"Quietly remarkable autobiography alive with unforgotten terrors, unforgiven indignities"...Alan Hollingsworth Autobiographical accounts of Victorian childhood tend to fall into one of two camps: life was either golden or it closely resembled something straight out of the Brontë sisters. Gerald Tyrwhitt, a.k.a. the 14th Baron Berners, was an unusual memoirist for his day and age, chiefly because he eschewed both nostalgia and sentimentality, preferring instead to depict his youth in wry, frequently hilarious terms. Berners has been called "the last eccentric," and indeed in his adult life he would have given Auntie Mame a run for her money. Although this book ends with Berners's teetering on the verge of adolescence, it serves as prelude to the life that would follow: already the future baron was enamoured of art and dismal at sport--a situation frowned upon by the fox-hunting, grouse-shooting, cricket-loving upper classes into which he was born. Sent away to school at the age of six, he soon became aware of an even more frowned-upon proclivity: an attraction to other boys. Berners relates the events of his early life with humor and dash; who knew that the life of a prepubescent boy could be so entertaining? In this memoir of his earliest youth, first published in 1934 in Great Britain, Lord Berners captures the devilish enchantment and perilous anxieties of an upper-class schoolboy, living at home with Mum, and perched on the brink of adolescence and also at the outer limit of the Victorian age. Berners (1883 - 1950), sometimes called the ``English Satie,'' eventually enjoyed a glamorous life as a composer, style-setter, homosexual, art-lover, and well-heeled host. But here he plants himself firmly in the ``dreadful plainness''of England as it lunged forward into the1890s. Dismal at sport in a world which exalted it, and precociously drawn to the arts (perish the thought!), he was sent off to boarding school at the age of six. He recounts his traumas and yearnings there in humorous and honest detail, casting himself much like ``Blake's little figure . . . stretching out its ladder to the moon.'' The unspoken strains of adolescence also vie for young Berners - s attention. At last his dangerous attraction for Longworth (and his first awareness of homosexual longing) is halted in a boyish escapade involving stolen cigarettes and moonlight bathing the school rooftop. Then summer intervenes with its athletic outings, picnics, and family intrigues. Lord Berners reflects on those fortunately - pre-Freudian, pre-Havelock Ellis generations.'' His spirit of candor and his literary panache combine to recreate a now-vanished youth, as well as the innocence of a larger bygone age. Out of the ``squalid dustbin of school life,'' Berners has extricated the stuff of romance. Though his privileged upbringing has often been bashed elsewhere, now it comes in for a well-earned share of nostalgic magic. So close one eye, squint politely, and read the words of Berners as the starry prelude to a life not yet lived. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. "Quietly remarkable autobiography alive with unforgotten terrors, unforgiven indignities"...Alan Hollingsworth Lord Berners (1883-1950) was a composer, novelist, painter, memoirist, conspicuous aesthete and the real life character on whom Nancy Mitford based Lord Merlin in The Pursuit of Love. This versatile peer has been called the English Satie. His ballets have been choreographed by Balanchine and Ashton. Used Book in Good Condition