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Blackmore Vale Childhood          Blackmore Vale Childhood

A delightful and often moving portrait of growing up in rural Dorset between the two wars.

Hilary Townsend was born in the Blackmore Vale, and lives there still, and this account of her childhood evokes a way of life that has vanished without trace. Her memories are sharply observed, breathing life into her descriptions of the deep dairy farming countryside of the Vale and the small market town of Stalbridge, then the centre of her world.

It was a remote place where change was slow, thrift was ingrained and the agricultural depression meant hard times for almost everyone. Yet the author's delight in the simplest of pleasures, and her boundless interest in everything around her, people as well as places, viewed against the seasonal backcloth of Dorset life at its most sturdy and independent, gives this account of growing-up in the 1930s its freshness and appeal.

HILARY TOWNSEND

Paperback, 144 pages + 8 pages of photographs

ISBN 1 904349 50 1


 £7.95   Buy product