Where Shall We Run To?: A Memoir

by Alan Garner, Robert Powell (Reading)

From one of our greatest living writers, comes a remarkable memoir of a forgotten England. 'The war went. We sang in the playground, Bikini lagoon, an atom bomb's boom, and two big explosions. David's father came back from Burma and didn't eat rice. Twiggy taught by reciting The Pied Piper of Hamelin, The Charge of the Light Brigade and the thirteen times table. Twiggy was fat and short and he shouted, and his neck was as wide as his head. He was a bully, though he didn't take any notice of me.' In Where Shall We Run To?, Alan Garner remembers his early childhood in the Cheshire village of Alderley Edge: life at the village school as a sissy and a mardy-arse'; pushing his friend Harold into a clump of nettles to test the truth of dock leaves; his father joining the army to guard the family against Hitler; the coming of the Yanks, with their comics and sweets and chewing gum. From one of our greatest living writers, it is a remarkable and evocative memoir of a vanished England.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, Biography Memoir, History

ebook

Published August 16, 2018

About the author

Alan Garner OBE (born 17 October 1934) is an English novelist who is best known for his children's fantasy novels and his retellings of traditional British folk tales. His work is firmly rooted in the landscape, history and folklore of his native county of Cheshire, North West England, being set in the region and making use of the native Cheshire dialect.

Born into a working-class family in Congleton, Cheshire, Garner grew up around the nearby town of Alderley Edge, and spent much of his youth in the wooded area known locally as 'The Edge', where he gained an early interest in the folklore of the region. Studying at Manchester Grammar School and then Oxford University, in 1957 he moved to the nearby village of Blackden, where he bought and renovated an Early Modern building known as Toad Hall. His first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, was published in 1960. A children's fantasy novel set on the Edge, it incorporated elements of local folklore in its plot and characters. Garner completed a sequel, The Moon of Gomrath (1963), but left the third book of the trilogy he had envisioned. Instead he produced a string of further fantasy novels, Elidor (1965), The Owl Service (1967) and Red Shift (1973).

Turning away from fantasy as a genre, Garner produced The Stone Book Quartet (1979), a series of four short novellas detailing a day in the life of four generations of his family. He also published a series of British folk tales which he had rewritten in a series of books entitled Alan Garner's Fairy Tales of Gold (1979), Alan Garner's Book of British Fairy Tales (1984) and A Bag of Moonshine (1986). In his subsequent novels, Strandloper (1996) and Thursbitch (2003), he continued writing tales revolving around Cheshire, although without the fantasy elements which had characterised his earlier work. In 2012, he finally published a third book in the Weirdstone trilogy.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Garner

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Veronica · Rating 4 out of 5]

This might seem just a lightweight series of snapshots from a wartime childhood, but of course being Alan Garner it's more than that. He has such a sharp evocation of a child's view of the world, of the normality of missing fathers, dangerous games unsupervised by adults, outdoor privies, unexploded bombs, bullying teachers. And even as a child he seems to have a strong sense of the history of his place, Alderley Edge, and his roots within it. If you've read his children's fiction you'll recognise many of the places he mentions here and feel the magic that he drew from them.

I particularly liked the way he ended by revisiting some of the early episodes: the bookending with two versions of Bomb was especially pleasing and made me smile. I'm very glad he's still writing so lucidly in his 80s.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alan Garner tells stories from his life (mainly his early life, before and during WWII) in Cheshire. He does so in a first person narrative style - a style absent nostalgia goggles or, really, any judgmental attitude, either. Perhaps of particular interest to fans of Garner's Weirdstone of Brisingamon, exploring the real Alderley Edge as it does, but even for people who know nothing of Garner's previous work, this book offers an unsentimental glimpse of life as a child in rural England, during the time of the Blitz, rationing, evaccuees and gasmasks.

[Lesley]

A scrapbook of childhood memories, told the same way children tell stories - this happened and then this and then this. Some are funny, some are sad, some are both. We see the world through young Alan’s eyes, and it’s as full of wonders as he is full of questions and curiosity. The sense of place is as vivid as you’d expect, portrayed without nostalgia or sentimentality. As a writer whose work is so rooted in landscape and history, his formative experience of that landscape and personal sense of history foreshadow the author he became. Interesting if you like seeing how writers are formed (I do.)

There was a discussion on ‘The Dark is Rising’ episode of Backlisted podcast about writers of superlative children’s dark fantasy fiction who were young children during the war, including Susan Cooper, Alan Garner and I can’t remember who else now, and how the war had shaped this generation of authors, which I found very interesting. And I notice the time-slip story is common too, also interesting I thought.

[Blaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely memoir of noted writer growing up in a family of limited means in rural Cheshire from the late 30's until just after the war. The detailed descriptions, the use of language, including many English words I'd never seen or heard before, and the marvellous character portraits make this a work to savor.

Now hopefully I'm ready for his Treacle Walker to come off my reserve list.

[Duncan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful and heartbreaking childhood memoir; a tale of alienation and reconciliation, of the value of education and the power of reading. There were some genuinely shocking moments that will stick with me for a long time, more so because of the simplicity with which they are told. And running through this all, just as you would expect from Garner, is the landscape of rural Cheshire. There are place names and locations that anyone familiar with his work will know and love.

[Jonathan Pool · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don’t come to this book if you think you will be getting a full life story from Alan Garner. Though this was written recently, in 2018, when Garner was eighty-four years old, the ‘memoir’ really only covers the very early childhood of Alan around World War Two in the 1930s and 1940s. Two essays (one set in 1955 and one in 1974) are added, and that’s an interesting decision because they are very short and loosely connected to the main content in the book.

Any disappointment I might have felt was quickly dissipated, because the stories of childhood innocence, from a wholly different era, are beautiful. They are funny, apposite, timeless.
These are stories of days playing outdoors; days spent making up new games; days spent with local friends; days typified by innocent mischief; they are schooldays with larger than life school teachers. There is no television. There are no mobile phones . Nursery Rhymes abound. Hymns are sung with cheeky words substituted for the gospels.

In my literary ignorance, and coming from early childhood in which Biggles, Asterix and Tintin were the extent of my early reading experience I had not come across Alan Garner until the announcement that his 2021 novel Treacle Walker was longlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize in 2022. Then I started to come across Garner in multiple places First Light, a celebration of Alan Garner includes essays on the man by Margaret Atwood, Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman, Stephen Fry, Rowan Williams, Robert MacFarlane (chairman of the Booker judges in 2022). That’s quite an eclectic mix. Then I remembered that Ali Smith spoke about his influence on her writing (it figures). Ali Smith talks about “givens” and that’s something drawn from Garner’s writing advice.

Treacle Walker attracted as much adverse comment as it did praise. It’s not an immediately accessible book for many (myself included on a first read). “Where Shall We Run To?” is a perfect companion to Treacle Walker and I highly commend it to those who found his Booker novel baffling as well as those who loved it.
It came as no surprise to me (after I had already read the memoir) to see Alan Garner's comments in the Booker prize publicity (Guardian 08.10.2022) when he says:

I was compelled to write Treacle Walker because, I realise now, it holds the essence of my own story. It is an extension, in mythic form, of the memoir Where Shall We Run To?

The “donkey stone” and the rag and bone man from Treacle Walker, for example are also part of Alan Garner’s upbringing, and his lifelong friend Harold is also a clear inspiration.

I wish I had read this book before I tackled Treacle Walker, but now that I have done so I fully understand why Alan Garner is spoken about with such respect and affection.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a delightful little book. I love that it's just random memories.

[Vicky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely Super!

[Roderick Mcgillis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Precise, intimate, funny, compelling. Would we all could write a memoir like this one.

[Brian Clegg · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is no doubt that Alan Garner is a remarkable writer, for whom a sense of place is absolutely central to his writing - so it's not entirely surprising that in this memoir of his childhood up to the age of 11 (with a couple of short articles from later years), the location where he was brought up - Alderley Edge - plays as much as part as his childhood friends and relations.

This was not the Alderley Edge of the modern football star - the village from mid-1930s to mid-1940s was a typical large rural village of the period with the familiar combination of eccentrics and everyday occurrences. Garner was a sickly child, whose illnesses also have a major influence on what we read.

For such a sophisticated writer, there is a deceptively simple style, relating events in a way that seems not much different to the way the young Garner himself might have related them - relatively little pastoral description, far more on what happened, with a casual attitude to time that enables him to flit backwards and forward through those ten years or so. School features large, as does family, and the ever-present Edge itself.

My main disappointment as a reader is that, while Garner hints at his transition to grammar school, he stops the narration before arriving there. This fits entirely with his sense-of-place driven approach, but I went to the same grammar school, also from the school of a large village (though 20 years later, and from a Lancashire village) and I would have loved to have discovered his experiences in Manchester - perhaps (please) there will be a sequel.

It's a short book that would be possible to read in a single sitting and a delight that Garner fan, and many others would want to share.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alan Garner's memoir of childhood is a vivid and intimate evocation of a time and place that seems both utterly remote and very familiar. Garner's lifelong association with the area around Alderley Edge, as a child and an adult, has been so strongly captured in his fiction, that the world described in Where Shall We Run To? is already known to the reader and there are echoes throughout this memoir of places and things that feature in books like The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its sequels, Red Shift and the Stone Book quartet. This is an episodic memoir, focusing on key incidents and remembered experiences, and told in knotty, muscular prose, well seasoned with Cheshire dialect. I particularly liked the device whereby Garner provides updates on some of the stories and characters in three short chapters at the end of the book; proof, if any were needed, of the tricks that time, place and community can play.

[BiblioPhil · Rating 5 out of 5]

The man is a visionary, here there is all childhood's curiosity, fears, embarrassments, hates. And his is the last generation lived through the war. a reminder that it wasn't a national myth but a time of absent fathers, random deaths, upheavals and privations.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I felt something go and not come back” is the main theme of this literary memoir covering the universal themes of the passage of time and the loss of loved ones. It is a memoir unlike any other, cleverly framing the first twenty-one years of the author’s life in a quasi-mystical manner not unlike the great works of fiction Garner is lauded for.
For a slim volume that can be read in a few short hours, there is a lot going on, and if read carefully you can spot the inspiration for many of Garner’s most popular novels. The chapter ‘Widdershins’ provides you with the basis for The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its sequel (the topography of Alderley Edge) with the original premise of Red Shift- the different wars fought from Romans in the Bronze Age, through to the Civil War, and ending with Garner’s Father’s recollections of a Zeppelin flying over the Edge during The Great War. The chapter ‘Bike’ largely covers the premise of Elidor and the author’s own fascination with Churches. These small allusions should keep the fans of Garner’s literary output satisfied.
On a different level, Garner being vintage 1934, this memoir gives an insight into an England that has long since disappeared with vivid descriptions of the nightmare of the 11+ examination, returning bottles to the shop and getting paid for doing so and brass hand bells being used to call the children in from school break time at first, before graduating to whistle bursts that mean stop, stand still and be silent, followed by another blast to line up, and a final blast to file back into the school building- that was still going on in the early 90s and it was reassuring to discover that particular silly ritual was not confined to the school this reviewer attended.
To return to the original theme of loss; it is threaded throughout the text making it a moving , and at times poignant tale, where friends die unexpectedly, Garner himself comes close to death as a child, and evacuee friends made during the war years, ‘vaccies’ they are brilliantly called, suddenly disappear back home following VE Day. There are other moving passages involving the United States GIs stationed in the North West in the chapter called ‘Porch’ but that is best left to the reader to discover for themselves.
Another curious aspect that should strike certainly millennial readers is Garner’s, and indeed everyone else in his memoir, knowledge of nature be it slugs, stone, whether natural water is safe to drink or not and so forth- knowledge that know only exists in Universities, but at one time would have been called ‘folk knowledge’ that everyone knew.
You don’t need to be a fan of Garner’s fiction to appreciate this touching memoir, you just need a couple of hours spare and an open mind and be willing to be transported back to an England that no longer exists.

[Vishvapani · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are hints in this short memoir by a wonderful writer of an answer to the question, but why did you write it? People cherish their memories, and perhaps no explanation is required for recording them, so perhaps the question is really 'Why should I read it?' Garner writes beautifully, of course, in his clipped Anglo-Saxon prose, but for someone like me, who read Garner's early books as a child and his later books as an adult, that isn't quite enough. I want to know if Garner is Colin, the child hero of The Wierdstone of Brisingamen (and the later Boneland), and if his experience growing up in Alderley Edge contained some pragmatic equivalent to the eruption of fantasy energies that Colin witnesses.

And I want to know what happened on his journey to Manchester Grammar and Oxford, where he studied Classics, that took him back to his home and the Cheshire dialect with all its Mercian inflections. I want to know how he learned to expand his vision by looking so narrowly at one location and how he discovered the Deep Place that it discloses.

Garner, the bugger, won't give me that, of course. He tells stories of school and the war and his family that shimmer with vividness; but the wizards and wolves and the red shifts of the rotating galaxies are no more than an echo inside a hint in these delightful but slight anecdotes.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A brief memoir by the author of 13-year-old-me's favourite series of books. It's good but too short. It made me want to read Cider With Rosie again.

[Allie Riley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly charming and delightful.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful stories from a childhood of a different era.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alan Garner's connections back in time are very strong - to be able to refer so easily to his grandad's grandad, and the houses and traces still visible in the surroundings as he grew up are an astonishing moment in time. That sort of past connection is unusual for a family without great wealth or property. For most families current pressures would gradually break ties to the past. But for Alan Garner he seems to have grasped early on how rich a local history he had and how important it was to capture and deepen it. I finished the book wondering how his memories of childhood could still be so sharp - but of course he has been cherishing and using those memories all his life. Not a great memoir, but a fine contribution to local history and part of his life's work, and a fitting record for all those local people named in the book.

[Lawrence Aitken · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a boy we were in the era where you read books, did your homework, watched BBC1, BBC2, ITV or played outside.
Alan Garner's books were those books you usually read in a few days as they were about the legends of Alderley Edge which was local to us in Altrincham.

It reveals his working class childhood both before, during and just after the Second World War in Alderley Edge. A different time of playing in the countryside, finding unexploded bombs, American soldiers and the acceptance of the fragility of life then. Some funny moments such as the explosion in the sewers that blew Mrs Noon's toilet off its base while she was sitting on it.

In the era of the iPhone this is one book that was an enjoyable, relaxing read and stopped me from looking at it. And I found out what "widdershins" means.

[Angus Murchie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this was a brilliant evocation of being a small boy in an adult world growing up on Alderley Edge in the late 1930s and through the Second World War.

Many of the stories are very funny, they all created clear images in my mind, as well as taking me back to being a very small boy myself and just how scary the world could seem. In particular, I was vividly reminded of the way people, especially in my case school friends, would suddenly disappear from your life with no explanation.

His description of how he learned to read small letters whilst in hospital with meningitis by using a comic strip to compare the big letters he knew with the little letters under the pictures was particularly striking, as was his physical reaction to realising he could now read anything.

The story about the Yank soldiers was endearingly sweet and warmhearted but then suddenly turned horrific in the last two lines. It felt like cruising down the motorway in 6th gear enjoying oneself, then accidentally selecting reverse and finding the engine jumping out the bonnet in a screech of hot metal. I’m not sure the terrible realities of war have ever been so starkly highlighted.

Anyone who has read Elidor, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen or The Moon of Gomrath will recognise and be thrilled by the links to those books in the numerous descriptions of his childhood house, some of the things that happened there and, most obviously, the landscape around The Edge. There are also lovely mentions of things which appear in Treacle Walker, which perhaps would help those who found that book completely baffling (as would reading the rest of his novels and essays first).

It may be a relatively slight book at 194 pages of quite large text but I consider this a “must read” for any Garner fan. All Alan Garner’s novels are also short and taut - and so much better for it compared with much of the bloated writing from most other writers.

[Tracey Curzon-Manners · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen is my all time favourite childhood book which is why I was so keen to read Alan Garner's memoir.

On the whole, the book is an enjoyable read, full of childhood memories of school, the war, and a general mix of characters who cross paths with young Alan.

But.

I found it disjointed and a bit of a shopping list - as in, we did this, then we did that, and this was the outcome - as though I'd sat down next to the local character in a pub who was used to giving his well rehearsed renditions of times gone by.

What did strike me was how fortunate he was to live in a place where the names of local places could not fail to incite the imagination. 'The Wizard' 'Stormy Point' to name a couple. 'The Edge', so prominent in his future books and a nod to a young lad who thought nothing of cycling 20 miles with his mum and knew his way around the area in a way that I fear is lost on youngsters today.

I did lament for those years ofsimple pleasures where imagination takes hold and being in a gang was an innocent way of connecting with the kids in your neighbourhood who shared a common background of having not much in life but still being willing to see life as the wonderful adventure it could be.

I did feel the book ended rather abruptly in a way that seemed slightly odd, but is forgiven for the sake of lasting childhood memories of my own. For which I thank the author.

[Ape · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was just fantastic. Alan Garners childhood memoir, written in a way that captures a child's way of observing the world and what happens, trusting belief in what they are told, and the dotting about of glimpses of memories rather than a strict and detailed ordered chronology. But not told in a dumbed down way either. You feel the generations and his strong connection to place, and to friends from.his childhood. And there were several random little details that clicked in my memory with things I have read in other books, in particular Treacle Walker.

He grew up during the second world war. So he went to school with gas masks and air raid drills, his father drafted and away in the army. He is an advert for why you want childhood vaccinations because my god he went through some nasty diseases and spent a lot of time in hospital. He's lucky he actually survived childhood. He learns to ride a bike. Pushes a friend into nettles. Once ate a slug. Moaned his little pet bird that died. Loved comics. Had an imagination sparked by all the strange place names in his stamp collection. He was out and about and living. There's a touch of melancholy to it when you think this way of rural life, or indeed this style of childhood is gone. But also the reflection of anyone looking back on their childhood, and how quickly it is gone and you can't get it back. Including a great number of the people from that time.

[Anna Hepworth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much of this book reads as if it is written for children. Not in that it pulls any punches, or hides the truth, but the reading level of the language. It was fascinating, because in some ways I felt like I wasn't meant to be the reader. That because Garner is a writer of children's books, he was writing a memoir that his target audience could read.

There was also a strong thread of nostalgia. Which, given what else I've read about Garner, makes sense. The focus time period is before he was accepted into a Grammar school, while he was still completely part of the local area. The writing style is that very rambling children's narrative, which doesn't particularly start or stop anywhere, but goes all places in between anyway.

The last three chapters are a foil to this. Each of them is a repeat of a previous chapter, but with a much more adult viewpoint, and a much more 'educated adult' feel to the writing. It was a fascinating comparison, to look back and forth between the chapters, and see how it is that the different tone/feel was achieved. For this alone, I would recommend it to people interested in writing memoir, and interested in pitching stories at different levels.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This beautifully written memoir of childhood is an absolute joy. Alan Garner is one of Britain's greatest writers and with this book about growing up during the war years on Alderley Edge in Cheshire, we get to see where the inspirations for such classics as the Weirdstone of Brisingamen came from.

Garner has always used his environment and his family history as story seeds, especially in the Stone Book Quartet, and this memoir only adds to that. Through debilitating childhood illness where a prolonged stay in hospital forced him to teach himself to read, to being the brightest boy in school, Garner paints a picture of a bygone age. Roaming over Alderley Edge with his father, Garner steeps himself in knowledge, not just through reading, but through family and experience.

It's a short book, but immensely nostalgic, immensely readable. There's a touching coda at the end where he meets his childhood friend Harold on the Edge in 2001 and they compare how their lives diverged.

Funny, moving and quite brilliant.

[Edmund Chattoe-Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fascinating writing exercise in that it really feels like a child's experience from a very early age. (But of course one cannot tell if Garner is really reporting his own memory as it happened or family accounts as well and that probably doesn't really matter.) The child's eye seems to focus very sharply on some events and almost completely miss others that appear to an adult much more momentous. (It is striking how many people die or permanently go away from Garner's world in a sentence or two despite the relatively short time frame of the book.) The book also gives a strong sense of what it was like to be a child at that time and in that place with its details of petrol rations, air raid drill and the much wider prevalence of serious illness. If you like Cider With Rosie I suspect you will also like this. Finally, you can see the roots of Garner's psychogeographical perspective on myth and the specific locale of Alderley Edge starting here. Well worth your time.

[Richard Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

This delightful memoire reads as written by the boy the author was with no adult overseeing sophistication. As such it comes across as authentic. It also opens a window onto a past that for some of us is still in our memory. There's the good - the freedom that we had as children and the excitement of a mind not jaded by exposure to the omnipotent power of the small screen - and the bad - the prevalence of awful childhood diseases for which there were no vaccines (and which shames the idiot anti-vaccers of today.) This latter aspect of existence then is summed up by the line 'And then M. died.' after a lovely description of the author's interactions with M. The horrible schools, the bullying, the general filth (the vaccies all having ringworm and nits) but also the freedom to cycle twenty miles to visit a relative without the stultifying fear. It's a beautiful memoire worthy of one of our greatest writers.

[Bob Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though Alan Garner is twenty five years older than me, not a lot changed in the world between our childhoods, the world was still a slow place and adventure could be found away from the prying eyes of adults, the days when one could be caned at school for having a blunt knife, as a blunt knife was a dangerous article when sharpening your pencil, to spending upwards of eight hours out of the house without any adult supervision. This book brings it all flooding back and makes one realise what a mess we've made of the world and society that we live in.
A good fast read, that had me returning to the Alderley Edge of my childhood, to find the village is now mainly eateries for 'ladies who lunch', charity shops and beauty/nail parlours.
Many of the land marks such as the 'Devil's Cave' are barred up, the Wizard's Well is barely noticeable and many developments are not in keeping.

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an account of Garner's life when he was 11 and younger. These years coincide with wartime Britain, so he writes about bombings and barrage balloons, gas-masks and bomb shelters, and the "vaccies", the children evacuated to his village outside of Chester. I associated Garner's work with an intensity of language and thought: in his novels I've discovered ideas that I've never encountered anywhere else. This feels like a more slight, or less important, work. It evokes a particular time and place, and is rich in the details of childhood, but it doesn't have Garner's unique touch. If you enjoy Garner's work, this is an interesting addition, but I wouldn't recommend it as a starting point.

[Katy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very disjointed and episodic memoir picking out some of the things the author remembers from his childhood during WW2. On several occasions, he just casually mentioned a small detail, such as coming near death himself, or a friend dying soon after an incident he just recounted, and it felt like we were missing half the story. However, that said, I still enjoyed reading about his childhood not too far from the place where my grandparents lived when I was a child, and thinking about the way in which his close associations with the landscape and legends of Cheshire informed his childrens' books. Like Susan Cooper, I have a feeling early readers of Alan Garner may also be quite heavily represented within archaeology.

[Jonathan Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a moving and in many way all too brief account by Garner, now in his eighties, of his childhood in rural Cheshire, where he still lives, in the 1930's and '40's, up till the age of 11, and the end of the War.

He writes here with a childlike simplicity, describing his young life with an immediacy that never feels forced or affected, and in a short Afterword he catches up with some of the characters from his youth in later life.

A delightful book, and a reminder of why he is such a beloved children's author: even in old age, he hasn't forgotten what it is to see the world through a child's eyes.