*Peppercorn Days by Jon Rose (E. P. Dutton, 1959)

 

This is a beautiful little book, an imagistic memoir about early childhood that is as vivid and untethered as a dream.  It is utterly transporting; I felt not as if I were reading it but as if I were floating in it.

Peppercorn Days takes place in a small town in coastal Australia sometime in the 1930s.  Parents have gone away for a few days leaving their four children -- three girls and a boy -- home alone, to be casually supervised by a local woman who as 19 sons.  The book is  narrated, or more accurately deeply felt, by the boy, the youngest child.  He lives in a kind of ecstatic erotic freedom -- he is frequently  stripping, or being stripped and fondled, and experiences the world in constant sensual pleasure.  He exists as much in an imagined future or remembered past as in the present, and flows amongst these equally vivid and alive realities effortlessly.

Peppercorn Days recreates the lost kingdom of childhood as brilliantly as any book I know, and brought me back to something in myself I had lost or forgotten.