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One of the books which I should have included in my Top 15 last year, but somehow didn’t, was Emma Smith’s excellent memoir of a Cornish childhood, The Great Western Beach. I wrote about it here, complete with a jaunty picture of a little bucket. When I heard Maidens’ Trip: A Wartime Adventure on the Grand Union Canal was being reprinted by Bloomsbury in the same format, I hurriedly asked for a copy, and the journey to and from London enabled me to read it.

Last time I praised David Mann’s jacket design, and I can only do so again – The Great Western Beach and Maidens’ Trip sell well for the content, I daresay, but there must be lots of casual browsers who picked it up on the basis of the brilliant design. And then there might be people like me who have a liking of Maidens’ Trip simply for the excellent apostrophe use. It’s reminiscent of some of Bob Dylan’s best work. Man, I love Bob Dylan.
[I should add that I left the computer unattended for a few minutes, and it was sabotaged by Colin.]

I knew approximately nothing about the Grand Union Carrying Company and the wartime work which happened. Women were employed to ‘make use of boats lying idle’, and transport goods up and down the canal. Emma Smith did this in 1943, with several other girls at different points, but with authorial licence she condenses these trips into one trip, and the girls into three girls – Nanette, Charity, and Emma. Yes, Emma is Emma Smith, but an edited version. In The Great Western Beach Emma Smith had a slightly surreal narrative voice – the vocabulary of an adult, the ignorance of a child. Maidens’ Trip demonstrates that she always used an unusual angle – though she always uses ‘we’ and ‘us’ to describe their experiences, there is no ‘I’. Emma, like Nanette and Charity, is always referred to in the third person, even though she alone has thoughts and reflections revealed. It took me 60 pages to discover why the book was a little unnerving, and then I realised what was going on. ‘We’ but never ‘I’.

There are too many mini-adventures in Maidens’ Trip for me to describe them all, and each feels representative of a boating life. Their interaction with professional boating fraternity shows a world now lost. These families would travel up and down the canals all their lives, marrying within the fraternity, bringing up their children in the same ways, with little knowledge or care about the world away from the water. Their friendships would survive on seeing people for only a few minutes a week, passing on the canal. Still Nanette, Charity and Emma made friends – and made enemies. Though the girls have distinct characters, each also has the stubbornness needed to battle the elements, the privations, and the locks. The overriding impression is of dirt, weariness, hunger and a constant triumph that they were succeeding at all.

Just like The Great Western Beach, Emma Smith writes in a continually captivating and energetic manner in Maidens’ Trip. Her experiences were unusual, but it is her writing voice which makes them fascinating. A sparse honesty pervades, and the book is without a drop of sentiment. Though perhaps not as good as The Great Western Beach, which deserves to be a classic of memoir for generations to come, Maidens’ Trip is a wonderful journey into the bizarre episode in the life of a very interesting woman.

“The trouble is,” said Charity, hearing, as always, only what she wanted to hear, “that no one knows a thing about canals till they come on one. People have said to me so many times: ‘But what do you do?’ and I can’t explain. They seem to think you do nothing but lean on a tiller all day.”

Perhaps we can’t share the same experiences as Charity, Nanette and Emma – but Maidens’ Trip is a close second best.

I think I’ll give you another day on the writer-as-character quiz from yesterday, though well done to all the correct responses so far, I’m impressed!

Instead, I’m going to write about The Great Western Beach by Emma Smith, which Steph at Bloomsbury sent me a while ago. Its subtitle is A Memoir of a Cornish Childhood Between the Wars, which is exactly what it is. Before I go any further, I must praise David Mann and Victoria Sawdon – for Jacket Design and Illustration respectively. What a stunning book. In the publishing world, people seem to endlessly copy one another with their covers – hundreds of Joanne Harris/Jon McGregor/Kate Morton lookalikes. Bloomsbury have really done something different, and it is beautiful – Mann and Sawdon must be at the top of their game, or they should be.

Right. Onto the content of the book. Emma Smith was known to me as the writer of a Persephone book, The Far Cry, which I’ve yet to read. She’s also a Shakespeare lecturer at Oxford, but that’s a different Emma Smith. I wasn’t aware that this Emma Smith was still alive, which sounds rude, but not everyone reaches their 85th birthday. She’s (sensibly) waited until late in life (one assumes) to write this memoir of her childhood – and rather brilliant it is, too.

The Hallsmiths, as was their name, aren’t an astoundingly unusual family, but have striking points – misanthropic father who resents being in a lowly position at his bank and craves fame; mother who has lost three previous fiancees; twin boy and girl – the boy fairly sickly, the girl stubborn and adventurous; Elspeth, the author. Elspeth’s early childhood is spent on and around the Great Western Beach, and the beach, alongside the family’s various homes, forms the locations for this autobiography.

I think the most useful way I can write about this book is to describe the style. First person, but neither from the author’s current perspective, nor from the child’s. It is all written as though she were looking back at the events from a distance of only a couple years – some hindsight and analysis is permitted, but alongside childhood ignorance of certain things, and a child’s language. Actually, the vocabulary is an adult’s, but many paragraphs end with sentiments such as ‘It’s not fair! Not fair!’ How does Emma Smith make this mixture of voices and tones and persons work? I don’t know, but it does. The Great Western Beach isn’t irritating or affected; somehow the view of a child is presented convincingly, without losing the slants of wisdom which are the memoir-writer’s prerogative.

Despite the comforting title, this is no cosy childhood. Her father is unloving and mean. She watches her brother struggle through a miserable childhood. Twice she is almost victim to sexual abuse from strangers. But The Great Western Beach is as far from miserylit as it is possible to get – where others, with less material, would have written a Tragic Childhood Memoir (WH Smith actually has a stand called this…), Emma Smith writes an honest but calm book – the good alongside the bad. Her powers of recall are frankly astonishingly – presumably the conversations are not verbatim, but I wouldn’t be able to write a chapter on my childhood, let alone a book, at a quarter of Smith’s age.

Perhaps the most moving section is Smith’s Afterword, which unsettles all the assumptions I’d made:

O my parents, my poor tragic parents – my good and beautiful, brave, dramatic, unperceptive mother; my disappointed, embittered, angry, lonely, talented father: locked, both of them, inside a prison they had not deserved, for reasons they didn’t understand, by conventions they took as immutable laws. I see them now as they were in my childhood: blindly struggling, trapped by social circumstances beyond their control, governed by inherited prejudices not worthy of them. How I wish I could have saved you, set you free, given you the happiness you once expected, all the success you had hoped and longed for, and never managed to make your own. Forgive me, my father, my mother. I have written this memoir, however much it may seem to be otherwise, out of great pity, and with great love.