Can You Find Me

Oxford: Oxford Univ Press,. Very Good/Very Good. 1978. First Edition. Hard Cover. 8vo 0192117513 Dust jacket complete, unclipped. Original cloth boards with bright titling on spine. No ownership inscription. xiv+272pp, b/w frontis, 16pp b/w plates. clean and tight. The playwright Christopher Fry comes from a remarkable family whose eventful lives form the subject of this book. With the aid of letters, diaries, and photographs he constructs a gentle, beautifully written and often very moving story in which his own childhood recollections weave among the memorable and wonderfully articulate cast of characters he introduces. The story begins in 1849, when the author's maternal grandmother Emma Louisa Lowe Fry and his grandfather Edwin Rowland Hammond first met. It was from this grandmother that Christopher took the name Fry, and it is his mother's side of the family who dominate the pages of his book: Aunt Ada, melancholy and eccentric, who suffered all her life from the nervous conviction of her own ill-health, and spent long hours annotating her copy of the Bible in her microscopic handwriting; Uncle Hal, who emigrated to Canada and sent home chilling accounts of his sea-crossing and early experiences, and later, descriptions of life with the Mounties; Hal's brothers, Charlie and Bert, who shared his spirit of adventure and travelled to Nev: Zealand and Australia - a country with the pull of a magnet for so many of the Hammond Family, where Bert's life was to end in tragedy. With the birth of the author in 1907, vivid personal memories of growing up during the First World War and early 1920s complete a picture of family life that spans a century. Can You Find Me is a fascinating tale of the diversity of lives and the intricate pattern of events which combined to bring about the meeting of the author's parents, and of how echoes of those earlier times continued into his childhood. .