The Hidden Roads out now!
This is not a misery memoir, not sensationalist and not a celebrity memoir. In these luminous pages, Kevin Crossley-Holland visits the foreign land of childhood and describes charmed seasons spent largely in the Chiltern Hills, and on the coast of Norfolk.
First memories as a war-baby; early rages; meeting Ralph Vaughan Williams and Rumer Godden and Jacob Bronowski, listening night after night to stories told by his composer father and going to the 1948 Olympics and Silverstone with his resourceful mother; starting a museum; idyllic cycle rides; church brass rubbing; being coached at Lords; living above the spring line beneath the great chalk Cross at Whiteleaf and roaming in the beechwoods; falling under the spell of Arthurian legend; catching opera-fever; French exchange visits and first visits to Switzerland; joyous holidays in north Norfolk; prep school and dreaded Scout camp; girls; these pages are full of anecdote, observation, and the old made new.
But this is also a book about growing self-awareness, the meeting-place of actuality and imagination' the nature and uses of memory, and the ways in which a writer may draw on the quarry of childhood. Above all, The Hidden Roads revolves around the sanctity and splintering of family, and the bonding of brother and sister, and it is steeped in the landscape and layers of England.
'...On the face of it, Crossley-Holland could not be more English middle class, but in childhood curiosity the mature medievalist and imaginative writer was born. No childhood is absolutly idyllic but this one, despite fault lines between the parents, comes close to ideal.'
Ian Finlayson (The Times)
'...Excavating his own upbringing has resulted in short, evocative snippets of recollection and reflection, bound together with an amiable understanding of the power of the past, and a good dose of self-mockery.... There were plenty of hidden roads in Kevin Crossley-Holland's charmed childhood surroundings, ways through the woods and into secret glades. But over and above the literal application, there are hidden roads leading to crucial perceptions, to ancestral illuminations, to the deepest connections with earlier times and ancient places.'
Patricia Craig (The Irish Times)
'...A lovely, poignant book, not wasting a word and evoking place in a deep way.'
Archbishop Rowan Williams