The difficult thing about writing a memoir is this: how do you avoid numbing the reader with endless thumbnail sketches of the hundreds of characters who have crossed your path? It’s easier in a novel, where you might have seven to ten main characters and can take time to delve deeply into each one. In a memoir which spans a long life from pre-war Eton to modern-day Yorkshire, you need to be a very good writer indeed to bring alive, for instance, Mrs Tedder, who did the washing-up at Sunningdale School in 1953. Are you interested?
Well, I’m happy to tell you that you are. Wild Writing Granny is a book full of delight. It is shot through with love, anguish, light, darkness and fun. If you enjoy reading about English schoolmasters, matrons and schoolboys, you’ll adore it. Mary Sheepshanks is a skilled and wise writer. Her thumbnail sketches are so controlled, so accurate, so honest and concise, that within three lines of being introduced to the 130th character you have laughed and almost cried.
She was born Mary Nickson, the daughter of an Eton junior master who later became a housemaster, and the first chapters of the book describe Eton as seen through the eyes of a little girl living in Baldwin’s End Cottage, with a view of horses grazing on Fellows’ Eyot out of one window, and of Windsor Castle out of another.
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