The boy that time donkey4/18/2023 ![]() Later recovering, the proposed visit to the new home does take place. Meanwhile he discovers that young Phillip, in an excess of zeal to be like daddy, has damaged his precious collection of butterfly specimens and now has found a pair of scissors and cut up that day’s newspaper – the last straw for Richard, who smacks his bottom hard. ![]() He cleans everything Hugh can have touched with carbolic. He has forbidden any visits by Hugh, but due to his inhibitions is totally unable to explain his reason to his wife – namely that Hugh has contracted syphilis, and Richard is terrified of cross-infection, especially on behalf of his young son. Richard hurries back to their rented house to collect his wife Hetty and baby Phillip for a visit planned for that afternoon, but to his great distress and anger he finds Hetty’s brother Hugh is visiting. This visit is full of hope for the future – but a hope that is almost immediately blighted, echoing the blight that attended his secret marriage in the first volume, The Dark Lantern.ġ1 Eastern Road, Gertie and HW at the gate The house is to be called ‘Lindenheim’ (‘Hildersheim' in real life) after his mother’s home in Germany. The Crystal Palace at Sydenham can be seen from the first floor balcony, glittering in the sun in the distance: a symbolic edifice that has its own thread as the series progresses. ![]() His sense of pride is quickly deflated by the mess left behind by the workmen, but he soon clears everything up. The builders have departed and Richard has the house to himself for the first time. This house was bought in fiction as in real life (£480 pounds in real life – slightly more in the novel) with money that came to him from his grandfather’s Trust on the death of his father. The book opens with Richard Maddison making a visit to the house he has just bought, 11 Hillside Road, Wakenham, which faces his beloved ‘Hill’: in real life this was 11 Eastern Road, Brockley (later re-numbered 21) opposite Hilly Fields, and which still exists today, looking more or less as it did then. We are shown how his father’s increasing irritation and his mother’s ineffectual placatory interference combine to have an adverse effect on the child: which is of course HW’s purpose, part of his ‘cause and effect’ theme, which we have already seen in the earlier Flax of Dream series. The book is an honest and vivid account of young childhood with all its trials and tribulations, and we truly live the lives of this fictional family with the wealth of detail of their lives and of the period.īut young Phillip is already rather a problem child in the eyes of various members of the family: he is sensitive and nervously imaginative, tending to lie his way out of trouble, whose naughty escapades – those of a normal child – are not understood by his parents. As the book opens we are in 1897 and at the beginning of the story of Phillip, Richard Maddison’s first born (and the central character of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight), now two years old and nicknamed ‘Donkey Boy’ because, due to his early problems, his life was saved when he was fed on the milk of an ass, brought to his despairing parents by ancient Mr Pooley. Date not known, but probably 1970, as that is when ISBNs were introduced in the UK.ĭonkey Boy is an evocation of time and place: of an ordinary family living in south-east London at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century. Re-issued Macdonald, using first edition sheets, re-cased and with a new dust wrapper bearing an ISBN. (Volume 2, A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight )įirst published Macdonald, October 1952 (12s 6d)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |