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.
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