What he says and how he says it

In the Blood

A Memoir of My Childhood

Andrew Motion

David R. Godine: 326 pp., $24.95

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IN reading this account of British poet laureate Andrew Motion’s childhood, my first thought was that Tony Blair’s New Labor government was four decades too late when it got around to making fox hunting illegal in England. If only the Labor government in power in 1968 had banned this barbarous and cruel practice, famously described by Oscar Wilde as the pursuit of the uneatable by the unspeakable, Motion’s mother would have been saved from lying comatose in the hospital after a hunting accident, as she is in the first and last chapters of his memoir.

But to Motion and his family, fox hunting is not at all rebarbative. Far from it: It is, he feels, in his blood. Hence the book’s title, which fittingly comes from Wordsworth, not only perhaps England’s greatest lyric poet but also a former poet laureate: “I have owed to them, / In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart.”

Motion takes great pleasure in recounting his first hunt and in being blooded (that word again!), the barbaric custom of daubing the face of the first-time hunter with the blood of the hapless fox. Those whose hearts go out less to cold-blooded creatures may prefer his equally proud account of catching his first salmon.

For all this talk of its being in the blood, the Motions’ fox hunting seems to be far less innate than part of a determined, at times almost desperate, attempt to affirm the family’s status in the countrified upper classes -- what the British sometimes refer to as the “huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ ” set.

When the future poet laureate first goes to school, his mother is less interested in what he’s learning than in how his teacher talks. The boy replies, “She’s got a funny sort of voice. It sounds soapy.” But this isn’t what Mrs. Motion is after: She’s looking for a social rather than an intellect- ual or elocutionary baromet- er:

“ ‘Does she say “toilet” for instance? . . . You must never say “toilet,” ’ mum went on; she was being so serious it made my clothes feel tight. ‘Why not?’ ‘Because it’s non-U,’ she said. ‘What’s non-U?’ Mum frowned, then said, ‘It’s the way people like us don’t talk. . . . We say “loo,” ’ she said firmly. . . . ‘ “Looking glass” not “mirror,” “Christmas” not “Xmas,” “sorry” not “pardon,” “sofa” not “settee,” “drawing room” not “lounge,” “pudding” not “sweet,” . . .’ ”

Mum says this is the way they’ve always spoken (“I can’t tell you why. We just do. We always have done.”), but her preferred diction slavishly follows the dictates of Nancy Mitford’s celebrated canonical essay setting out U-speak, which was published only a few years before this conversation took place.

The Motions’ concern with class custom rears its ugly head again when poor Andrew is sent off to boarding school at age 7. Unsurprisingly, the young lad doesn’t wanna, and he senses that mum sympathizes with him when he tells her so: “She wasn’t going to agree with me, I could tell. She wanted to, but she couldn’t. ‘I know, darling,’ she said softly. ‘But it’s what happens. Everyone has to go away at your age. All the boys, anyway.’ ” In this family, it is clear that keeping up the traditions of a class to which the parents are determined to belong trumps emotions, however heartfelt.

A lot of the book concerns Motion’s school days, first at the prep school and then, from age 13, at Radley, a minor “public school” (the British term for certain posh private high schools). Most of his fellow prep-school students have gone on to the more prestigious and socially impressive Eton. His account is pretty much boilerplate (cold dormitories, sadistic teachers, inedible food and smelly “loos”), not likely to find its way into the list of classics on the subject -- for instance, George Orwell’s “Such, Such Were the Joys.” There is also less discussion of the homoerotic atmosphere and sexual practices common to such places than in almost any other contemporary British boarding school memoir I can think of.

The low temperature of this reminiscence, whether describing life at school or his mother’s lengthy coma -- we never find out whether or how much she recovers -- is in part because of the way Motion has chosen to tell his story. He has decided to keep the reader with him as events unfold; there is no benefit of hindsight here.

This method has its virtues and, along with large doses of the kind of descriptions of nature you would expect from a poet, does impart a salutary measure of immediacy to the narrative. But, as befits the class to which the family is clinging, there is a stiff-upper-lip quality to Motion’s tale that robs it of its natural pathos and makes “In the Blood,” in the end, an unsatisfying read.

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Martin Rubin is a critic and the author of “Sarah Gertrude Millin: A South African Life.”