giving us the proper pronunciation — ‘Biffield’) and presumably the names of the people characterised so brilliantly, perhaps accounts for the book’s coherence and heft. It reads like a novel.

There are moments of Proust-like detailed description of walks, of Tolstoyan evocation of farm labour, and his mother (charitably pitied by the loving son) is an almost Lawrentian figure, intelligent, no longer aspiring, trapped by class and poverty, ‘always sharp when doing someone a kindness’.