Chilblains in the Cotswold

One day in 1941 an officer on exercise in the Cotswolds looked down from the brow of a hill and saw a cluster of stone buildings in the valley below. On closer inspection these turned out to be a deserted farm, with a beautiful Elizabethan farmhouse and great cathedral-like barns. It was in a derelict state, but the soldier, the Bertie of the title and Xandra Bingley’s father, was undeterred. ‘We will rise above any minor problems… we’re not about to start playing windy buggers. Not when we’ve found this heavenly place… No siree.’ His, or rather his wife May’s, money bought it, and it was in this idyllic though primitive setting that Xandra Bingley spent her childhood.

The subtitle of her memoir, ‘Country Memories of Wartime’, is a little misleading. She was only three at the end of the war, and that period is covered mainly through her parents’ letters and a few of those isolated and tantalising memories which unaccountably survive from very early childhood.