Summary of Rose Tremain's Rosie: Scenes from a Vanished Life Author: Doctor Terence Rajivan Edward (or 0161__Rajivan, if that helps) Draft version: version 1 (3rd April 2026) No idea how reliable this book is! Read it fast and summarized it fast. Easy to read, but worth rereading. My remarks in square brackets. Paradise. Presents Linkenholt Manor, which she and her sister visit 3 times a year from London and feel much love for. Hampshire: around the house on the hill are 2000 acres of farmland, owned by grandfather! (She implies her family are upper middle class in the chapter The English Room.) The place seemed to love them, while relatives did not. Grandfather and Grandmother were heartbroken people, who lost their son from a burst appendix at Harrow school. Another boy dies in war, age 28. The middle child Jane, their mother, gave them no joy. "Without Jo [sister], I would have been lonely as a child in Linkenholt. The grown-ups mainly put themselves into a drawing-room existence, where they smoke and drank and played cards and did The Times crossword and waited for meals to arrive." p.13 [Sounds like life in a psychiatric ward!] The family go on pheasant hunts on boxing day. "The Fosbury daffodils presented to me and Jo a sight we never, ever forgot. It surely outshone in wonder and variety the golden blooms that Wordsworth saw" p.17. (Maybe the best daffodils don't turn into the best poems.) Vivid descriptions of guns sounding. Sister is described as an artistic genius, with her drawing and painting talent. (Cousin Johnny was friends with a young Winston Churchill, footnote p.23. [A schoolboy in my year went to Oxford and works in the Oxford English dictionary as an editor, and one worked for The Guardian for 2 or so years!]) Cast Away. Until she is 10, she lived in Sloane Avenue in Chelsea. Vera Sturt - referred to as Nan - is the anchor of their London life, and whom the book is dedicated to. She wakes them in the morning, makes them porridge, takes them to school, brings them back, takes them to swimming lessons. Her father is a playwright, Keith Thomson. They grow up to the sound of his typewriter, remembering to be quiet on the stairs, because Daddy's writing. But his career is disappointing. His plays don't make it from provincial theatres to London. His drawing room comedies are soon regarded as unfashionable, and superseded by the angry realist plays of John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, David Storey. (p.33, footnote, Keith claimed to have discovered Mary Ure, who starred in the film of Osborne's Look Back in Anger.) "As many writers do, Keith used his work not to join in many family things." p 33. He was easily bored and disliked the Tory shire culture around Linkenholt. He would drive back to London to avoid the Boxing Day pheasant slaughter. His work on mystery plays in York gets him an OBE. He falls in love with a much younger woman - Virginia Wood, father' secretary apparently - and he runs away with her, after one attempt to save his marriage. Their mother has an affair with Keith's cousin, Sir Ivo Thomson, and Ivo's wife has an affair too! Ivo had a director's job at York Herald Newspaper and sold his shares, to begin life afresh. Mother. Mother, Jane, was sent to boarding school at age 6. She was 2 years younger than all others, and only had experience of a lazy governess beforehand. Was sick everyday. Grandparents did not visit. She was often in the school sanatorium. Her only hope came from her expensive coat, which made her feel that her mother her loved her a little bit. p. 48 Changes her name to Jane, because she was always called plain. Rose refused to answer to Rosie, as mother refused to answer to Viola, but there is no comparison in harshness of life. Mother thinks she loves food, but actually her bodily sickness from boarding school continues her whole life and she chain smokes. She is disgusted by much, including tooth cleaning. "Jo and I grew up entirely without the feeling of being loved by mother." p.53 Timmy Trusted was a boy the same age, everyone loved him but Rose, who was expected to play with him, He was regarded as better at everything and destroys her sand sculptures as something girly. They surf. They learn to fit in or else. Aunt Marie, a rich eccentric, gives her £100; mother considers it too much, uses a little to buy a new bike and then later: sorry, used the rest. Mother wanted them to be honest, but was dishonest and threw away their poems. "it was as if, in her arithmetic, she decided (her italics): Jo and Rosie have got quite enough already, thank you very much! I endure Linkenholt for their sakes. I fill their Christmas stockings. They don't need me to make financial sacrifices for them. They don't need me to love them." p.68 Angel. Tells us about her holidays. P74. That she prefers realistic plays to Lewis Caroll's Alice in Wonderland, p.79. Reads A A Milne and Stevenson, p.80. Pearl S Buck is what Nan (Vera, a Nanny, see the opening) reads. Nan goes away, p.85. Nanny Collins, a new nanny appears, causing Rose to draw grotesques from hatred p.87. Nan Vera returns. Her mother and new husband move to Frilsham Manor, Berkshire, but mother does not want to do much mothering. Rose moves in with Nan at Meadows, p.90. Children in general love tasks, we are told p.91. [Whatever!!!] Penultimate page, I wanted Nan to be my mother, Nan was an angel. The English Room. Crofton Grange School - abiding memory is that it is cold, Rumour of a Tudor ghost, with the Dickensian name Miss Mellish, imagined in purple, reflecting the vivid imaginations of teenage girls. Upper middle class girls, we are told! They talked about boys a bit, but mostly about exile, from proper food, from families, from a nurturing past. (p.99 - never stopped longing for return.) They bullied a fat girl. No physical beatings there, unlike for public school boys of that time. 100 girls overall. Not enough sleep. No laundry more than once a week, rationing of hair washing - suspects "we stank." Italian kitchen staff, but not Italian food! Breakfast was the best. Children were thin. She likes the English teacher, an intellectual, from Oxford, friends with poet laureate John Masefield [who looks like Hulk Hogan to me] and keen on Keats: Miss Robinson, or Robbie. She makes friends with them. has Shakespeare expertise. They were Robbie's crew! Rose writes stories like Masefield and then they draw pictures to illustrate Masefield's books (p.109). Once they went to see Masefield. Rose told him she wanted to be a writer, but does not recall his reply. She keeps in contact with him by sending flower pictures and he replies. Sabine has sexual relations with her father apparently. Father said, "The first lover of a woman must take care of her and I can only reassure myself that this will happen by taking care of her myself," Sabine shows no signs of being traumatized. Rose thought about lost father and began writing plays - aged 13? Drama was regarded as important by the school. [Minimal trace of a science here!] She wrote a play about 2 pampered girls who attempt to see the world, by working for rich Italians. After her second play, Always a Clown, she was no longer unhappy at school. She did not want holidays; she wanted to be back at school: "painting scenery, learning Shakespeare, singing in the choir, playing the piano – and writing." p.120, Writers come to writing differently, she argues - Angus Wilson age 40, Penelope Fitzgerald as Oxford undergrad. Regarding herself (in bullet points!): father was a writer, so she felt it honorable; she didn't want to be like her mother, no job; she wanted to be destined for something, as her sister was destined for art; writing cured homesickness; and Robbie showed her it shed light on the human condition, as nothing else could. Also [not in bullet points, but seems an elaboration of the final point], after tennis she has an experience of happiness and desolation: a sense of the fleetingness of everything… which teenagers are especially prone to? She wanted to put such feelings in a concrete form. She decides to write a story! Teen Music. Mother's second husband was a good substitute father: Ivo Thomson. Thomsons were from Yorkshire and he has something Yorkshire about his character - amused, stubborn, outspoken, and kind, p. 129. Was mother happy? She felt grateful to be rescued from heartbreak, when husband and lover eloped, and tried hard to be happy. An unpleasant birthday experience for Rose, where her mother is cold and stuck in a swimsuit, removed with pliers, prevents Rose from ever enjoying birthdays. Ivo T's kindness did not reduce mother's general anger. Rose spends a lot of time practising piano, working on music beyond her mediocre skill. Jane and Ivo do not come to her first concert; Jane is never proud of her. Father Keith comes to half a concert. (Earlier footnote, p.36, never read her novels, or any from Sacred Country?) He saw her, but never even said hello, which was wounding. At 15, she falls in love with a boy called Dermot Halloran, 17, about to become a cadet in nautical college. He reminded people of Elvis. They give teenage hops at Ivo and Jane's manor, and she danced with Halloran in the dark, they touch and kiss and dream. He leaves for the Canadian navy. The only serious love - because sexually consummated - was between clever Eton star Robin Peat and beautiful Nancy Phillpotts, p.144; then he failed to get in to Oxford. He deflowered Nancy, then a Cathy too! He meets Nancy when old and married her, but all his early promise has gone and he dies of alcoholism in 2004. Milton's Oppositions. She was tasked to do a large Milton-themed mural by Robbie, at the time of her O-levels [aged 15?], and tries to figure out how to pass nevertheless. Robbie encourages her to go to Oxford, but her family (mother and Ivo) are unresponsive in letters. Mother had other plans, which we learn about after disturbing story. Mother had been attacked by Spanish servants, rape, difficult for Rose to comprehend - they seemed happy at the manor house. When her mother was old, she asked her about it, but Mother stared in bewilderment, as if "What are you talking about?" Her talented sister Jo, who joins Central School of Art in London, is steered towards design, not where her talents lay. At 23, she marries and gives up on the skill that defined her childhood. Now time for Mother has anti-Oxford plans: does not want a bluestocking for a child. Taken out of Crofton Grange and to finishing school in Switzerland. Why does she not argue with Mother? She says the nearest she can get to explanation is: she was terrified of her. There is a strange music fraud story on p.165, of interest to musicologists we are told. Music teacher Joyce Hatto marries William Barrington-Coupe, known as Barry, in 1956 and gives up teaching for concert performance. When she becomes too ill to play, with stomach cancer, in the 1990s, he issues numerous recordings apparently of her. They are not of her: "he had 'spliced' the work of lesser known concert artists'. When the fraud was found out, he said Joyce never knew they were not by her. Pp.165-166. Rose's last grades at Crofton are mostly As and A-s, apart from Latin and Gymnastics Tits to the Valley. In Switzerland - Mon Fertile finishing school - she shares a room with 2 South African girls. French only is spoken - a rule, to ensure language learning. There were Germans, Dutch, Scandinavians, South Africans, Canadians and British girls! At supper, each must stand up and admit the number of non-French words used. At night, they whisper in other languages. Her South African friend Carol's father's second wife was formerly married to murderer Neville Heath. They learn to type and are told they will serve men. ("This was 1960, and feminism had not yet come storming into the world." p.175 - not reliable as history, okay!) They struggle with French writers Racine and Corneille, who never seem to yield their secrets, unlike Shakespeare. She does no writing at this finishing school. At Crofton, she believed she would succeed where her father had not, but here she was merely prepared for wifehood and being a secretary, causing her to give up. A new girl comes and Carol and Rose conclude that she is a good sport. She learns to ski. The chapter title is explained on p.184. It is a skiing instruction, issued by a male teacher to girls, which they experience as amusing but which 16 year old girls today would reasonably object to, p.184. She reflects that with the things she so far had attempted - piano, typing, riding, tennis, skiing, even the Milton mural - she always fell short of doing them really well. Her father Keith mocks her for agreeing to go to this finishing school. Afterword. Mother sends her to a school in Paris. She finally rebels, enrols in the Sorbonne, and enjoys student life. In 1976, her first novel was published. It was rejected by 6 publishers and then published by editor and friend Penelope Hoare. References Jane's Addiction. June 8 2006 (my birthday). Jane's Addiction - Classic Girl - Lollapalooza 91. Available at YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgaM1dX9Va0&t=6s [Song for this book. Maybe another recording first. About the same level?] Tremain, Rose. 2019 (originally 2018). Rosie. Scenes from a vanished life. London: Vintage.