Laurie Lee, whose poetry already seems to be largely forgotten, wrote a minor classic in this account of his childhood in the Cotswolds in the years shortly after the first World War. It is no rural idyll or Lost Paradise, since his father had virtually deserted them and his mother was scatterbrained in spite of her vitality and good humour. The rural England he saw around him was vanishing even then, though Big House life lingered on and church-going was still an important part of life. Apart from chronic poverty, Lee suffered from mysterious fevers which today we would call psychosomatic, but which gained him little family sympathy. The ending, however, is suitably elegiac, as the village community he had grown up in began to break up; old people died off and young ones left, and the motor-car and charabanc began to take over. B.F.