David Hughes

The box in the attic

issue 27 March 2004

As with the opposite sex, there are few books you fall for and want for life, even fewer with which you can find little fault. Here is a right stunner, if it happens to be your type — a secret family history, hitherto interred by the accidents of time, across the events of which the author stumbled by luck. A drawing on the wall at home caught Josceline’s adolescent eye. It was by Burne-Jones. Other clues to her prenatal past turned up. A relative found a japanned Victorian box in, guess where, an attic. A boring soldier or two surfaced from the bog of the Boer war. Her brother produced four flat leather boxes, from which generations of family scandals and eccentrics leap out of hiding. Officers drank claret at breakfast while planning to hunt and shoot, whether game or women or foreigners. But this is no conventional glance at the cadaverous lineaments of a society long gone.

Comments

Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months

Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.

Already a subscriber? Log in