​JAMES COURAGE DIARIES, EDITED BY CHRIS BRICKELL

I’ve just finished reading this fine book. James Courage kept a diary from the age of sixteen to the end of his life. He wrote in its pages about being a boy on a country estate near Amberley, about being a teenage boy at Christs College, and about being a student at Oxford. He wrote mostly about the long years afterwards when he was working hard on novels and short stories – always doing his best to write truthfully. He was mordant. He was fearful. He was inhibited. He was imaginative.
     He, like me, was sexually abused by an uncle.
     ‘Do you know what my uncle called me? I was this timid boy – delicate and small even at fourteen – and he called me “White Mouse”. He seduced me in a cave, a limestone cave. I was terrified. For six months afterwards I lived on the verge of a breakdown, then collapsed at school. But I couldn’t tell anyone why. I thought I’d go to prison, be hung.’
     My main reservation about the book is that it lacks knowledge of the social context of James Courage’s early life in Canterbury. James’s father is characterised as a ‘farmer’ when really he was a wealthy landowner and the family lived in a mansion with servants on their estate, Seadown. His grandmother is characterised as living ‘on a farm near Mount Somers’ when really she was the dowager in charge of a huge sheep station called Mount Somers. The large landholders of Canterbury only began calling themselves ‘farmers’ at the very end of the nineteenth century when they were being attacked as a parasitic aristocracy by a broad coalition of political opponents from the middle class and working class. It was a highly successful rebranding. It blurred the boundary between the few hundred landed gentry and the many thousands of small farmers below them in the social heap.
     Other than that reservation, though, Chris Brickell has done a skilful job choosing and editing diary excerpts.
     James Courage comes vividly to life in this book.


Stevan Eldred-Grigg