Andy Catlett: Early Travels by Wendell Berry

This book is a delight, warm and comforting, but it is also a thoughtful consideration of how life has changed since the middle of the twentieth century.
It concerns Andy, a nine year old boy in 1943, and a major landmark in his life: he is making a bus journey on his own. It is the period between Christmas and New Year and he is journeying a few miles to stay with his grandparents; first his paternal grandparents who live on a farm for two nights, and then he will stay with his other grandparents in Port William, before being collected by his parents for New Year. It is narrated by Andy as an old man at the beginning of the twenty-first century; he looks back fondly at this turning point in his life and the few days that he spent with his grandparents and other friends, most of whom have since died. He thinks back to the people he knew then, their kindness and love for him, and considers their lives from the perspective of the twentieth century; he took the way they lived for granted when young, but now recognises the hardship that they often went through.
This is not a book for thrill seekers, nothing of moment really happens, but everything is important to Andy in the way that days like these are for children. A major event for Andy is that while waiting for the bus after his father has left him Miss Angela, the waitress in the bus station café, buys him a cup of coffee. It is his first taste of the drink and something that makes him feel exceptionally grown up. The tale of his coffee drinking even becomes town gossip.

'The episode gave me a sort of fame, and of course my father heard of it. Two or three weeks later I happened to encounter him on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. He was standing with his hands in the pockets of his overcoat, talking to his friend Charlie Hardy.
I gave them a wave and said, "Hi."
"That's Miss Angela's buddy, ain't it?" said Mr Hardy.
My father snorted. "That's him." He reached into his pants pocket, drew out a nickel, and handed it to me. "Here. Go buy yourself a cup of coffee."'

One of the major differences that Andy considers is the change in relationship between races since he was a child. As an old man he recognises the injustices in the 1940s in the way black and white families interacted that, as a child, he had just accepted. He also notes the different pace of life, one which was already beginning to change; his Grandfather Catlett who collects him from the bus stop in a horse and cart was already part of a way of life that was dying out.
The contrast between these grandparents and his other, younger, maternal grandparents who live in a modern house in town, with a car and other comforts, shows a new attitude to life, even though they work equally hard. Andy considers the differences between the periods and sees that much has been lost but it is not a rose-tinted view; he recognises that there were things that were wrong with the past age, hardships and injustice.
He also, from his later perspective, realises how protected from the world he was then. He describes his Uncle Virgil's wife, Hannah, who is living at his maternal grandparents and how nice she was to him, but from this later perspective he recognises the sadness of the hope she had that was not destined to be fulfilled. Her husband, away fighting, was killed soon afterwards. The Second World War is a slight shadow throughout the book; it does not have much direct impact on Andy himself as a small child, but people were missing from the town because they were away fighting, and he talks of the ones that didn't come back and the impact that this loss had on the town.
Port William life is shown through Andy's young eyes, and I revisited many of the characters that I met when I read Jayber Crow last year, but saw them in a different light as Andy decribes how these grown-ups seemed to him as a child.
The story is told in Berry's slow and absorbing style, with a beautiful use of language; the town and the period really live through this book. It was a perfect read.