Rural life

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32886, 8 April 1972, Page 10

Rural life

Emily Davis. By Miss Read. Michael Joseph. 238 pp. Admirers of Miss Read’s illuminating studies of English rural life will welcome this valedictory tribute to one of her best-known characters. Emily Davis dies peacefully in her sleep at the age of 84, leaving behind her a record of unobtrusively devoted service to her small community, and a large number of friends of all ages and in all walks of life. Knitting up a number of recollections Miss Read weaves an enchanting pattern of the old schoolteacher’s career beginning with Emily Davis’s own early days, when she formed her friendship with timid little Dolly Clare with whom she was destined to share a home in their old age. The author takes us through several episodes of Miss Davis’s life deftly embodying the characters who had most reason to cherish Emily’s memory for some sensible and timely service. Miss Read’s narrative style never falters, and whether she is writing restrainedly about the love affairs which ended (though for different reasons) the hopes of marriage of both girls, or the purely comic episode of Danny Goss, the poacher, and his concealment from die local policeman of two pheasants in his children’s beds, she is never at a loss for a suitable phrase. The dire poverty, and low intelligence of some of the inhabitants of Beech Green and Fairacre are not glossed over, and greed, selfishness and low cunning were encountered daily by the tolerant Emily whose discretion in "not telling” certain facts which came to her notice was remembered with gratitude by those with guilty secrets. Good old Dr Martin who had known Emily for many years summed up to the sorrowing Miss Clare her friend’s simple epitaph, "She left her own memorial. She’ll never be forgotten.” The book is necessarily sentimental at times, but never cloys, and M. Goodall’s illustrations highlight the evocative spirit of the work.