Corduroy

Although most of us feel the urge, at times, 'to go back to the land' and get away from the fury and frustration of city life, few of us actually do so. Adrian Bell however, decided to see what life was like on the land and, at the age of twenty, went to live and work with a farmer. Neither romanticizing the struggle with the soil nor sentimentalizing the birds, the beasts and the fields, Adrian Bell gives a faithful portrait of a Suffolk farm in the 1920s. His is an account richly laced with humour and shrewd observation of what happens when you actually 'go back to the land'.