Hilary Tolkien (1894–1976)

A very slim collection of brief reminiscences from the author's childhood in Warwickshire from around 1900 to 1920.

Traipsing through fields to pick blackberries and wild flowers, avoiding bad-tempered landowners; recollections of a hostile old woman in a windmill and a friendly sweet-shop owner (fantasized as the Black and White Witches), a grumpy park-keeper, a road-maker in the first days of the motor car; driving to church in a pony and buggy; brief glimpses of a country childhood abounding in apple and plum trees, red squirrels, nightingales, and mischievous farm cats. There is a familiar quiet lament for the passing of the 19th-century countryside: "His cornland path led to the most delightful dell where the most enormous blackberries grew. We called them 'bumbles', and the dell 'Bumble Dell'... The Great Western Railway filled in our Bumble Dell in order to get from Brum to London quicker than the other railways."

Then comes a list of First World War battlefields, with a note about fuel coupons and a bomb on the Broadway road.

"Fed trainloads of troops on Pershore plums that we poured into their tin hats... We were often picking Damascenes late, by the light of the floodlights that brushed the sky all through the night. Later we had the planes and bombs over Coventry, and everything smelt of cordite, and the doors all rattled by the noise and shake of the aero barrage, even twenty miles away."

A nostalgic volume which is clearly of value to the author's family, and a pleasant little contribution to the authentic record of a vanishing life; but it would scarcely have merited publication (with illustrations and footnotes) were it not for the fame of the author's elder brother, with whom he shared a lifelong friendship and a deep love for the countryside of the West Midlands.

MB 9-iv-2018… (mer)