Spectatorial
Michael Holroyd
All Stracheys Are Cousins Amabel Williams-Ellis (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £11.95)
Imet Amabel Williams-Ellis once in the mid-1960s. I wasn't sure what to expect. She had worked on the literary side of the Spectator, but apart from that I knew her only in relation to other people. She was a Strachey, one of her cousins being the biographer, another the translator into English of Freud's works. Her father had been editor, at its most influential period, of the Spectator. Her brother was the author of The Coming Struggle for Power and had been Minister of Food in the Labour Government. Her husband, Clough Williams-Ellis, was a celebrated architect and the creator at Portmeirion in Wales of a fantastical Italianate village. But who was Amabel?
I remember how impressed I was at lunch by her vitality and straightforwardness. Her Personality seemed to combine eccentricity with good sense. She tossed down a tall glass of lager while telling me the story of Alfred Russell Wallace, about whose life She was writing a book for children. What She said then she has written now in these memoirs. Wallace, she writes, was the self- taught collector for museums who was Charles Darwin's runner-up, a gentle Owenite socialist.
Quite independently he worked out the very same principles of the workings of evolution as Charles Darwin, and then generously conceded priority. Writing the book was enthralling because, as well as the usual vicissitudes of research, his story involved enormous butterflies, fires at sea, birds of paradise and all sorts of invigorating story props as well as the opportunity of studying an excep- tionally endearing human being.
This passage helps to explain what sort of writer Amabel Williams-Ellis is. She belongs to a rather unusual category and to some extent reminds me of another con- tributor to the Spectator, John Stewart C°Ills. Both claim to be 'slow' and, for Inuch of their lives, largely ignorant. They nave conducted their education at the Public expense and to the public profit, using their experiences and the writing of tile. 1r books to find things out — often things that were generally taken for granted. Both are teachers, and share the wOnder and exhilaration of their discoveries With us, their readers. As inquirers after nature and human nature, they seem ready 1_0 take on anything. Collis has discovered --_,Iltistopher Columbus, written a whole enaPter on a piece of chalk and another on the Potato (I am anxious to say 'a word about the potato. But will the Muse fail
me?'), discoursed on the human body, studied the marriages of Strindberg and Tolstoy. On Amabel Williams-Ellis's shelf sits an examination of the tank corps next to a study of John Ruskin and works on poetry, architecture and science fiction. She quotes with approval her neighbour Richard Hughes's distinction between ar- tists and sentimentalists: 'The artist teaches, the sentimentalist reminds.' Now in her 90th year with 40 books behind her, she is contemplating An Outline of Ignorance for children and, for adults, A History of World Nonsense.
She has written mostly for children, cam- paigning against Walt Disney and Enid Blyton with a series of authentic re-tellings of traditional tales and filling an important gap in children's non-fiction. Her own children had taught her that their questions often needed scientific answers. When they asked 'Why don't fish drown?', 'Why does milk turn sour?' and 'What's electricity? Animal, vegetable or mineral, or is it a gas?' she realised that there were 'hardly any accounts for children of recent scien- tific "marvels", let alone good stories of how these marvels had been achieved. Children's arms were jabbed or scratched to prevent them dying of smallpox or chok- ing with whooping cough, but their minds were deprived, for instance, of the riveting tale of how the secret of antibiotics was so nearly missed'.
Something sharp and professional awoke in her. Her five years surgical nursing ex- perience in the first world war had taught her something about anatomy; she set herself to learn about Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Rutherford's atom-splitting, the rediscovery of Mendel's work on genetics; and on other subjects — the oddities of marriage for example — she let her un- conscious do much of the research for her. So when, on the top of a bus one day, a grandchild wanted to know why girls look- ed like their fathers as well as their mothers, she could answer briefly and in a lively style This was the recipe for How You Began (1928) and its successors which broke new ground in children's publications.
She has called this book a memoir, but really it is genuine autobiography: the record of a soul in its adventures through life. She is often slapdash and does not ex- cel at individual pen portraits. Though there are some interesting glimpses of unlikely people — Maxim Gorky lecturing in Moscow, Goebbels speaking in Berlin — the value of the book lies principally in its power of charting the processes of growing up, discovery, and self-awareness. Her humour and persistent curiosity identify her as a modern person. After the birth of her first child she found herself wondering how 'after such a very undignified and basic ex- perience, Queen Victoria had managed to stay so pompous and still be so very much the Queen'.
This book is written as if for her grown-
up grandchildren: their generation. She takes us back to her Victorian childhood with its vintage uncles and eminent Spec- tatorial visitors; to the glitter of her Edward- ian youth supported by its hierarchy of servants, with the richness of its food, its restrictions of dress and behaviour, its com- fort and apprehension. She leads us into the experiences of war and explains how she became a 'class traitor' through her grow- ing interest in socialism. All ages, she tells us, are unprecedented: and all have their parallels and connections. She feels a con- nection herself with that intrepid 19th- century traveller Mary Kingsley, 'an an- thropologist before anthropology', in whose shining presence, when a child, she had felt 'a sort-of tingling'.
At many points of her narrative she asks the sort of questions that we who have not lived through these times might ask. Why did women put up with all that sartorial nonsense, such as the hobble skirt? Why did so many people fail to wonder and pro- test at the suffering of the first world war?
• In the texture of these questions and answers she shows herself as belonging to the present and the past. Some experiences, such as the death of her son, have been too painful to revive: 'Nobody should ask me to relive this'. But she is a natural writer and instinctively uses her sensations of bereavement over her son when describing the death, while she was a child, of her elder brother Tom: 'panic of an earthquake . . . a shocking biological affront'.
But Amabel Williams-Ellis is an optimist. On the whole, she has had a happy life and this book has given her a vivid second living of it. Tor me this has been a strange sort of pleasure,' she writes, 'a sense of being alive all over again. The experience has been of fresh life, regained vitality . . .' Her achievement is to have called up a real past and enabled us to share so much of it with her.
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