Derrick Rugg describes his idyllic childhood at Kentisbeare in the 1930s looking for wild violets or strawberries, of cricket, rabbit chasing and apple scrumping, until the time comes for secondary school.
More Information
Rights Information
Worldwide Rights Available
Reviews
Derrick Rugg has had ‘a mind to write of days that have gone’ … The account is a personal one, but the characters, items and events merge comfortably into the landscape of race memory … Across Cobblestones will certainly bring back a whole lost world: grubby Beacon readers, Oxo tins full of plasticine, conkers in vinegar, jam jars sunk in water weeds to catch the little fish, and that strange, presumptuous moment in history when the War made its first appearance, when ‘soldiers in five or six lorries came into the village flower show one year, to demonstrate squat trucks that rolled on great fat wheels’. For Derrick Rugg that was the beginning of the end, ‘I dare say my name is scratched on a stone somewhere’. Better than that, he has written a charming book. John Mole
