Henry Williamson

Green Fields and Pavements: A Norfolk Farmer in Wartime (Henry Williamson Collections, #13) (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Henry Williamson (1895-1977), nature writer and novelist, remains best known for his nature stories set in North Devon, the much-loved classics Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon. Between 1937 and 1945 he farmed 243 acres of difficult land in North Norfolk, bringing a near-derelict farm to an A grade classification during the years of the Second World War. Throughout those years he was writing newspaper articles, to help finance the farm, and Green Fields and Pavements is a collection of the articles that he contributed to the Eastern Daily Press between 1941 and 1944. Williamson's eldest son, Bill Williamson, who worked on the farm throughout the war years from the age of thirteen, has written the Foreword, and the pen and ink drawings are by Mick Loates.

Nearly seventy years on, these beautifully written pieces make fascinating reading. Beginning during the dark days of the war, prior to the turning point of El Alamein, and ending before D-Day, Henry Williamson presents a many-faceted, sometimes humorous, picture of life as it was on the Home Front during those years: of agriculture at a time when only the large farms could afford the new American combine harvesters, and the small farmer built his stacks and waited for the threshing machine; of literature and art, with reviews of contemporary books; of the countryside and its wildlife; and the poignant stories of Cheepy, a tiny chicken that mothered a brood of guinea fowl chicks, and Hooly, the young tawny owl adopted by the Williamson family.

The war is an ever-present background, with references to the Eighth Army in North Africa, soldiers training in the fields, and the thunderous bomber streams of the RAF at night and the US Eighth Air Force filling the East Anglian skies by day.

Country Life magazine's reviewer commented: 'This is a bedside book of high quality; delightfully written and well illustrated, full of fascinating detail and description. I recommend it warmly.'

---

Dieser Download kann aus rechtlichen Gründen nur mit Rechnungsadresse in A, B, CY, CZ, D, DK, EW, E, FIN, F, GR, H, IRL, I, LT, L, LR, M, NL, PL, P, R, S, SLO, SK ausgeliefert werden.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Henry Williamson
• Erscheinungstermin: 7. November 2013
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781873507551
• Artikelnr.: 70542655

Autorenporträt

The writer Henry Williamson was born in London in 1895.

Naturalist, soldier, journalist, farmer, motor enthusiast and author of over fifty books, his descriptions of nature and the First World War have been highly praised for their accuracy.

He is best known as the author of Tarka the Otter, which won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature in 1928 and was filmed in 1977. By one of those extraordinary coincidences, Henry Williamson died while the crew were actually filming the death scene of Tarka.

His writing falls into clear groups:

1) Nature writings, of which Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon are the most well known, but which also include, amongst many others, The Peregrine's Saga, The Old Stag and The Phasian Bird.

2) Henry Williamson served throughout the First World War.The Wet Flanders Plain, A Patriot's Progress, and no less than five books of the 15-volume Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (How Dear is Life, A Fox Under My Cloak, The Golden Virgin, Love and the Loveless and A Test to Destruction) cover the reality of the years 19141918, both in England and on the Western Front.

3) A further grouping concerns the social history aspect of his work in the 'Village' books (The Village Book and The Labouring Life), the four-volume Flax of Dream and the volumes of the Chronicle. But all of these groups can be found in any of his books.

Some readers are only interested in a particular aspect of his writing, but to truly understand Henry Williamson's achievement it is necessary to take account of all of his books, for their extent reflects his complex character. The whole of life, the human, animal and plant worlds, can be found within his writings. He was a man of difficult temperament but he had a depth of talent that he used to the full.

The Henry Williamson Society was founded in 1980, and has published a number of collections of Williamson's journalism, which are now being published as e-books.