Every midnight, on a forlorn stretch of heath, a phantom carriage reenacts its final, wild ride. In this vivid recollection of a magical time and place, water falls from the scullery pump “sparkling like liquid sky.” Autumn is more than a season-it is a land eternally aflame, like Moses’s burning bush. It was here, in a verdant valley tucked into the rolling hills of the Cotswolds, that Laurie Lee learned to look at life with a painter’s eye and a poet’s heart-qualities of vision that, decades later, would make him one of England’s most cherished authors. The cottage his mother had rented for three and sixpence a week had neither running water nor electricity, but it was surrounded by a lovely half-acre garden and, most importantly, it was big enough for the seven children in her care. Three years old and wrapped in a Union Jack to protect him from the sun, Laurie Lee arrived in the village of Slad in the final summer of the First World War. This international-bestselling memoir of childhood in post–World War I rural England is one of the most “remarkable” portraits of youth in all literature ( The New York Times).
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