After the War, Before the Invasion : NOVEMBER 1948 An Autobiographical Memoir<i> by Carl Dawson (Charlottesville/University Press of Virginia: $17.95; 176 pp.) </i>

In November of 1948, 10-year-old Carl Dawson, together with his parents, his sister and brother, arrived in Los Angeles from Yorkshire. For Carl and his brother, the Atlantic crossing on the Queen Elizabeth was “a bonus paradise we had entered in anticipation of the real paradise in California. Staterooms with hot water and clean towels. Dining rooms with more food at one meal than we had seen in a year.” But already a darker tone enters with the boys’ mother disconsolately taking to her bed. After New York the journey continued to offer excitement, but on a more frugal level; for the Dawsons’ means were limited.

The family was met by Carl’s Uncle George, who had lived in America for years and had promised his brother a job in this land of opportunity. Settling into a house on a street above Toland Way in Glassell Park, the family went about making its often puzzled entry into middle-class American life.

The promised job turned out to be far less exalted and more menial than Carl’s father had imagined, but he stuck to it patiently, having given up everything in England to make the trip. Carl’s mother never fully accepted the move and we see her from time to time weeping and depressed, on occasion utterly withdrawn, with her children disturbed by overheard remarks on the possibility of shock treatments.

In a series of vividly recorded scenes, Carl traces his advance in the new land as he makes friends, attends Toland Way School and explores the larger city. Set against these are equally vivid memories of English days when he hiked in the Pennines with his father, and the family went on outings made happy by his mother’s laughter. At times, he risks entering his parents’ minds, and the entire mosaic provides a sensitive, touching picture of a working-class English family coming up against American life.

One of the most telling incidents comes early in the book when the children are taken on a tour of Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley by Vergil Smock, the Pullman porter who had become their friend on the train from Chicago and had promised to call. He showed them Suicide Bridge, the Rose Bowl, and Lincoln Park, driving down the Arroyo Seco Freeway. Back home, the children found their parents made anxious by criticism from their neighbors and others who were shocked at the Dawsons’ permitting the trip. Though asked in for tea, Mr. Smock politely declined and “drove away for the first and last time.”

Later explorations take the children as far away as San Diego and as near home as Forest Lawn. They learn how truly the area is the province of the automobile as they drive to the coast, seeing Malibu and Topanga, and giving their mother at least one happy moment when she is able to quote Keats at the sight of the Pacific.

Dawson takes his title from Philip Levine’s line, “Give me back November, 1948” in “You Can Have It,” and quotes further from the poem:

I give you back 1948.

I give you all the years from then

To the coming one. Give me back the moon

with its frail light falling across a face.

For anyone who has lived in Southern California during these years, Dawson indeed does give it back, on his own terms and memories for himself, and for every reader’s personal terms and memories as that reader relives his own experiences during those years when an observant, sensitive boy found himself not quite in the paradise that he had been promised but in a new world that he was, ultimately, able to make his own.

And for anyone who knows the immediate area in which the Dawsons lived, the mere naming of Toland and Scandia Ways, Eagle Rock and York Boulevards, Verdugo and San Fernando Roads triggers echo after echo, with a peculiar satisfaction provided in learning that Carl went on to take his A.B. in nearby Occidental College with Honors in English, magna cum laude, leading to an internationally recognized career.