Some books crystalise for their readers the thoughts or feelings that have rattled inside for years without finding either articulation or acknowledgement. For the most part, memoirs of other people seldom create this effect. However, having read Neil Ferguson’s Taller Today, the previously disagreeable word ‘bittersweet’ gains credence, and also begins to make sense. Ferguson’s memoirs record the author’s family and personal turmoil of growing up in England after the Second World War. The book is a futile grasp at fleeting memories, but it treats loss with such wit and humility that it becomes universally accessible. This is a book that many readers, from various walks of life, could read with a wistful smile, thinking of their own younger days.

The narrative begins in 1953, with young Neil living with his father in a rented flat close to Kensington Gardens in London. That one winter spans the early chapters, and is a formative time in the writer’s life. He has his father to himself, his mother and two other siblings living separately for lack of space in the London apartment. Neil has his father’s undivided attention when at home, and he discovers the joy of playing alone in the vast, deserted, snow-covered park right around the corner. He recalls in vivid prose the absence of anyone else: “The empty paths were furred with frost and the white grass remained undisturbed until I chose to disturb it … I didn’t find the park dank or dismal, but others evidently did.”

Here in Kensington Gardens and the adjacent Hyde Park, Neil meets Lucy, who becomes “the necessary adjunct to my kingdom, a princess with golden hair tied up behind with a ribbon.” She becomes the first girl to strum his heartstrings. “Only when her eyes were upon me,” he recalls, “her voice calling my name, did I understand what it meant to be.” Of course, the memoirs being full of memories, and memories being evanescent, the reader is well-prepared to let Lucy go. One day, she simply “failed to appear.” She is gone, and after a few days, Neil accepts it. And the intangible memory of her becomes like everything else that he thought was precious at the time: the exoskeletons of insects and seeds in his pocket. To balance this reminiscence on early heartache, the opening chapters also focus on Neil’s father and his friends. Neil’s father, an engineer and a pub-frequenter who loves half-pints, is a retired Royal Navy officer. A natural raconteur, he tells stories that make little sense to Neil when he is a child, but the aged, memoir-writing Neil recalls them with details intact.

Whole passages run by with direct quotes from over 50 years ago. A reviewer has called these “a considerable feat of memory,” but they may also be an impressive work of invention, just to invoke the feeling of the father’s stories, or their type. The father does have some interesting tales to tell, including his invention of a new kind of bomb, and of having his plane shot down by the Turkish army.

The mood of the writing remains much like the nostalgia-infused commentary of the American drama, The Wonder Years. Ferguson’s Taller Today evokes childhood memories in the same way that Fred Savage’s TV character brought them out in his viewers. The only difference is, Ferguson does not write from a point of hindsight. He presents the memories as naively as he experienced them.

His life is interesting, though not severely dramatic. Young Neil and his sister are abandoned at several instances, and their parents’ history remains a mystery. What makes it worth reading are the crisp and delectable turns of phrase, the play on memories, and the soft, padded realisations. Here, there are no ‘he suddenly realised’ moments. Instead, as in real life, the insights are noticed and articulated much after they take place: “I didn’t tell him what I had found out, something I hadn’t known before the week I had spent under the stars, a native boy alone in the bush with his spear, unsupervised by his elders and betters. I was going to be a writer.”

Taller Today, the book’s title, is taken from a W H Auden poem, and the book itself contains a poem written by one of the father’s friends about the father:

And at the foot of the rainbow we tear its roots from our hearts with fingers driven by cowardice and despair, that its awful splendor will not linger here, but leave us to the Ordinariness that we prefer.

As an incantation of self-inflicted loss, the verses fit the theme of the book, and its principal driving force: Neil’s father, who is selfish but inspires, has poets and layabouts as friends, and serves as both anchor and steam to the engine of Neil’s life. The story ends well, and rounds things off much like real life, with some loose strands in the author’s life still frayed open and vulnerable to the touch.

Though memoirs are different from novels, they are not necessarily more honest. The author has desired that Taller Today be described as a non-fiction novel, and it reads better that way, once the reader understands that information will be withheld to make a better story. What is paramount for the reader is that the experiment has succeeded. Neil Ferguson triumphs at turning the narrative of his everyday life into something as compelling as this book.

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Taller Today: Fragments of Childhood

(Memoirs)

By Neil Ferguson

Telegram Books, London

ISBN 1846591511

256pp.