In Praise of Childhood

THE EDGE OF DAY (275 pp.)--Laurie Lee--Morrow ($4).

The current style in writing is to run down childhood. Described from a psychiatrist's couch, it often takes on the look of a private hell, where the only fun is in being singed. Most adults know-that childhood is not really so bad. It hurts, of course, but it has its compensations-often wispy and ungraspable by memory. In his autobiography of boyhood in an English village, 45-year-old British Poet Laurie Lee shows that his childhood is still with him, like a second self. The Edge of Day has a shine that is as foreign to contemporary books about boyhood as the first years of this century are to the present.

Author Lee had advantages that derived from his disadvantages. His father had deserted his family when Laurie was a baby, and a mother with a brood of six is never a match for an imaginative boy. Besides, he was often sick, and so came in for special treatment: puddings, wood fires in his room, the respect that brothers and sisters feel for a fellow who has been so close to death (pneumonia) that his body was once washed for a funeral. They lived in a tumble-down house in the Cotswolds, but mother and children--at least by Author Lee's account --never indulged in self-pity. Husbandless Mrs. Lee--erratic, forgetful, sometimes downright dotty, but forever cooking and mending for the brood--comes through as a genuine heroine. Her son has performed the feat of conveying her love, and his, without once slipping into the treacle that sons find almost impossible to avoid when they praise Mom.

The Edge of Day (a Book-of-the-Month Club choice, and a good one) will never be called an important book, but it deals with important things--the changing seasons, the magical qualities of visiting uncles and spinster neighbors, the insatiable appetite boys have for berries picked in the noonday heat. Author Lee knows that his book has an almost archaic aspect. Not until the end do autos appear in the valley, and one uncle takes on the stature of a hero by becoming a bus driver. The language is always charming and often poetic, but what is most remarkable about these childhood memoirs is the total lack of sentimentality. The Edge of Day is a rarity among books: a simple story that derives its glow from the beauty of common truth uncommonly stated.

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