Mangoes, Mimosas and Mirth by Griselda Heppel
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| A Late Beginner by Priscilla Napier |
This view doesn’t allow for various other essentials eg the ability to write in a way that actually engages the reader…. But I suppose that is for a publisher to decide.
In the case of memoirs I’ve read in the last year or so, I am very glad the publishers did decide, and even gladder for the perspicacity of Slightly Foxed Editions, in rescuing many out of print gems and giving them new life. A Late Beginner by Priscilla Napier, Jessica Mitford’s Hons and Rebels, Hermione Ranfurly's To War With Whitaker (though to be fair that is a young person’s memoir, not a child’s) and now, Mango and Mimosa by Suzanne St Albans, whose childhood was arguably the most eccentric of all.
Up against the Mitfords', I realise that is quite a claim.
In an era when parents were much less ‘hands-on’ than they are now, Suzanne’s come over as particularly, sublimely irresponsible, disappearing without warning for days and months on end. Marie provides the only stability in their lives, and the one and only time she takes a month’s holiday, her 20 year-old stand-in locks the children in the nursery (where meals were always served anyway) for the whole period, in the height of the French summer. How did the mother allow such cruelty? She clearly loved her children but you didn’t interfere with Nanny, it seemed. The past is another country, as we know.
In the case of memoirs I’ve read in the last year or so, I am very glad the publishers did decide, and even gladder for the perspicacity of Slightly Foxed Editions, in rescuing many out of print gems and giving them new life. A Late Beginner by Priscilla Napier, Jessica Mitford’s Hons and Rebels, Hermione Ranfurly's To War With Whitaker (though to be fair that is a young person’s memoir, not a child’s) and now, Mango and Mimosa by Suzanne St Albans, whose childhood was arguably the most eccentric of all.
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| To War With Whitaker by Hermione Ranfurly |
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| Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford |
Born in 1922 in Java Assam, Malaya, where her reclusive father ran a rubber business, Suzanne Fesq and her siblings ricocheted between their termite-infested house in Malaya and their village home in Vence, France, with a bewildering uncertainty, only matched by the unpredictable nature of their schooling. The children were left entirely to the care of Marie, their devoted, strict, puritan and - fortunately, for their education in the natural world, at least - zoologically obsessed nanny.
In both parts of their world, there was certainly plenty of a zoological nature to study, from the columns of ants that ate their way through the meat larder in Vence to the profusion of insects, giant caterpillars, rats, bats, snakes, monkeys and other animals who clattered above their heads at night in Malaya, where creatures ‘frequently crashed to the floor with a thud and a squelch.’
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| Mango and Mimosa by Suzanne St Albans |
Somehow in the merry-go-round of ignorant governesses, elderly and perplexed tutors, the odd term here and there in half a dozen different schools, Suzanne and her siblings do get an education beyond their wild and often dangerous childhood exploits. By 1940 they are living on the French Atlantic coast, where in the chaos of refugees streaming south from Belgium and Paris, the children and their mother are evacuated by a British ship. Their father, working out in Malaya, is not so lucky.
I loved this book. I can’t imagine anyone being able to look back on such rich and exotic childhood memories nowadays. Given the Fesq siblings’ many narrow escapes from death, that’s arguably not a bad thing. And the world has changed, not just socially and politically, but ecologically too. The sheer profusion of flora and fauna Suzanne grew up with must exist nowhere in post-pesticide Europe today, and I imagine is severely diminished in Malaya as well. Carried away into her world of deafening dawn choruses (when did you last hear one of those?), fields and woodlands dense with wild flowers and seas boiling with fish, crustaceans, starfish, sea cucumbers et al, we realise how much we have lost.
OUT NOW
The Fall of a Sparrow by Griselda Heppel
BRONZE WINNER in the Wishing Shelf Awards 2021
By the author of Ante's Inferno
WINNER of the People's Book Prize
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Comments
So you give a fascinating account of life lived in Malaysia by Suzanne St Albans, which does sound rich and exotic. I think it is the quality of the writing that makes a memoir successful for us to read. One of my own favourites is Frankie and Stankie by Barbara Trapido about growing up in South Africa in the 1950s. Highly recommended if you haven't ever come across it.
Agree, it's the quality of the writing that counts. I've heard of Frankie and Stankie but haven't read it - must put that right forthwith! I loved The Travelling Hornplayer.