Slightly Foxed – The Real Reader's Quarterly

UK 14.50 • EU 15.50 • Rest of the world 16.50 • Cloth binding • Silk headband, tailband and ribbon marker • 170×110mm • 216pp

In 1951, a shy and solitary 14-year-old boy was sent by his parents to spend the summer with ‘the aunts in Flanders’. So began for Michael Jenkins a formative experience which, when he came to write about it half a century later, reappeared to him ‘as in a dream, complete but surreal’.

A House in Flanders, his account of those summer months spent on the edge of the Flanders Plain, does indeed have a hypnotic and dreamlike quality. The dignified old French country house with its unvarying routines; the extended family of elderly aunts, uncles and grown-up cousins (with one of whom he fell boyishly in love); the summer warmth and wide Flemish skies were like an awakening to a young boy whose home in England was a ‘cold and empty place’ and whose parents, he felt, ‘preferred frigid intellectual exchanges to the more complicated and demanding world of personal relationships’.

Yet all was not as golden as at first seemed. The German occupation had left its mark, and in 1951 memories of it were still raw and painful. Gradually, through his vivid portraits of the various members – in particular of the firm but kindly matriarch Tante Yvonne – Michael Jenkins teases out the history of the family and of the surrounding area and uncovers the secret at the heart of the book – the reason he has been sent there.

As Dirk Bogarde wrote in the Daily Telegraph when A House in Flanders was first published, this is ‘a radiant book, a whole spectrum of colours and lights, of delights and elegances, of wistfulness and love’.

UK 14.50 • EU 15.50 • Rest of the world 16.50 • 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 14.50 • EU 15.50 • Rest of the world 16.50 • 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 14.50 • EU 15.50 • Rest of the world 16.50 • 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 14.50 • EU 15.50 • Rest of the world 16.50 • Cloth binding • Silk headband, tailband and ribbon marker • 170×110mm • 288pp

Adrian Bell was a rather frail young man of 20 when, in 1920, he left the bohemian life of London to work on a Suffolk farm. Out of that experience he wrote Corduroy, one of the classic accounts of life in the English countryside.

Bell’s father had been withering about his son’s literary ambitions but agreed to let him learn agriculture and sent him as a paying guest to a farming family in a village near Bury St Edmunds. ‘I was flying from the threat of an office life,’ Bell writes on the first page of the book. Yet when he arrived one autumn day on an old motorbike he felt all wrong for the part – too much of a ‘gent’ with his weak hands, his boots which were unlike anyone else’s, and his inability to understand the Suffolk dialect. Like many townies, he assumed at first that the yokels were somewhat simple, but soon his own ignorance of the countryside and initial inability to do the most basic physical tasks taught him a new respect. A farmer, he discovered, stored away in his head thousands of facts about animals, crops and fodder, while his eye for a pig was ‘as subtle as an artist’s’. Bell’s eye was subtle too. He grew to love the land, and Corduroy is filled with the most precise yet poetic descriptions of the countryside and of farming life. It was a book, his son the former MP Martin Bell tells us, that many soldiers from the villages of England took with them in their kitbags to the war zones of the Second World War to remind them of the world of peace and sanity they had left behind. For Corduroy is not simply a period piece – it captures what is unchanging about the lives of those who live from, rather than simply on, the land.

UK 15.50 • EU 16.50 • Rest of the world 17.50 • 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’.

UK 14.50 • EU 15.50 • Rest of the world 16.50 • 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.