LORD BERNERS’ YOUTH

Greymouth Evening Star, 17 March 1934, Page 8

LORD BERNERS’ YOUTH

PICTURE OF MID-VICTORIANISM,

Lord Berners, composer, musician, painter, and wit, describes in an unusual autobiography, published recently, an incident in his tempestuous childhood, when, seizing the slipper with which his mother was chastising him, he drove her from the room under a rain of blows. He writes:

“The first blow acted upon me as a spark in a powder magazine. With empurpled face, foaming at the mouth, I wrested the slipper from her hand and began belabouring her throat and bosom with such violence that she ended by flying in terror from the room.”

He records later how his turbulent spirit was, when he was sent to school, cowed by a headmaster of almost unexampled' ferocity.

This book, “First Childhood” (Constable, 8/6) is devoted entirely, to Lord Berners’s very early years, and ends at the date he left his preparatory school. He criticises certain aspects of Mid-Victorian England, and gives an ironic picture of a rather joyless childhood. His parents were kindly, but preoccupied. Cruel schoolmasters and the formality and conventions of the time did nothing to make pleasant the lot of a highlystrung little boy. PARENTS’ ESTRANGEMENT. Lord Berners’s father was. Captain Hugh Tyrwhitt, the third son of Baroness Berners and Sir Henry Tyrwhitt. Captain Tyrwhitt married Julia, daughter of Mr William Orme Foster, M.P. Captain Tyrwhitt died in 1907, and his widow (who married again) in 1931. Writing frankly about his parents Lord Berners says:— “It was some time before I came to understand the lack of affection that existed between my two parents. I thought at first that it was the normal relationship between husbands and wives. Later on, when I grew more sophisticated, I was able to diagnose more accurately the hopelessness of the case.” “One of the most forbidding, aweinspiring women,” Lord Berners has over known was his paternal grandmother (whom lie calls Lady Bourchier). It was rumoured, he says, “that, concealed beneath her skirts, there was an elaborate system of strings and pulleys for raising her petticoats off the ground whenever she walked' in the garden. ... It is certain that, whenever she went out of doors, her clothes used to assume a curious bunched-up appearance behind, which made her look like an emu.” One unusual feature of the autobiography is that, in many instances, Lord Berners gives fictitious names to his people and places. PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED From Gordon and Gotch, Ltd.: — Nash’s January: Fiction, articles and illustrations of high order, "Do We Survive Death,” dealing with a question most people are interested in. ‘‘West” and “All Detective,” cater for those who like “thrillers,” shootings, and he-men’s doings.