4/30/2024 0 Comments Tim mclean cat walker![]() As the book wears on, you realise how far apart the men’s lives drifted – Ted advancing on to a university education and a writing career that his carpenter father could not easily relate to – which makes it all the more poignant. The High Path was published in 1982 when Ted Walker was only in his forties and he refers to his father several times in the present tense, still always in the admiring terms of his childhood memories. What is particularly interesting is that all this was written when Walker’s father was still alive. Here his dinner would be waiting for him (my mother and I would already have had ours) and I would watch him, cat-like, eat every mouthful. With water scaldingly hot from the kettle on the hob, straight away he would wash his hands as methodically as a surgeon and then I would nuzzle at his own essential fragrances – sweat and Nut-Brown shag at the nape of his neck – when he carried me through to the living-room table. …in the kitchen, even had I been blindfolded, I could have recognized him: for he brought into the house an entire anthology of smells I associated with nobody else: the hair-oil smell of his cap the open-road gustiness of his flapping coat and then the redolence of his trade: sawdust and shavings of pitch-pine and mahogany, a toolbag rankness of nailsacks and creosote, carpenter’s pencil and linseed oil. His description of it gives a sense of how much he adored his father – getting so much pleasure from being carried by him and watching him eat – and also how beautifully detailed his writing is: One of Walker’s earliest memories is the evening routine of welcoming his father home. ![]() He had school friends and admired other male relatives but his father was the center of his world. He was an only child until he was ten and, in the absence of any brothers or sisters, his favourite companion was his father. And there are few things I love more than happy childhood memoirs.īorn in 1934, Walker’s childhood memories really begin during the war. The working-class Walker family had their hard times – multiple generations lived in one cramped house, money was scarce, and Ted’s sister Ruth died when she was only a few weeks old – but this is the memoir of a very happy childhood. A memoir of Walker’s Sussex youth, the book begins in 1932, two years before Walker’s birth, when his father moved south from Birmingham in search of work, and continues on through to 1953, just when Walker is getting ready to leave for Cambridge. I have been collecting Slightly Foxed Editions over the past few months but The High Path by Ted Walker is the first one I have actually read and, I have to say, it sets a very high standard. ![]()
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