England Without Tears

AN ENGLISH YEAR (243 pp.)--Nan Fairbrother--Knopf ($3.75).

One of the casualties of post-World War II writing is the book of personal reflection. Like reflection itself, it has become almost a luxury, or in any case a publisher's risk. Who now cares much about what one unimportant individual, no matter how sensitive, thinks of life as it runs itself out in unimportant byways? The answer is, very few readers--unless such a book slows down life itself for a few hours and makes it seem as various and remarkable as it really is.

Attic Images. This week an Englishwoman of 40 has done it, and done it in her first book. An English Year is the work of Nan Fairbrother, the mother of two boys, 11 and 12, wife of London Physician William McKenzie. It would be easy to say that her book is not about anything much, and in a way that would be right. During the war she spent three years on a farm in Buckinghamshire, while her husband was overseas with the R.A.F. From the attic of the 16th century house she could see London, 40 miles away, being destroyed each night. But with uncommon discipline she kept the war and her absent husband almost entirely out of her pages. Instead, she watched Nature's show as the seasons turned, observed her young sons with curiosity and astonishment, dwelt on her reading and her memories.

The result is one of those leisurely English personal accounts that can fairly be set beside such classics as Naturalist Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selborne and Novelist George Gissing's The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. Nan Fairbrother does not so much write as compose, in model sentences and paragraphs. She describes the natural world about her in fresh images, e.g., "The fir trees, seen from above, are as neat and composed as cats sitting by the fire in the circle of their tails." The change that has come over old rural England is made plain as she observes that "the cowman now feels closer to his electric milking-machine than to his cows, and for every laborer who can thatch a hayrick there are a dozen who can take a tractor to pieces."

Inhuman Beings. Author Fairbrother leaves no doubt about her love for her children, 4 and 5 at the time of her writing, but many a less discerning mother may be startled by one of her typical observations: "Charming they may be, but still it is lonely living with children, and at times I long for my fellow creatures which these are not. For children as young as these are strange animals, and we have no way of understanding each other. They are alien, inhuman beings, less considerate than a dog, less controlled than a horse, less conscious than a cat, their very voices high and shrill as seabirds. They can satisfy none of our emotional needs yet we must satisfy all of theirs."

Mother McKenzie, vacationing in Italy now worries that such passages may one day disturb her sons, "now sophisticated young Londoners." If they have a good share of her own temperament, she need not worry. They will probably grow up to applaud her for a fine memoir and graceful evidence of a civilized mind.

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