Rose Tremain (or Rosie as she was then) grew up in post-war London – a city still partly in ruins, where both food and affection were fiercely rationed. But when she is ten years old, everything changes. She loses her father, her house, her school and her friends and is dispatched to a freezing boarding-school in Hertfordshire.
Slowly the teenage Rosie escapes from the cold world of the Fifties, into a place of inspiration and friendship, where a young writer is suddenly ready to be born.
Reviewed by Maggie Fergusson in Slightly Foxed Issue 64.
Love and Friendship
MAGGIE FERGUSSON
Rose has written that ‘knowledge is a powerful thing, and knowing when to keep it secret is an art which every serious writer needs to perfect’. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that it’s only relatively recently – and prompted by a conversation with her daughter, Eleanor – that she has chosen to share the story of her childhood in a memoir, Rosie (2018). It makes for much unhappy, and even sometimes shocking, reading . . .
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 64, Winter 2019
Love and Friendship
One summer’s evening, at the age of 13 or 14, Rose Tremain had what she describes as ‘an epiphany’. She had been playing tennis with friends at school, but was alone, when she was overcome with...
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