A Welsh Childhood

Welsh novelist Ellis, born in Liverpool of mixed Celtic and Russo-Finnish stock, was raised in a coastal village in north Wales. In this vibrant, nostalgic, altogether delightful autobiographical memoir laced with puckish humor, she celebrates a rural, fulfilling, relatively classless way of life that is steadily being eroded by tourism and encroaching urbanization. She vividly recalls oral traditions handed down to her as a girl, folk stories of witches, fairies, druids, mermaids, warriors and lake monsters that later fueled her novelistic imagination. Her childhood was idyllic-riding her own pony, taking dancing lessons on a moored ship, having adventures on a nearby island-and her beautifully written narrative blends local gossip, snippets of Welsh history, and observations of Welsh food, customs, the downwind radioactivity that has affected the region since Chernobyl, reported UFO landings, her obsession with death, her strong belief in ghosts. She briefly touches on motherhood-married at 23, she had four sons by age 30-and pours out her grief over the accidental death of her teenage second son in 1978. Sutherland's marvelously evocative black-and-white photographs of neat cottages, wild, lyric landscapes, standing stones, untamed seas, castle ruins, mussel-gatherers and sheepshearers perfectly complement the text, making this volume an enchantment. (Mar.)