An East Anglian childhood

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33442, 25 January 1974, Page 13

An East Anglian childhood

Norfolk Child. By Jane White. Michael Joseph. 188 pp. Norfolk, harsh, enduring, dour, captured Jane White’s loyalty and love from the time she was taken there as a small child to live in a lonely farmhouse. The vast arching East Anglian sky, the strong winds, the huge empty land with its tiny flint cottages and great churches make up a landscape which, she admits, became and remains an obsession with her. Jane White was born in Cambridge, when her father was a university lecturer, but for the sake of her elder sister’s health the family moved to a large farmhouse near Cromer. In this house and the surrounding countryside she. her sister and her younger brother spent a childhood "so happy as to be in retrospect almost painful to remember because 1 can never have it again.” “Norfolk Child” is quite simply a description of that childhood and that country. Jane White is already an established writer with five successful novels to her credit and this memoir of her early years is written with the same skill and easy style developed in her fiction. The turn of the seasons, the men of Norfolk, the vast featureless landscape are more than just a background to tales of a happy childhood, they appear to the reader as vivid and real as they clearly still remain to the author. Yet neither they, nor the childhood treats of pantomine, bonfires or harvesting are ever described sentimentally. “Norfolk Child ’ is a strongly felt and beautifully written record of a child's love for a harsh land under great skies.