IN OUR STREET

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 1, 2 January 1932, Page 17

IN OUR STREET

A CHARMING STORY

"Hn Our Street" (Cassell), Comptou Mackenzie's latest novel, is inspired by old Kensington, and perhaps by Thackeray. It is, however, no delineation of contemporary manners, but is what its author somewiierc calls "a reverie," in which he recalls, with that astonishing momory of his, a certain street wjth which ho was familiar as a boy, its houses, its facee, its shops, its children, its oddities and humours, its romance and its noises. At first the reader is cheated into supposing that this is pure autobiography, and that the boy wlig stayed with two maiden aunts at No. 9, BeauclerU street was in fact Mr. Mackenzie himself. It is not Mr. Mackenzie, but a wraith of his youth, nameless, who remembers a decade of childhood, not wholly imaginary, between tho two Jubilees of Queen Victoria, and who, looking back from some unrevealed present, indulges a regretful retrospect.

Bcauclcrk street, numbered only by the odd numbers from one to twentylive, is uniform, Victorian, of threestoried houses built of dirty yellow brick, of which each area "had a laburnum, two lilac bushes, and a dustbin" and every garden three poplars. And in these houses lived a doctor, an o.rgauist, and his old-maid sister, a minor preRaphaelito painter, a large Bohemian family, a tremendous star of the drama, a retired . general, a Jewish business man, a governess of the old school, some naughty children, and •several more. We meet them through tho boy's point of view. There is a little love, a little sorrow, and a little mirth, perhaps coloured by regret that it is a tale of a London that will never be known again. However, it opens one's eyes to tho richness with which life, in no matter what street it is laid, decks itself for a child.