WHERE SHALL WE RUN TO?
A MEMOIR
ALAN GARNER 4th Estate, 194pp, £14.99, Oldie price £11.10 inc p&p
Described by Philip Pullman as ‘the most important writer of fantasy since Tolkien’, Alan Garner, born 1934, was an early beneficiary of the 1944 Education Act, without which he could never have gone to Manchester Grammar School and Oxford. Yet according to Erica Wagner in the Financial Times, he regards the Act as ‘not a total blessing’ because it cut him off from his roots in the Cheshire countryside: ‘I felt something go and not come back.’ On learning that he’d passed the Eleven Plus his best friend’s mother said, ‘Well, Alan, you’ll not want to speak to us any more.’
Garner’s episodic and engaging memoir is set during the war, when even a self-confessed ‘sissy and lardy-arse’ could pretend to be a Spitfire and shoot down Messerschmitts and Focke-wulfs. But, said Nick Rennison in the Times, the past Garner describes ‘could as easily be the 19th century as the 20th’, because on Oak Apple Day at his village school ‘big boys run around with nettles, stinging anybody not wearing an oak apple or a leaf’. The
Spectator’s Ben Myers concurred: ‘Passing gypsies sell skinned rabbits with their paws left on to show they aren’t cats.’ But Garner doesn’t overdo the nostalgia: ‘His message isn’t that life was better then, merely different. The same could be said of Garner himself… a unique and wizardly voice whose territory is marked not by boundaries but by words spiralling in all directions, and that should be treasured.’