ALIVE, ALIVE OH! And Other Things That Matter

Legendary publisher and acclaimed memoirist Diana Athill wrote this last, joyful overview of her life when she was in her late eighties. Aged 21 when the war began, she remembers the "wonderful truth of Overness" on VE Day and her discovery in the fifties of the Club Med, a hedonistic free for all on Corfu where young holidaymakers were accommodated in tents. As the Cold War came closer, her youthful instincts remained buoyant even though "it doesn't take long for an empire to collapse". The book's title refers to an episode in her early forties when she found herself pregnant, not for the first time. But for the first time, after weeks of uncertainty, she decides to keep the child and offers to resign from her work. Her employer robustly tells her that she will need the money and if anyone is embarrassed they can leave instead. When she starts to miscarry she ends up in hospital having transfusion after transfusion, only just managing to survive, culminating in the amazing realisation that "I am alive". On the publication of her first memoir, she was afraid her mother would be mortified by the revelation of what she saw as guilty secrets, but in the end it strengthened the relationship between the two women. Athill describes her move to a residential home, something she would never have been able to imagine happening to her in her earlier years, and she meditates on the nature of new friendships made in old age. A rollercoaster of a read. 168pp, paperback.