About Time: An Aspect of Autobiography

This remarkable memoir describes the author's life as the daughter of a rather unsuccessful English vicar, from her birth in 1918 until the outbreak of the Second World War. The potraits she gives of her parents are extra-ordinary. They were remarkably unsuited, her father intense and full of sexual energy, while her mother seemed to have little interest in men. It soon became a hellish tormented marriage of the kind depicted by Ivy Compton-Burnett. The family move restlessly about England, from the Cotswolds, to London, and on to Derbyshire, without ever finding a satisfactory home. The book is notable for the compression and beauty of it's language, and the sensitivity of the treatment of her parents' tortured marraiage and her abusive but sometimes loving father. It might be compared with J.R, Ackerley's `My Father, Myself' and Blake Morrison's `And When did you Last see your Father?'. A real work of art.