SPOUTING WALES

In English literary circles, Alice Thomas Ellis is a kind of legend. She is the author of several gossipy popular novels and is by all accounts a bohemian’s bohemian. She is also an unapologetic Catholic whose bluntness about her faith, and much else, is as bracing as a slap to the cheek. When the Archbishop of Liverpool died last year, she vilified his liberal tenure in a fiery article that cost her her column in a national Catholic weekly. And in early March she wrote an op-ed for a London newspaper entitled “Why I Do Not Want a Clone of My Dead Son.”

In A Welsh Childhood, first published in England in 1990, and now available here with photographs by Patrick Sutherland, Ellis recounts with unusual poignancy growing up before World War II on the coast of North Wales. She etches sharp images of the characters she was raised among, like the schoolmaster who “had been gassed in the First World War and as a result he spat a bit as he spoke, and our exercise books came up in moisture bubbles when he stood beside us.” And for an evocation of pastoral life, is hard to top this:

Lambing, sheep dipping and shearing, haymaking and the heaving up of turnips held no terrors for the delicately reared; and watching the man boiling the pig mash out of doors on an autumn evening was the sort of pleasure that you might remember on your deathbed. A fine cold, clear autumn evening is the sort of thing you might remember on your deathbed anyway, and combined with this was the illicit delight of being up past your bedtime, with night coming down over the mountains and yet being safe with the bonfire crackling and lighting up the low branches of the hazel trees and the men stirring the swill talking to each other. Then a run across the field back to the cottage fireside, tingling, as they say, with well-being. I never feel like that any more.

It is the graceful and simple last sentence that is Ellis’s signature. At times she gives glimpses of a land so haunting that, as a long-ago tenant of her Welsh cottage inscribed on the door of the hayloft: “It does not matter who I am, for this must surely be a part of Heaven. Just stand here and really listen.”

What makes A Welsh Childhood so moving is this wistfulness, this all- pervading sense of loss. There is sadness here, and sadness there, and even more sadness up ahead along the road. And yet, for an American reader, it is refreshing to read a memoirist whose encounters with tragedy do not send her into self-indulgent keening. Ellis’s grandfather’s suicide gets only a passing mention, and the fatal accident that claimed her 19-year-old son is treated matter-of-factly. Mentioning that she lost another child when she fell down a flight of stairs while pregnant, Ellis says only, “Medical science has made great strides, but we can’t expect others to take the responsibility for our carelessness.”

Ellis also displays some of the cheeky humor that has won her novels such a loyal audience. Recalling a boy who showered her with (unwanted) kisses and got her into trouble with the headmaster, she deadpans, “I have never recovered from the injustice of this and I hope Robert has had a rotten life.” And she gives a delightful account of her eighth birthday, when she was shoehorned into a silky frock, and responded by plopping herself in a cowpat.

But what makes the greatest claim on her attention is the bleak splendor of Wales itself — the gray crags, stone graves, white fog, cold sea. Ellis ” fell in love with the land as I believe people are supposed to fall in love with other people. I wanted to be one flesh with it.” Patrick Sutherland’s photographs catch something of its forbidding charm, which has proved an attraction for visitors since the Romans. The country has always been remarkably resistant to change, which suits Ellis fine.

Ellis wears a distaste for modern life on her sleeve, and is brutal in her appraisal of both the day-trippers who pour into North Wales and the tourism- planning types who will do anything to accommodate them. She also gleefully quotes earlier travelers, such as Samuel Johnson and Matthew Arnold, who lamented the inconvenience and the hazards of Welsh roads. During a discursion on the sheer, steep dangers of Wales’s towering cliffs, she cheerily alludes to one hapless fellow who stepped over a wall to relieve himself: “He never came back, poor man.”

Marc Carnegie is managing editor of the American Spectator.