Constable & Co Ltd, 1988, Blue Cloth, Book Condition: Near Fine, Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine, Reprint

gilt titles spine on dark blue covers; beige endpapers; b/w. frontis. photo.; "When I stayed with the Fenners my bed was the old horsehair sofa which was pushed up against the wall dividing their cottage from the derelict one next door, and at night the noise of the rats on the other side of the partition was dreadfully disturbing. What could they find to eat in that empty house . what, if not me so conveniently to hand? I lay awake straining for the gnawing through the lath and plaster which would mean they were on their way.' Sylvia, 7-year-old darling of a middle-class Norwich family, can scarcely believe her luck at being allowed to stay with Maud's family in their cottage opposite the Cross Keys pub. Maud is her family's housemaid, independent of spirit and tart of tongue. Sylvia's mother, understanding nothing of the fierce rural poverty of the 1920s, assumes that Maud's impeccable city standards of cleanliness will apply equally in Salham St Awdry. How wrong she is! Cosseted Sylvia is enraptured by it all, from the outside pump and the communal privy to the inescapable dirt; enchanted by the Fenner family's unquenchable zest for life, their earthy language and the rumbustious anarchism which turns topsy-turvy the polite hypocrisies instilled in her at her posh private school in the city. Sixty years later Sylvia - now the crime novelist S.T. Haymon - recreates in humorous, unsentimental, crystal-clear prose, the world of the Fenners, the world of pre-war poverty, swept away by the Welfare State. It is both a memory of childhood and a portrait of East Anglian rural life. Seen through the child's and the adult's eye, the Fenners emerge as an altogether memorable family, outclassed only by their even more flamboyant neighbour, the insouciant and mysterious Chicken." Size: 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. 240 pages. Quantity Available: 1. Shipped Weight: Under 1 kilo. Category: Genealogy & Local History; History; East Anglia; Norwich; England; 1920s; Biography & Autobiography. ISBN: 0094683409. ISBN/EAN: 9780094683402. Inventory No: 3678.