Paradises lost and a mother from hell

Rose Tremain Chatto & Windus €17.99 Rosie: Scenes From A Vanished Life

‘Rosie illustrates fiction writing’s limits as an act of catharsis’

Rose Tremain grew up hating ‘Rosie’, the name foisted upon her – but not as much as she came to hate her mother. In her non-fiction debut, the awardwinning novelist, right, charts a Fifties’ upper-middle-class childhood blighted by a chilly, envious mother and by the loss of successive paradises. Tremain is the first to admit her privilege. When she built a treehouse with her sister and cousins at Linkenholt, their grandparents’ Hampshire estate, the butler climbed a makeshift ladder bearing orange squash on a silver salver.

‘If part of your childhood is spent in a paradise like Linkenholt, a veil falls between your eyes and the truths you need to learn about the world,’ Tremain writes. ‘Later, this veil falls away.’

The falling away begins when she’s ten years old and her father, a failed playwright with tired eyes, runs off with a younger woman. Her mother, Jane – thin and angry, scarred by her own unloving parents – swiftly marries his cousin, Sir Ivo Thomson. The girls are promptly evicted from their thriving London lives, deprived of their beloved nanny, and packed off to an obscure boarding school.

‘The Great Casting Away’, as Tremain dubs it, turns out to have its benefits, but no sooner has Tremain found happiness in her schoolwork and Oxford hopes than Jane wrenches it away, dispatching her to a Swiss finishing school.

‘What was Jane thinking?’ becomes the book’s refrain as the maternal misdeeds mount up: she spends Tremain’s money, defaces a glowing school report, ruins birthdays… When Jane later becomes the victim of a shocking crime, Tremain, now in her 70s, can’t help wondering what was done to provoke it.

Fans will find the source of many a character and episode from Tremain’s fiction here. Yet even as it describes some of the ways in which an author is made, Rosie illustrates fiction writing’s limits as an act of catharsis: it’s impossible to entirely outrun one’s childhood. Happily for the reader, this makes for an evocative, unflinching memoir that’s all the more electric.