Reading this little gem, you can't help but be reminded of, say, Sassoon's Memoires of a Fox-hunting man or Yeats' Reveries. Not because of the style, or the content, but for the look it casts back, and the gaping holes one finds in the narrative.
Shepard could really write - wistful, nostalgic prose - and as he illustrated this text himself, the book as a whole is a treat. But not having grown up on Winnie the pooh, I'm rather indifferent to that part of the writer: what he evokes here is just one year in his life, when he was about 7. Drawing was obviously central to him then, but don't expect juicy bits on Milne etc: Shepard sticks to that one childhood year.
Except once: and that's the gaping hole.
Except when he suddenly remembers visiting, much later, the grave of his beloved brother, killed in WW1. And that is the trigger for the reader to ask: where's the pain? Where are the childhood nightmares, the tears, the pains?
Answer: there are none. There are none because this is an ideal of a childhood: everyone and everything is good, pure, and conducive to happiness. The episode at the farm, for example, or the Jubilee night, or the games on the street: all is cotton-woolled, seen through the screen of memory and the main aim of the writer. Of course, he was from a very wealthy family, and enjoyed a childhood totally removed from the miseries of everyday Londoners. Yet that's not the point: the point is that the mother he adored, the mother he idolised, was to die shortly afterwards, a death that remains completely out of the book.
And so the gaping hole? The reality.
This book seeks to preserve an enchanted period of innocence, pleasure and abundance, of games and love and happiness. It is a buffer against what was to come, the horrors of death and war: the horrors of growing up and becoming an adult.
So this little book is a gem because of the voice, of the atmosphere, the details, and the great, pure love for life and for living in the moment that children have, and that adults forget so quickly. It is about the quiet before the storm, the innocence before the sin, the dream before reality; it is about lying about the past (Sasson's wonderful book pretends his parents were dead and he was an orphan, while none of it was true at all) to re-create it, to hold it still for a handful of pages.
It's, in short, a wonderful example of what memoires can be: a sepia photograph which has been framed very carefully to edit out the ungainly bits: not to lie, but to re-create, preserve, and cherish.
Fascinating.