A GIRL'S BEST FRIEND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 471, 2 July 1948, Page 17

A GIRL'S BEST FRIEND

YOUTH IS A BLUNDER. By Elma Napier. Jonathan Cape. T is difficult to convey in a short-space the charm of this splendidly disordered monologue. The writer describes her childhood and growing up, 1896 to 1912, and no doubt will display the same. vitality and vivacity in later volumes. The book, to be sure, will have snob appeal; the writer, a Gordon Cumming, is exceedingly high born, and her pages are sprinkled with titles. Although she is now a democrat, she touchingly values her ancient pedigree, which climbs back amazingly through the bloodiest pages of Scots history to harlemagne, and then five centuries before him to the "royal line of the Sicambri."’ Her ancestors had bad luck in their dealings with kings; the Red Comyn was done to death at Dumfries in 1306; Elma Napier’s father was condemned to social extinction-in 1891 on the word of another prince in the celebrated "Baccarat Case." Youth is a Blunder covers much the same sort of ground as Osbert Sitwell’s memoirs and is written in the same spirit of serene detachment. Elma Napier substitutes for Renishaw equally eccentric and at times even gloomier households in Scotland, Devon, and in several parts of Europe. She is less gifted as a writer, but "miuddles through" gaily and conveys an equally firm delineatiof of her parents. As she chatters on, now funny, now vulgar, now profound, we watch with unabated interest every move in the triangular duel of the three principals, her father, her mother, and herself. Her mother, of course, had staked out a claim for gratitude and love so immense that it might well have proved ynendurable to many men less ruthless, selfish, and brilliant than Elma’s father: for she had married @ disgraced man in his darkest hour, succoured his wrecked fortunes with her money and, she fondly thought, his wounded spirit with her affection. Sir William Gordon Cumming was scarcely aware that this great bill was owing.

Elma’s mother found her revenge in authority, of which her ‘eldest daughter was the main but not the exclusive object. \When they were. ilJ, the deserving poor ‘got soup and blankets, but their lives were interfered with and their wages were small. It was a form of slavery run on philanthropic lines. .. . "It so happens that Mother was exceptionally benevolent, but I don’t think that made it a good system." Elma’s father consoled himself with the consistency of his habits. "It didn’t take the Baccarat Case to make enemies for my father. He had made them for himself long before; had cuckolded so many husbands; been witty at the expense of so many fools." Elma defends her father’s honour, both steadfastly and dispassionately. Was he perhaps "framed"? His counsel in the libel action always believed him innocent. The rich and the eminent can find childhood hell just as surely as any slum child. "The lack of logic in my education never ceases to fascinate.’ Mother shielded Elma from the "facts of life," but could never resist a lavatory joke. Her poor child was "told much one day and denied all knowledge the next; what one might seem to do made more serious than what one did." Little wonder then that Elma felt marriage an escape. But ". ...a happy marriage is no safe defence against that senseless thing called love, although a sure refuge to crawl back to, bleeding from wounds." Her final judgment on her loving persecutor is mature and balanced: "No one ever understood Mother. Only as I grow older I come inevitably nearer to comprehension; am filled with sympathy."