| The Impertinents Abroad
On the heels of the great success of his irreverent childhood memoir, Montecito Boy, Nevill Cramer delights us again with Montecito Boy Abroad--An Irreverent Journey, 1939, an account of his trip to northern and central Europe--and principally Ireland--with his brother Ambrose and cousin Joan on the eve of World War II, when Cramer was sixteen.
Readers of Montecito Boy will instantly recognize the narrator of this sequel; but here the sassy voice of the teen has matured somewhat. In the former, Cramer evoked his youthful impudence as he lovingly skewered his ancestors. Now, as Cramer turns his wit and insight on the people and places he discovered on his tour, his approach is more even-handed: he skewers his own teenage self on the same brochette as the quaint customs he discovered abroad.
And quaint those customs and places certainly were. Although the "old world" was of course already well into the industrial age, it was as far as ever from the modern technological age. Young Nevill and his companions sailed, not flew, across the sea. They traveled around Ireland on bicycles with but one gear (as opposed to the dozens on modern bikes), snapping photos with a box camera (not a video camcorder), and visiting homes with roofs of thatch and hearths stoked with peat. They visited castles and manors of lords and ladies long gone, and admired the graves of poets now busy making more peat.
It's safe to say that neither Europe nor Nevill Cramer was ever the same after the latter's visit to the former. For the young society lad the event marked a coming-of-age and an awakening to lands beyond his own horizon. For Europe it marked the end of an idyll of peace before the onset of World War II. Had Europe come to visit Cramer, things might well have turned out differently. But there it is.
About the Author
Nevill Cramer is retired from a career as a teacher of English at Laguna Blanca School, and devotes himself to community service to the disadvantaged. He lives and writes in Montecito, California, of course. |
