The Secret Orchard Of Roger Ackerley

by Diana Petre

Book by Petre, Diana

Genres: Biography, Memoir, British Literature

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

The half-sister of J.R. Ackerley.

Reviews

[Mary Warnement]

I started this SF edition on the subway this week, and though I had only a few pages to finish come last weekend, I only just finished last night. Staying up too late and reading only a couple paragraphs before sleep overtook me. That's not an indictment of this sad memoir by Diana Petre of her mother. Petre writes well about her family's unusual situation. Muriel, her mother, is Roger Ackerley's mistress, his secret orchard. Perhaps the children become part of their hidden pleasure too, but Muriel leaves the children with caretakers of his choosing for years. Her selflessness acting as quartermaster for the Victoria Station tea cafe for troops and then working with the Red Cross in Italy during WWI doesn't jibe with her selfish behavior toward her own children, but why should I expect consistency in human behavior. I don't fault Petre or her older twin sisters for escaping and leaving their mother to her own. In my younger days I would have questioned Petre's decision to sit with Muriel and comfort her as she lay dying, but that act of kindness and forgiving probably helped keep Petre sane. Sometimes you have to accept that you'll never know what another's thinking. That maybe they're not thinking. A sentence near the end sums it up: (265) "The waste of so much precious emotion over the years was like a crime."
The somewhat comic ending could have seemed contrived; if read out of context, one would think it made up and laugh. I smiled but did not laugh.

[E A M Harris]

Who is Muriel and what happened to her to turn her life into a dysfunctional calamity and threaten to do the same to her children? Even at the end of this memoir, set in London in the early to mid 20th century, we have no certainties, only likelihoods.
Muriel's character was full of discords: in peacetime she was a needy drunk, but in two world wars she was efficient, hardworking and willing to take her work to the front line.
Diana Petre was her daughter and struggled with a confused and chaotic upbringing. But her book is anything but chaotic; in a plain but very clear style she analyses events and feelings, keeps track of several lives and gives us a clear vision of her times.
This book is part memoir and part 'true story' mystery, and even though the mystery is only partly solved, it is a satisfying read.

[Lizzie]

Sad memoir by one of the daughters of Roger Ackerley's mistress, so J. R. Ackerley's half sister. She and her sisters were hidden away while her mother, who seems to have been a narcissist, left the girls with carers. Later she came back into their lives but demanded attention and loyalty. I skimmed it - just not a very interesting story, unfortunately.

[Felicity]

Like many of Petre's readers, I came to this book via J.R. Ackerley's My Father and Myself, so I already understood the significance of the Secret Orchard. The first impression of this memoir was discouraging: Petre's prose is often artless and occasionally asinine. Thus she observes that 'absolutely nothing was as I had thought it was, and none of it could ever revert and be as it had been before' (6) and speculates that had her mother Muriel been 'an ordinary sort of mother, with us from the beginning, I would not have wanted to collaborate [sic] with her youth' (7). What does it profit a reader to learn that Muriel 'had long arms and hands and straight legs, and a high un-English waist'? In addition to the stylistic shortcomings, sympathy and self-disclosure are noticeably sparse in this tale of a misguided drama queen and her three misguided daughters. Petre tells us a great deal abut her mother's sins of commission and omission; Muriel was a liar, a fantasist, irrational, impulsive, self-absorbed, unloving and unlovable from the outset, and 'bitter, destructive, pessimistic and totally wrongheaded in every respect' (150), 'lacking in self-knowledge' (176) to the very end. Petre records a great deal of her own righteous anger without offering much insight into her own behaviour. If the hypnotherapist who treated Petre, apparently successfully, knew even less about her life after two years of regular consultations, how could the reader expect any substantial disclosures? She dismisses in a single sentence, for instance, the end of her own previously unmentioned marriage. Interestingly, the dominant twin sister who arranged the release of all three girls from the parental home, showed surprising Cordelian charity and generosity to her mother at the end of her life, which Diana either could not or would not match. The unsolved mystery of Muriel's origins did not trouble me, but I remained perplexed by the unrelenting hostility from her youngest daughter, who had nevertheless doted on her 'Uncle' Roger, the serial marriage-dodger. Postmillennial memoirs often tell more than I want to know about the inner lives and secret loves of their authors; however 'untrue' Muriel may have been in her dealings with her daughters, Diana's memoir left me distinctly 'leery' that she was being egregiously economical with her version of the truth.

[Marjorie]

Diana Petre was the half-sister of J R Ackerley, a writer and editor who worked for the BBC magazine for decades and moved in a literary circle that included E M Forster and W H Auden.

Diane's mother was her father, Roger Ackerley's mistress. She, and her older twin sisters, had only glimpses of her father's "real family." They knew nothing of his secret garden.

J R Ackerley's short memoir, My Father & Myself, lays the groundwork for this dysfunctional family story and he reports the facts clearly and dispassionately. He also reveals much about his own personal journey, which is quite interesting.

But Diana's memoir is riveting, moving, and heart-felt. The two memoirs are definitely in dialog with one another. I couldn't put Diana's down, although both JR and Diana are superb writers, at the sentence level.

I think this may be out-of-print. I found a battered used copy on World of Books.

[Lori]

Interesting, sad, sometimes funny memoir of a family who lives an almost unbearably dysfunctional life. Muriel, the author's mother, is a needy alcoholic who abandons her children to an odd governess paid by her bigamist paramour. Except when she decides she shouldn't have abandoned them and returns to their home to "mother" them. Yes, it's that odd a life, but is fascinating, and described in such a clear-eyed fashion that we the readers are allowed not to pass judgment but merely to observe these lives lived out.

[Sarah Gregory]

This is Diana Petrie writing about her mother Muriel. Her story gets more and more extraordinary as the book progresses. I found it unputdownable towards the end. Petrie writes very well with humour and imagination as well as sadness. Her own ghastly upbringing and mental distress are the backdrop to the adventures of her mother.

[mathilda malanga]

crazy ass book