Cross Currents

This autobiography by Janet Teissier du Cros (born Janet Grierson) recounts a vanished world. Born into an upper-class household in the Edwardian era, she experienced all the security of a confident imperial era, a time of gaslight and servants, as well as the time of childhood's most vivid hopes, fears and imaginings. Janet was the daughter of Sir Herbert Grierson, first holder of the Chair of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Aberdeen. Her mother's father was Sir Alexander Ogston, Professor of Military Surgery and Surgeon-in-Ordinary to the Royal Family in Scotland. The Greiersons were from Shetland, the Ogstons from Aberdeen, and the author presents her life with both families in her narrative. During World War I, the family moved to Edinburgh, when Sir Herbert took up his Chair at the University of Aberdeen. It was a world where money and the law took an unfamiliar precedence and a world touched also by wartime austerity and bereavement. Janet had a first acquaintance with artistic circles, with Edinburgh figures such as Andre Raffalovich, Canon John Gray (said to be the original of Oscar Wilde's "Picture of Dorian Gray"), George Saintsbury and Donald Francis Tovey. Through her father, the author also met literary figures, including W.B. Yeats and G.K. Chesterton. The story ends in 1923 when the author leaves for Vienna to study piano. Later, she married a Frenchman, and, as Janet Teissier du Cros, recorded her experiences of living in German-occupied France in divided loyalties.