Description
NOTE: This is a second-hand paperback copy from our collection. It is sold ‘as seen’ but is in good condition. The cover has some wear and soiling, as does the page edges, but nothing that really detracts from it’s appeal.
‘A unique picture of English rural life’ – Sunday Times
‘A book rare in its perfect simplicity and veracity… has filled in, solid and deep-coloured, the pattern of a (recently) vanished rural culture, with its ordered ritual, its skills, its language, its legends. Here are baking and brewing and curing bacon… and harvest customs that are purely pagan… Mr Evans is no romantic. He has falsified nothing, from the farmworker’s scourge of rheumatism to the brutalizing poverty that drove men to poaching at a time when the penalty for it was transportation, or even death. But equally he gives the wholeness of the old life, and the passionate pursuit of perfection that could make a craft like drawing a straight furrow into something near an art.’ – The Time Educational Supplement.
