“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” The British novelist L.P. Hartley was referring to childhood or, more exactly, to the memory of childhood. It’s the foundation of any explored adult consciousness, of course, and particularly that of the poet and often the novelist. It is most particularly true of British writers, who have made a virtual genre of traveling back to that foreign country and treating it as Arcadia.
More interesting, though, are memoirists like George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh. Their school remembrances gave the darker reading to the two-faced Latin phrase “I too have been in Arcadia” — the one in which “I” is not the nostalgic rememberer, but doom or, specifically, death.
Andrew Motion, Britain’s current poet laureate, has written a childhood memoir that is Arcadian in the first or golden sense, though not without pain. The pain comes mainly in childhood’s end: his mother’s mortal injury in a riding accident in 1968. “In the Blood” begins here, with teenage Andrew and his younger brother, Kit, spending days waiting at home for word from their father, camped at the hospital. The suffocating pressure of the wait, the enforced idleness, the feeling of stopped time, are beautifully rendered, recalling somewhat Agee’s “Death in the Family.”
Today’s New York Times has a review for English Poet Laureate Andrew Motion’s 
