Laurie Lee

I expected to be shot at any moment and if they had done I would have understood, that they couldn't take risks with someone foolhardy or so unpredictable.

I don't know what idiocies drove me in those days, but they were naive, innocent idiocies in many ways.

Such a morning it is when love leans through geranium windows and calls with a cockerel's tongue.

I wanted to communicate what I had seen, so that others could see it.

In London, Man is the most secret animal on earth.

It was a world that I wanted to record because it was such a miracle visitation to me.

But our waking life, and our growing years, were for the most part spent in the kitchen, and until we married, or ran away, it was the common room we shared.

We were living in the Slad Road when my father left us. I was about three.

What she did was to open our eyes to details of country life such as teaching us names of wild flowers and getting us to draw and paint and learn poetry.

I have been sitting watching that ever since I came back, the continuous variations of light and shadow.

That last winter was a tragic story and I got no personal honour out of it but I was a witness to it.