Reflections in a family mirror

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34065, 31 January 1976, Page 9

Reflections in a family mirror

The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerly. By Diana Petre. Hamish Hamilton. 183 pp. N.Z. price $11.85. Roger Ackerly himself would probably be very surprised to know that the secrets, and many of the •ntimate details, of both his married and irregular love life are now public knowledge, thanks to books written by two of his children, one by his belated wife, and a fourth by his faithful mistress Ackerly was a prosperous English businessman whose firm, Elder and Fyffes. was a major importer of bananas. The firm gave him an income comfortable enough to support two households. The story of his “regular” family in Richmond (he married his wife, however, many years after his children were bom) was told earlier in the posthumous memoir “My Father and Myself”, written by the most eminent of his offspring, Joe Ackerly, for many years literary editor of the English “Listener” Now another of his children. Diana Petre, tells the story’ of the mistress

and the three daughters who lived in Barnes, and who appeared only briefly in “My Father and Myself”. The prominence of Roger Ackerly in the title of this second memoir is misleading, “Uncle”, as the three daughters he had by Muriel, his mistress, knew him, certainly appears often enough in the book, and the nature of his relationship with Muriel is one of the themes running through it, but not the most important. The main concern of the book is the relationship between mother and daughter, and the investigation and explanation (to the extent that it can be explained) of the parent’s character by the child. It is, therefore, a female mirror-image of Ackerly’s “My Father and Myself.” In her own way, Muriel was quite as interesting as Roger. She had a distinguished public career as a war nurse in the first and second world wars, but once the stimulus of a national struggle was removed she declined into a melancholic, incapable secret drinker. Muriel remains an enigma

throughout the book. In the last pages, Diana Petre talks of a “psychical blight” that had “settled early in the secret years”. Much about her mother’s early life the daughter simply did not know, and could not extract from her. And much of the mother’s later life is in shadow too, because the daughter deliberately cut herself off for many years from the strangely troubling figure. After that break, contact was not resumed until the deathwatch the daughter kept in the last six months of her mother’s life. There is now a considerable body of literature dealing with relationships between parents and children in British society in Victorian and postVictorian times. ‘The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerly” is a useful addition to it. It is no match for the classics, Edmund Gosse’s “Father and Son” and Samuel Butler’s “The Way of All Flesh”, or even for the lesser classic “My Father and Myself”. But within its limits it is a readable memoir and casts additional light on the relationship crucial to most people’s lives.