Kathleen and Frank

There was a time when people kept diaries, and they sent each other letters, and because these things were precious and a part of our shared culture, they were kept, archived, became the family history. In most cases, nothing comes of it - there is value in the documentary evidence of lives being lived, but this value is deeply personal and not worth sharing with a wider public.

That isn't the case with Christopher Isherwood's parents, Kathleen and Frank. No, they lived through some of the most important parts of late nineteenth and early twentieth British history - the Boer War, the dawning of Home Rule in Ireland, and, of course, the first world war. Through these various periods the couple flirted by letter, then dated, then suffered show more an extensive engagement, trying to cope with Kathleen's belligerent father. Eventually the marriage was achieved, and it was successful by anyone's standards - while there were probably many moments of disharmony, there isn't a huge amount of evidence of any great quarrel in Kathleen's diary, or in Frank's letters to her when he was away with the Army.

It is interesting that Christopher Isherwood took on this project. He began work on it in the years following his mother's death, and only a decade and a half before his own death. There comes a time in every person's life, it seems, when the urge to look back, to wonder where you came from, becomes irresistible. I feel it now myself, though my parents were never the epistolary kind.

But what of the book itself? It took me a long time to read. Most of the early chapters are composed almost entirely of the letters sent back and forth, with Kathleen's diary entries giving a picture of the day-to-day existence of a youngish woman of the period. This is interesting but never fascinating - because neither of them are writers. They are competent, but they are not literary in the way that Christopher is, and his interruptions and analyses are generally the highlight of the book. After the marriage and with his arrival on the scene, there is more and more Christopher, and the book benefits from this.

There are so many books out there that are most definitely worth reading, and this is one that occupied many hours that could have been spent reading something else. Was the experience worthwhile, then? The answer is, naturally, a yes - though one can imagine that had Christopher Isherwood fictionalised the entire account, that might have been even better literary entertainment. show less