Slightly Foxed – The Real Reader's Quarterly

UK £15 • EU £16 • Rest of the world £17 • Cloth binding • Silk headband, tailband and ribbon marker • 170×110mm • 272pp

Writing in Slightly Foxed, Dodie Smith’s biographer Valerie Grove describes Look Back with Love as ‘one of the happiest and funniest accounts of an Edwardian upbringing’.

And indeed it is. Best known for her first novel I Capture the Castle, for the evergreen The Hundred and One Dalmatians, and for Dear Octopus, her 1938 play set at a family reunion, Dodie did not publish this account of her early life until 1974 when she was 78.

Brought up among her mother’s family since her father had died when she was a baby, Dodie spent her childhood surrounded by doting adults. It was the jolliest environment imaginable – the Furbers adored seaside trips, motor-car outings, fairgrounds, circuses, jokes, charades and musical soirées. Above all they loved the theatre, and it was through her bachelor uncles’ involvement in amateur dramatics that she conceived her passion for the stage.

Her memoir gives a wonderful picture of this large extended family and of life at that time in the ‘basking Sunday afternoon charm’ of Manchester’s Victorian suburbs. And of the funny, complicated, creative little girl who would later say of herself ‘I think I’m an oddity really, but I do my very, very best to write well’ – which in Look Back with Love she certainly did.

UK £15 • EU £17 • Rest of the world £18 • Cloth binding • Silk headband, tailband and ribbon marker • 170×110mm • 240pp

Virtually closed to outsiders for the preceding decade, China was just beginning to make tentative moves towards the outside world when Frances and her fellow students were driven in an ancient coach through the dark silent countryside to their new quarters at the Foreign Languages Institute. Here they were settled into small rooms with hard iron beds and a single dim light bulb. Outside were showers powered by an enormous boiler emitting boiling steam from cracks in the pipework. Next day, at the medical centre, they learned that medical treatment was free but ‘we would have to pay for our own abortions’.

UK £15 • EU £17 • Rest of the world £18 • Cloth binding • Silk headband, tailband and ribbon marker • 170×110mm • 312pp

‘The most amusing book of childhood memories I can remember reading’ was Graham Greene’s judgement of P. Y. Betts’s People Who Say Goodbye.

Successful early on as a short-story writer and a contributor to Greene’s prestigious but short-lived magazine Night and Day, P. Y. Betts shone briefly but brightly in the literary firmament during the 1930s and then was heard of no more. Rediscovered fifty years later living contentedly alone on a remote Welsh smallholding, she was encouraged by a publisher to put pen to paper again and produced this irresistibly funny yet poignant memoir.

She was born in 1909 into an unconventional middle-class family living in Wandsworth when it was still a countrified suburb. Nearby was the great prison, where from time to time a crowd gathered at the gates when a murderer was to be hanged. Down the road was a military hospital, from which, during the Great War, the ‘sad, lamenting never-coming-back notes of the Last Post’ would often be distantly heard.

These were powerful early impressions for young Phyllis, but People Who Say Goodbye is far from sad. In fact her clear-eyed account of life in the Betts family circle is sharply comic – the clashes between the carefree Betts household and her mother’s snobbish and conventional family living across the Common; the holidays at Brattle Place near Dover, with its terrifying and toothless landlady Mrs Milton; the happy, undemanding days in Mrs Stroud’s school where dictation was given from leaders in the Daily Mail. P. Y. Betts is a truly original voice and People Who Say Goodbye is a delight – a powerful evocation of a time and place and an unsentimental account of being a child that has the unmistakable ring of truth.

UK £15 • EU £17 • Rest of the world £18 • Cloth binding • Silk headband, tailband and ribbon marker • 170×110mm • 208pp

There can be few author-illustrators whose books are remembered – and still read – with such affection as those of Edward Ardizzone. And affection is the keynote of this charming memoir, which brings alive in words and pictures the comfortable Edwardian world in which Ardizzone grew up.

The author of the ever-popular Little Tim and Lucy books (and illustrator of many more) begins his story in 1905, when he was 5 and his mother brought him and his two sisters home to England from Haiphong, where his father was a telegraph engineer. Having settled them in the remote Suffolk village of East Bergholt she returned to the Far East for three years, leaving them in the care of their maternal grandmother, a much-loved but somewhat alarming figure whose sudden inexplicable outbursts of temper could turn her face almost literally black with rage.

Thereafter, like many colonial children, the young Ardizzones led a somewhat peripatetic existence, punctuated by visits from their mother – once with a surprise new brother and sister in tow. But they grew up with a full complement of cheerful young bachelor uncles, great aunts and eccentric family friends – all beautifully and often poignantly captured in Ardizzone’s deceptively simple prose and delicately humorous drawings. This book is a must for fans of Ardizzone, young and old, and a perfect introduction for those who haven’t yet discovered him

UK £15 • EU £17 • Rest of the world £18 • Cloth binding • Silk headband, tailband and ribbon marker • 170×110mm • 224pp

Graham Greene once said that writing this memoir of his early years ‘was in the nature of a psychoanalysis. I made a long journey through time and I was one of my characters.’ Certainly the younger self that emerges is as complex and intriguing as any of those he created in his novels.

Greene grew up in Berkhamsted among a large colony of Greenes, and attended Berkhamsted School, where his father was headmaster. As it turned out, the conflicting loyalties this produced, combined with the secrecy and subterfuge encouraged by the school’s puritanical regime, were the perfect grounding for the spy – and the novelist – he was to become. But the price was high. By the time he was out of his teens he had had what would now be called a nervous breakdown, undergone psychoanalysis – unusual for the 1920s – and become addicted to playing Russian roulette with his brother’s revolver.

A Sort of Life takes him through Oxford, the early years of marriage and his conversion to Catholicism, to the point where he recklessly gives up his first Fleet Street job as a sub-editor on The Times in order to write full-time. But what marked Greene out above all else was his utter determination to pursue his craft. There can be no more fascinating or illuminating account of what it takes to become a writer.

UK £15 • EU £17 • Rest of the world £18 • Cloth binding • Silk headband, tailband and ribbon marker • 170×110mm • 224pp

In his prizewinning memoir The High Path, Ted Walker recreates with unusual vividness his secure, happy childhood in the England of the Thirties and Forties, and the influences that made a working-class boy into a poet.

Most telling, perhaps, was his relationship with his father, a carpenter who had come to the Sussex coast from Birmingham in search of work before Ted’s birth. The affection between the two shines out from the tender portrait of him, cruising the last mile home from work on his Ariel motorbike, playing backyard cricket with typical concentration, or struggling to master French with Ted, urged on by their loveably eccentric teacher Mr Jupp.

A sense of history came from magical visits to his father’s family in the Worcestershire countryside, and sensuous pleasure from the grocer’s shop managed by ‘Grandad Harry’ – an Aladdin’s Cave where ‘a wondrous blend of smells: nutmeg and cinnamon, dog biscuits and bran, wax polish, ripe cheese and Brasso all harmonized to give a sense of good things kept in spotless order’. It is a picture of a proud and thrifty working-class world now utterly lost.

With grammar school and a place at university a gap began to open between Ted and his parents. These new experiences brought intellectual confusion, romantic longing, sexual frustration, but the warmth of his happy childhood was still his bedrock. The High Path is a beautiful book, written with all the honesty and sensitivity of the poet Ted Walker became.

UK £15 • EU £17 • Rest of the world £18 • Cloth binding • Silk headband, tailband and ribbon marker • 170×110mm • 256pp

James Lees-Milne, writer and architectural historian, is probably best remembered for his mischievously perceptive diaries, which chronicled the doings of upper-class English society from the Second World War onwards in twelve addictive volumes. Another Self, his fanciful, funny, yet poignant account of his early years, has the same gripping quality.

A deeply religious child, Jim spent much of his boyhood wandering dreamily in the grounds of his parents’ medieval manor house in Wickhamford, Worcestershire. It gave him a nostalgia for the past and a love of historic buildings which would lead to his later distinguished career with the National Trust.

His father, however, had no time whatsoever for such arty attitudes. He determined that, after leaving Eton in 1926, Jim should ‘stand on his own feet’ and accordingly enrolled him in Miss Blakeney’s Stenography School for Young Ladies in Chelsea where, as the only male student, he spent a lonely year learning shorthand and typing. Thanks to his mother he escaped to Oxford (a disappointment) and thence to London, where he had another searing experience as assistant to Sir Roderick Jones, the boorish and dyspeptic chairman of Reuters. Droll, shy and sexually ambivalent, Lees-Milne wrote that he ‘always felt an outsider in every circle’. It was this, combined with his eye for detail and highly developed sense of the ridiculous, that made him such a wonderful comic writer. John Betjeman compared the impact of Another Self to that of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall.

UK £15 • EU £17 • Rest of the world £18 • Cloth binding • Silk headband, tailband and ribbon marker • 170×110mm • 288pp

For nearly fifty years Michael Wharton, under the pseudonym ‘Peter Simple’, produced one of the funniest satirical columns in Fleet Street. This memoir of what he called his ‘deformative years’ is equally irresistible, absurdly amusing, yet touched with a haunting melancholy.

The creator of such deathless characters as Julian Birdbath the unsuccessful writer, Dr Heinz Kiosk the well-known psychoanalyst, and Dr Spacely-Trellis the go-ahead Bishop of Bevindon – who all appeared regularly in the column – was born Michael Nathan in 1913 in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His father, from a prosperous German-Jewish émigré family, was in the wool trade, a compulsive gambler who spoke four languages, all with a Yorkshire accent. His mother, a barely literate Yorkshire girl whose maiden name was Wharton, was convinced she was related to the Whartons of Wharton Hall in Westmorland and spoke mysteriously of a ‘missing will’ which, when found, would restore the family fortunes.

This was not the only ‘missing will’ in the Wharton story, for Michael, though clearly intelligent, was, as he typically put it, ‘born to function on one cylinder only’. Given to paralysing bouts of gloom, he viewed his eccentric family with their outsider mentality, their irritable ‘fratching’, their strange Anglo-German mispronunciations and titanic farting competitions as if through the wrong end of a telescope. How he finally made his escape into the liberating air of Fleet Street, via a lamentable Oxford career, war service in India, and years adrift in London’s post-war bohemia, is the subject of this entirely original and darkly funny book.

UK £15 • EU £17 • Rest of the world £18 • Cloth binding • Silk headband, tailband and ribbon marker • 170×110mm • 336pp

Priscilla Napier grew up in Egypt during the last golden years of the Edwardian Age – a time when, for her parents’ generation, it seemed the sun would never set upon ‘the regimental band playing selections from HMS Pinafore under the banyan tree.

In A Late Beginner she recalls that childhood and those last fleeting years of the British Protectorate. Her father, Sir William Hayter, a clever, hardworking man with enlightened views, was legal and financial advisor to the Egyptian Government. Her brother William would later become British Ambassador in Moscow, her sister Alethea a distinguished writer, and Priscilla herself would marry and lose her husband in the Second World War. But here she is a high-spirited little girl, William a knickerbockered schoolboy and Alethea a muslin-clad toddler. Priscilla brings vividly to life that far-off world – the house and its devoted Egyptian servants, the desert picnics with Nanny, the visits to Cairo Zoo, the afternoons spent rampaging with other children in the grounds of the Gezira Sporting Club. And the long summers in England when Lady Hayter took the children to join her sisters and their families in Sidmouth – a different scene altogether, especially as the First World War began to take its tragic toll of uncles and cousins. Priscilla Napier was a born writer, and A Late Beginner is not only a wonderful evocation of a place, a time and a climate of mind, but of the child’s eye view. It ranks, says Penelope Lively in her introduction, ‘quite simply with the greatest accounts of how it is to be a child’.

NB We have fewer than 150 copies of this title left, and won’t be reprinting, so do order while stocks last.

UK £15 • EU £17 • Rest of the world £18 • Cloth binding • Silk headband, tailband and ribbon marker • 170×110mm • 296pp

The writer V. S. Pritchett ended his life crowned with honours, but he never forgot his working-class beginnings in London. In A Cab at the Door he vividly recreates his eccentric, down-at-heel childhood before and during the First World War, the atmosphere of which would permeate his later fiction.

Victor’s mother, an irrepressible cockney from Kentish Town, had hoped for a daughter, whom she intended to call after the dying Queen, so when the baby turned out to be a boy, she had to make a hasty adjustment. Life for the Pritchetts was full of hasty adjustments. Pritchett’s father – who later converted to Christian Science – was a reckless, over-optimistic peacock of a man, always embarking on new business ventures which inevitably crashed, hence the ’cab at the door’, waiting to bear the family quietly away from yet another set of creditors. Pritchett captures unforgettably the smells, sounds and voices of London in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the cast of Dickensian characters who made up his childhood world, from his austere Yorkshire grandparents, to the members of his father’s Christian Science church, and the employees and customers of the Bermondsey leather factor’s where he worked as a clerk until he made his getaway to Paris at the age of 20, determined to become a writer. It’s impossible to sum up a book of such vigour and originality in a few words. It simply has to be read.

NB We have fewer than 80 copies of this title left, and won’t be reprinting, so do order while stocks last.