A pure delight from start to finish! Not only is it an uncanny description of the world seen through the eyes of a child, but it also provides an insight into the lives of well-to-do Edwardians and the officials who used to run the British Empire.

It puzzles me that it is not more well known.

Just hunting down a copy of this book was a treat in itself. I too first heard about it on the BBC show My Life in Books where it was picked as an old favourite by the Duchess of Devonshire. Via Google I found Slightly Foxed and their wonderful book shop near Gloucester Road station. And so I was lucky to get hold of one of the limited edition cloth-bound pocket editions. What a treat to read a book with a ribbon placeholder! I went back there recently and was told that A Late Beginner is now sold out but that a pocket paperback will be done next. Exactly when, they cannot say yet. ( )

Priscilla Napier’s autobiography was first published in 1966 and I was surprised at how difficult it is now to get hold of. I searched the library catalogue for it after hearing The Duchess of Devonshire’s recommendation of it on the first series of “My Life in Books” on the BBC. The Birmingham library system didn’t appear to have it however, so I turned to Abebooks – a few copies were available when I looked but were very expensive. More recently I remembered that Slightly Foxed had published it as one of their charming cloth bound books. I ordered it and was so pleased with the lovely quality of the book when it came. However I believe that, that print run of ‘A Late Beginner’ has now sold out.
Priscilla Napier’s early childhood was spent in Egypt where she lived with her parents and siblings and a succession of nannies, nursery maids and governesses. When she was twelve Priscilla left for school and this book is about her life in the years before that sad departure. The backdrop of this autobiography is the end of the golden Edwardian era in the few years before World War one, the turbulent years of the Great War and its immediate aftermath. The daughter of William Hayter a liberal financial advisor to the Egyptian government, her elder brother William became a British ambassador to Moscow, and her sister Alethea a writer. The war impacts most strongly of course upon the adults who surround Priscilla and her siblings, and it is through watching them and over hearing their conversation that Priscilla learns what is happening. Her stupefaction at seeing her mother silently weeping in the dentist’s office after an Uncle is killed obviously making a lasting impression upon her.
Priscilla Napier’s recreation of her world through her young child eyes is wonderful; she loved Egypt, and hated the forced returns to England during the hot Egyptian summers. This was particularly terrifying for young Priscilla as it meant sailing through war ravaged seas, with the fear of torpedoes a very real threat. The fear she felt all those years before is absolutely palpable – and quite understandable, presumably though the fear of the heat and disease of the Egyptian summer just as great for her parents, for them to have undertaken such a journey – more than once. This is a memoir of growing up, childish pranks, and battles of wills with stern faced nannies, desert picnics and long summers in England.
I have to admit that I preferred the first two thirds of the book – but this could be simply be because of my mood – a little over tired possibly for this kind of writing. However the writing is excellent and the world re-created beautifully memorable. ( )

I hardly know where to begin with this book. It was so dense, so full of sharp observations and incredible detail, so personal and yet so broad in its scope. Priscilla Napier spent her childhood in Egypt, leaving forever at the age of 12 to be sent to school; this is her memoir of this period. It was the end of the Edwardian era and encompassed the First World War, with the British Empire still maintaining some colonial hold on parts of the globe although that power was waning. Her father, Sir William Hayter, was a legal and financial adviser to the Egyptian government, supportive of Egyptian aspirations to self government. Priscilla acknowledges her father's liberal and egalitarian views throughout the book, his belief in the purpose of his work, particularly as the English in Egypt were replacing the brutal regime of the Turks. She also bows deeply to both of her parents' superb parenting skills.

She begins with the experiences and world view of a small child, centred around nursery and Nanny, the house servants, and her parents. The perspective grows as she does, the child's voice and viewpoint reflected so well in what she saw, smelled, ate, heard. Napier loved Egypt and resented the return to England during the Egyptian summers, when it was too hot and potentially dangerous disease-wise to stay. But with the advent of the War, that resentment turned to raw terror as their ship had to navigate mined waters and the very real fear of being torpedoed by the German submarines. She describes this fear so well, evoking the terror of a child trapped over deep water at the mercy of what might lie below that I felt it as well, praying with her that she would reach Southampton intact on each trip.

Napier also does a brilliant job of evoking the tension and horror of the war itself, watching the faces of the adults in her world, seeing her cousins left fatherless, or the change in the men who do survive. Her descriptions of Egypt are incomparable, as are her portrayals of the life they lead there. She isn't sparing of herself when she is obnoxious or messes up either, so this isn't a cloyingly sweet story but an honest one, whether dryly funny or achingly sad. I particularly liked her description of the young Churchill, who wasn't highly regarded after his escapades in India.

This is social history at its best and most intimate. It took me a while to work my way through this book but it was never for lack of interest that my reading of it was slow and careful. I read it in sips, letting each bit settle and become absorbed before going on to the next sampling. Napier has written something rare and unique about a period which my grandfather would have known and was a remnant of, so that traces of it were felt in my own life. And yet it was so exotic, so wildly different from any experiences of my own that the book captivated me as something fresh. Highly recommended. ( )

Priscilla Napier grew up in Egypt during the last golden years of the Edwardian Age – a time when, for her parents’ generation, it seemed the sun would never set upon ‘the regimental band playing selections from HMS Pinafore under the banyan tree’. A Late Beginner she recalls that childhood and those last fleeting years of the British Protectorate. Her father, Sir William Hayter, a clever, hardworking man with enlightened views, was legal and financial advisor to the Egyptian Government. Her brother William would later become British Ambassador in Moscow, her sister Alethea a distinguished writer, and Priscilla herself would marry and lose her husband in the Second World War. But here she is a high-spirited little girl, William a knickerbockered schoolboy and Alethea a muslin-clad toddler.

Priscilla brings vividly to life that far-off world – the house and its devoted Egyptian servants, the desert picnics with Nanny, the visits to Cairo Zoo, the afternoons spent rampaging with other children in the grounds of the Gezira Sporting Club. And the long summers in England when Lady Hayter took the children to join her sisters and their families in Sidmouth – a different scene altogether, especially as the First World War began to take its tragic toll of uncles and cousins.

Priscilla Napier was a born writer, and A Late Beginner is not only a wonderful evocation of a place, a time and a climate of mind, but of the child's eye view. It ranks, says Penelope Lively in her introduction, ‘quite simply with the greatest accounts of how it is to be a child’.