Great Meadow (1992)

First Published: Viking
Published: Bloomsbury
ISBN: 0-670-84758-5

From 1927 to 1934 Dirk spent his holidays on the Sussex Downs with his sister Elizabeth and their devoted but strict nanny, ‘Lally’. It was a time of the gleaning at the end of the summer, of harvests and harvest mice, of oil lamps, of wells and of incredible, enchanting adventure. Seen through the eyes of an innocent, shrewd young boy, Great Meadow recaptures an idyllic childhood, a lost time of love and gentleness, with its sounds and scents intact, while the world beyond prepared for war.

First page of Great Meadow ⧨

Chapter 1

It really wasn’t the sort of morning on which rotten things are supposed to happen.

All the way up from the little iron gate at the bottom of Great Meadow the larks were singing like anything. The sun was hot and the leaves on the elder and ash at the edge of the gully had just started to turn yellowy-goldish, because it was going to be September in a minute although you would hardly have known it, it was so beautiful.

The high grasses were full of crickets and grasshoppers and the field curved away up towards the sky, soft and smooth and fawn as a deer’s back. Only very little clouds drifted in high above from the sea at Cuckmere and sort of got melted away by the warm breeze which came in the other way from the Weald.

We didn’t really know much about the witch. We had spoken to her once, years ago, with all her cats round her. She had been quite nice and showed us a sort of shell thing with Bombay written on it, which is a town in India, because we had given her a bit of a help with some wood for her fire. But that was all, and she didn’t put a spell on us, as far as we knew, although my sister did get the measles a bit later on and I didn’t, which was jolly lucky for me. But that was the only time we’d been really close. I mean, we never spoke again or anything like that.

We sometimes used to see her hurrying along, shoulders…

‘Bogarde writes with a love for his vanished world that is undisguised and unmistakable. He has brought back a land of lost content, and its lamps still shine’

The Times Literary Supplement

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