WHEN SHE WAS A CHILD

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33857, 31 May 1975, Page 10

WHEN SHE WAS A CHILD

Long Ago When I Was Young. By E. Nesbit. Macdonald. 127 pp. N.Z. price $6 (aprox.). 1 “The Story of the Amulet”, by E. Nesbit, did most for me,” C. S. Lewis once recalled when discussing the early influences on his own magical faerie writings. “It first opened my eyes to antiquity, the ‘dark backward and abysm of time’.” Lewis was not the only adult a generation ago to recall and reread E. Nesbit with pleasure. The gentle little English authoress has floated in and out of favour for 80 years. Edith Nesbit (“Daisy” to her friends, always just “E” to her readers) lived between 1858 and 1924. She enjoyed a new popularity recently when her tale “The Railway Children” became a moving and successful television serial. “Long Ago When I Was Young” is her own backward look, from old age, at a childhood in a. world utterly different from the twentieth century. Her account of school and play in

England and France was only published many years after Miss Nesbit’s death. The episodes show her remarkable memory for the immediacy of childhood feelings. Children will enjoy them, but only adults will appreciate the full wonder of a writer who can recall so vividly, and with not a shred of mawkishness or self-pity, the * scratch of a slate pencil, the smell of a French cider press, and the awesome fear which night can hold for a child. Fear was so much a part of her earliest recollections that she determined her own children would be protected from it at all - costs. One hopes she succeeded. Not that her recollections are all dark. Edith’s search, in the 1860 s, for the “source of the. Nile” with her brothers among French woods and fields is just as exciting, and much more interesting, than adult expeditions in Africa at the same time. Noel Streatfeild supplies a graceful biographical introduction to a strange, moving little book.