Haunted by hunting

This is an ambitious book. Andrew Motion set out to write a memoir of his childhood but not from the standpoint, and distance, of a grown-up looking back; he set out to write it in the character of a child and teenager living through his experiences. The result can be startling.

Of his father, a third-generation brewer and a colonel in the TA (a rank he used in private life), he says: ‘every time my dad said “Surrey” he made a tsk noise, because he’d once met someone from Esher who wore a Gannex coat like Mr Wilson’. In other words, Motion Senior was a hair-raising snob. The county of Surrey was written off because of one man’s mac. His son makes no comment of any kind. You don’t when you are 16.

So this is a family memoir where the grown-ups, especially his parents, come and go in a haze of acceptance, for Motion has chosen to write from a time before rebellion. No judgment, no bitterness, even though by sending him to the usual crazy prep school they prompt the unhappiest days of his childhood, and little characterisation beyond the fact that the Colonel puts Bay Rum on his hair, and his mother is beautiful. For all these, you have to read between the lines.

The trouble is that, when you do, you feel guilty, for this was a family to whom something terrible happened. When Andrew Motion was 16 his mother suffered a hunting accident, from which she did not recover: the book ends with her still in a coma. And with that accident the family life he had known was over.