Full and active life

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33609, 10 August 1974, Page 10

Full and active life

Sun Too Fast. By Sheila Powerscourt. Geoffrey Bles. 283 pp. Compulsive readers of the memoirs of celebrated people may be disappointed by the absence of purely social gossip in this book. The minutiae of such tattle is outside the scope of Lady Powerscourt’s interests, and those distinguished people whose friendship she has enjoyed were all noted for personal achievements in different fields of activity, In a longish chapter entitled “The Sundial” she does, however give us more than a glimpse of her early youth, and of the marring of three lives—her own and those of her two brothers—by an inhumanly vain and hostile mother, whose dislike of her husband and children must inevitably suggest comparison with Medea. Born Sheila Beddington, the author, whose kindly and indulgent father made up to her in maturity for the bitter unhappiness of her childhood, spent some of her time after the inevitable separation of her parents at Bellair, the country house of her maternal grandmother in Ireland, and the rest of it acting as hostess for her father in London. But she managed to indulge her passion for

knowledge during those years to good effect. Her erudition in such subjects as archaeology (including studies in depth of Greek and Egyptian remains) and ancient manuscripts is almost intimidating. Her knowledge in these fields won her the respect and affection of such experts in the field as Lord Brabazon of Tara, and Sir Chester Beatty — the latter surely a modern-day saint with his multifarious charitable enterprises and personal generosity. All through these pages there runs the thread of the author’s personal philosophy and abstruse researches into the meaning of life and religion, relieved always by a keen sense of the ridiculous, and, despite the periodical assaults of illness, an unquenchable curiosity concerning human problems. She has also found time to publish four volumes of poetry, hold high office in the Girl Guide hierarchy, learn the hard way to handle a yacht in a turbulent Solent; as well to make prolonged studies in ancient lore and civilisations. It would perhaps be an understatement to say that she has made a distinct imprint on the world she lives in.