Writing wrongs of lost childhood
ROSIE: SCENES FROM A VANISHED LIFE ★★★★ by Rose Tremain Chatto & Windus, £14.99
ROSE TREMAIN is the award-winning author of celebrated novels including Restoration, Music And Silence and The Gustav Sonata. But in her first work of non-fiction she reflects upon her sad, lonely childhood at the hands of her damaged and self-absorbed mother Jane.
Tremain came from a privileged background. She grew up in Chelsea, west London, and during school holidays she and her older sister Jo had the run of her grandparents’ sprawling Hampshire pile Linkenholt Manor. There they were waited on hand and foot by a battalion of servants. But behind the privileged facade lay a world of emotional dysfunction.
“Rosie” never felt loved by her parents or her grandparents. Her childhood was “defined” by a longing for the moment when her adored nanny Vera Sturt, or “Nan”, “would be revealed as my true parent and Jane would be sent away”.
Tremain credits Nan with saving her sanity and showing her so much love that as an adult she was able to break the cycle of her emotional inheritance and show her daughter Eleanor the love she had never received.
In her defence Tremain’s mother had also suffered a loveless childhood. Her parents never recovered from the deaths of their sons, one from a burst appendix and the other killed in the last month of the Second World War. She was sent to boarding school aged six.
But when Rosie was 10, her father Keith, a struggling playwright, left Jane for a younger woman. As Jane’s world imploded, she didn’t want to deal with the distraction or demands of her children. So Rosie and Jo were removed from the local school – and the nanny they loved – and dispatched to boarding school in Hertfordshire.
Tremain’s anger is palpable decades later. “What was Jane thinking?” I often found myself asking the same question. Of course Jane, who died in 2001, has no right of reply but she repeatedly behaves in a “dishonest and cavalier” manner. For example in 1953, when Rosie was nine, her great aunt gifted her the huge sum of £100. And Jane spent it on herself (“I’m afraid Aunt Marie’s money coincided with a difficult time for me... The rest just went”).
During the girls’ first holidays from boarding school, they were reunited with Nan, only for Jane to announce she planned to marry a family friend and that the family would be leaving London – and therefore Nan – to move to her new husband’s home in Berkshire. Rosie’s eyes became so sore from crying that she pulled out her eyelashes one by one.
It took Rosie years to settle in to her “rural prison” of boarding school. At the start of each term the girls would draw a “term worm” in their prep books and colour it in daily, counting the days until they would see their families. But she also discovered that writing fiction offered an antidote to homesickness. She was committed to becoming a writer by the age of 13 and later encouraged to apply to Oxford.
BUT Jane declared this an “inappropriate dream”. She didn’t want a “bluestocking” for a daughter. So just as Rosie was thriving once again, Jane packed her off to a Swiss finishing school where the height of ambition for the girls was secretarial work.
Tremain explains in a tantalisingly brief afterword that she eventually got her life on track and I longed to learn more about how she disentangled herself from Jane’s expectations.
But this is an impressionistic memoir. It was written at sufficient distance from the events it describes that Tremain’s pictures are painted with a broad and sometimes sketchy brush. Little wonder that she has never forgiven her mother for binning her letters, poems and school reports in a house move: they could have added so much colour and context.
But this sad story of Tremain’s formative years is still compelling, moving and nostalgic in its evocation of a bygone era.