By EMMA BROCKES Published: March 30, 2008
Julie Andrews’s memoir is full of crisp locutions like “poor unfortunate” and “banished to the scullery” and “trivet,” a characteristically precise term that the dictionary defines as “an iron tripod placed over a fire for a cooking pot or kettle to stand on.” It opens with a soppy poem she wrote about England, but what follows is a decisively unsoppy account of a typically dismal English childhood, complete with cramped lodgings and brutish relatives, which Andrews tells briskly and without self-pity.
Trivets come into it because, as is so often the case with the theatrically well-to-do, Andrews has refashioned herself out of trivet-level origins. The story starts in Walton-on-Thames, a village in the south of England, where she grew up. Her great-grandmother was a servant, her great-grandfather a gardener, and both grandparents on her mother’s side died of syphilis, the only response to which is: blimey, they didn’t put that in the press release for “Mary Poppins.” (The book’s tone addresses precisely this kind of joke and seems to implore, with weary finality, Enough already.)
Many celebrity memoirs overegg the rotten aspects of a childhood in order to flatter the achievements that follow it, but Andrews resists this. Her approach is restrained, and the quality of her prose such that you are reminded she is already an established children’s author. Her maternal grandfather was a rogue who served time for going AWOL from the army and whose philandering effectively killed his wife, who died shortly after he did, when Andrews’s mother was still a young woman. The portrait of Barbara Morris by her daughter is touching; she was a talented classical pianist who, despite her best efforts, eventually sank, like her father, into alcoholism. “My mother was terribly important to me, and I know how much I yearned for her in my youth,” Andrews writes, “but I don’t think I truly trusted her.” Her father, Ted Wells, was a teacher, a kind, gentle man whom Andrews draws in loving contrast to her stepfather, Ted Andrews, a vaudevillian whose name she was made to adopt when her parents divorced and her mother married him.
There are two major revelations in “Home.” The first is that Ted Andrews’s well-documented alcoholism and violence extended to creepier transgressions, which necessitated his stepdaughter putting a lock on her door after he twice, drunkenly, tried to get into bed with her. The second is something that before she came to write the book she hadn’t even told her siblings: one evening when she was 14 and driving her inebriated mother back from a party, Barbara told her that her father was not, in fact, Ted Wells, but the man whose party they had just attended, with whom Julie remembered “feeling an electricity ... that I couldn’t explain.”
