Pigtails among the haystacks

During the bitter winter that seized Britain in earnest at the end of January 1947, the children of the village of Farnborough on the Berkshire Downs went to the pictures in Wantage to see Courage of Lassie but were unable to return home on the bus because of a heavy fall of snow. Accompanied by ‘big Mrs Willoughby (20-odd stone), who never took off her pinafore and had arms like skittles’, they trudged the five miles back on foot through the fresh snow in the dark. ‘There was a strange ethereal light on everything and a deep silence. It was as though we were the only people left on earth.’

So begins what might be called an embroidered memoir by Candida Lycett Green of her childhood in Farnborough. She has chosen to recall it as a month-by-month account of the farming and village year (1949) seen through the eyes of a girl on the brink of puberty — pigtails among the haystacks. Alongside the loving descriptions of village life and of the old agrarian routine go a child’s observation of the behaviour of grown-ups and a sharp eye on the relationships among her friends and playmates. There is a gang who meet in the spreading branches of a sycamore tree and when Terry Carter, the leader, asks her and her friend June to join, the honour was immense. ‘This was, without doubt, the greatest moment in our lives so far.’

A few miles from Farnborough was the Atomic Energy Research Station at Harwell where Klaus Fuchs worked until he was revealed as a Soviet spy. It was reading a book about him that gave Candida the idea that, as she and June roamed the surrounding country, they might somehow have come across the German scientist.