Celebrated novelist’s non-fiction debut offers vignettes of a now-vanished world

“I can sometimes conceive of my childhood as a long journey towards the one-syllable noun I could properly own: Rose,” writes Rose Tremain, explaining that she answered to ‘Rosie’ until she was 20.

This confession is an early indication of just how significant distance is in Tremain’s first work of non-fiction.

Rosie, subtitled Scenes from a Vanished Life, is exactly what it suggests: no comprehensive autobiography of the novelist’s life, nor the story of her formation of a young writer, but rather often dream-like vignettes of a girl that no longer exists.

Born in 1943, Tremain (inset) grew up in Chelsea, among the bomb-sites and the barrow boys. Holidays were spent at Linkenholt, her grandparents’ manor house in Hampshire — a rural “paradise”.

Love is largely absent in both homes. Rosie’s mother’s parents never recovered from the loss of their two young sons — one from a burst appendix, the other in the First World War — and are unable to love their daughter, Jane, who in turn struggles to show affection to her daughters.

Rosie’s father, a not very successful playwright, was barely present — even before he and Jane divorced and he disappeared from their lives. Jane reacts to this by embarking on an affair with her ex-husband’s cousin, whose wife begins sleeping with a married family friend.

“The grown-ups had entered a period of sexual madness, quite beyond us to comprehend,” Tremain observes, “making up for lost time”, the war having stolen their youth. What saves Rosie during these years of neglect is the kindness of her nanny.

I was struck by the similarities between Tremain’s childhood and that of the novelist Penelope Lively. Lively’s memoirs — Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived and A House Unlocked — piece together a whole lot of fragments, but Tremain takes this tactic one step further, setting up a distance between herself and her material that makes for sometimes exasperating reading.

That her inattentive mother remains ‘Jane’ throughout, for example, is understandable, but what little insight Tremain affords us of her own thoughts have a sense of sterility. Unlike Lively, who went on to Oxford, Jane decides she doesn’t want a bluestocking for a daughter, so Rosie has to abandon her academic ambitions and is sent to finishing school in Switzerland instead.