Beside a Norman Tower

[Atlantic Monthly and Little, Brown, $2.50]

HAVING forsaken, for the moment, her own intricate and vivid type of novel, Mazo de la Roche has here set her hand to a very different sort of narrative. In Beside a Norman Tower she has undertaken a peculiarly difficult task, and has mastered it, not only with skill, but with that persuasive reality for which every reader is always asking in his heart. She gives us the account of two very small English children, three and two years old, and of a year and a half of their crowded, wondering, and busy lives in Devonshire, interrupted by a brief sojourn in London. Not often does any author dare to attempt such a study, the continuous experiences of persons of such extremely early years. The dramatis personœ of When We Were Very Young are seasoned veterans compared with this pair, Gillian and Diggory. Above the high-walled garden where they play stands the church with its Norman tower, housing those bells which occasionally come crashing into little Diggory’s sleep to fill him with uncomprehended terrors.

This is definitely a book for adults, since young readers could have little appreciation of what the story really accomplishes. As grown-ups, our conscious memories go back to glimpses, here and there, of what we knew when we were four, or perhaps three years old. Continuous recollection is a tide which washes back only so far as the age of six or seven. We do, however, possess a depth of unconscious recollection of those earlier things, occasionally stirred by the touch of some unexpected reminder. It is this wordless store of half-forgotten memories which responds with instant understanding to the tale of these two small persons, each going forward in his own swift development. We see the casually noted but satisfying beauty of the English landscape slide past; we watch the picturesque scene of the Hunt, and the throbbing excitement of the birthday party. We become acquainted with the all-powerful characters of this little universe — Nurse; Mother, a being set apart from all others on earth; Chad, the gardener-chauffeur, untiringly kind, patient, and protecting. We see, in a child’s far, indifferent perspective, death and the pain of other partings; but never does the author forget to make us see that it is the child’s sense of values which rules the narrative. There are the joys of stirring woolen gloves into mud puddles to make pudding, the brief terrible quarrels over the possession of insignificant objects, the equally intense making-up, the hopeful but always fruitless rebellions against the nightly duty of going to bed. Beneath these day-by-day incidents lies the unshakable foundation of all that children crave without knowing it — warmth, comfort, security, and love. The whole is told with an intangible grace specially suited to an account in which one tooheavy touch would ruin all.

As we read, each of the two children becomes, without our knowing when it began to be, the portrait of some beloved child of our own intimate experience. We have all known the pangs of seeing the magic period of irresistible littleness advance inexorably into bigness, with the loss of something which can never be replaced. It is just that thing which Mazo de la Roche has caught and made permanent; through her means it can never escape us altogether.

CORNELIA MEIGS