Books: The even better life

THIS IS a book of unusual power and clarity. It is not, perhaps, for those Felicity Kendal fans who cherish memories of her twinkling adorably in oversized dungarees. In White Cargo, she reveals herself to be a tough, worldly woman of fascinating provenance and fearless honesty: an honesty given added piquancy by the realisation that the sex goddess of Middle Britain uses swear words.

The book is an autobiography. Its chief character, however, is Geoffrey Kendal, the forceful and magnificent father whose life is dedicated to performing the plays of Shakespeare and Shaw in India, and for whom his wife and two daughters seem to be not so much a family, more a ready-made theatrical troupe. It is her life within her father's world, from the moment she goes on stage in her crib until she leaves for England aged 18, that forms the greater part of Felicity Kendal's book. What comes afterwards (The Good Life and so on) is of less interest. Kendal's early years are told with such a fine, detached accuracy that the book transcends the autobiographical genre and becomes, quite simply, like a remarkable novel.

The focus of White Cargo is turned away from herself with admirable discipline. Through odd, memorable vignettes she gives us a picture of India after Independence, where impoverished Rajabs play polo on bicycles, vast audiences turn up for Arms and the Man (Nehru's favourite), and she shops for a school uniform in Bangalore's Victoria Crescent. So much writing about India meanders around the quasi-spiritual, but Kendal's is taut, concrete and fresh.

Through it all runs a magnificent portrayal of a theatrical world which is, like postwar India, in limbo. The Kendal company is, in fact, the last gasp from the age of Mr Crummles, with its sticks of five and nine, its 70-year-old actor with his set of "juvenile" dentures, its tabs and wigs and crude grandeur, above all its sense that is doing something for which there is a real audience hunger. Theatre today may be more lifelike, but it no longer has that kind of life.

Nor, perhaps, do actors have the life of a Geoffrey Kendal: through him, his daughter recreates a stronger, braver, more direct age, when the world was something you marched upon joyfully and the only thing to fear was "small houses and small minds". Such vitality makes all the more poignant the fact that these memories are juxtaposed with passages written at Geoffrey's bedside, in hospital, where he lies incommunicado after a stroke.

At the end of the book, Geoffrey Kendal's ashes are scattered in India ("OK. You Win. I'll cancel the plot in Dorset"). The description of this is clean and detached and artistically realised: the honesty is total, with none of that embarrassing wallow, that hint of pleasurable self-laceration, which clogs so much modern autobiography. Being her father's daughter, Felicity Kendal would have too much humour and dignity for that kind of thing.