0
Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Watkins-Pitchford, Denys [‘BB’]

Watkins-Pitchford, Denys [‘BB’]

Brendon Chase, [25] 31; [59] 31; The Little Grey Men & Down the Bright Stream, [55] 31

Browse articles

20200505104537 Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary | 5 May 2020

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 5 May 2020

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

A highly sensitive translator friend of ours once told us, quite seriously, that he couldn’t read in a room where there were other books. Their presence was too distracting, too powerful. We sniggered rather unkindly at the time, but this week, wandering round the bookshelves and feeling somewhat cut-off and unreal in the dim light of a wet afternoon, I felt acutely the presence of authors I’d once been passionately attached to and hadn’t thought of for a long time, especially the diarists, nestling in the ‘biography’ section in the spare room.
20191115100027 Foxed Podcast Episode 13 | Nature & Story

Episode 13: Nature & Story

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

In the parochial lies the universal, or does it? Join us on a trip to the British countryside as we plough into the matter of nature, landscape and the rural world in literature to find out more. Together with Juliet Blaxland, author of Wainwright Prize shortlisted The Easternmost House, and Jay Armstrong of Elementum Journal, the Slightly Foxed Editors and host Philippa share tales of living on the edge of eroding cliffs, pioneering bird photographers, ancient arboreal giants, guerrilla rewilding and favourite loam and lovechild comfort reads. In this month’s forage through the magazine’s archives, we go down to the Folly Brook to explore a vanishing world with ‘BB’ and his little grey men and, to finish, there are the usual wide-ranging recommendations for books to take your reading off the beaten track.
20170901111004 Helena Drysdale on BB Children’s Classics: The Little Grey Men and Down the Bright Stream

Beside the Folly Brook

Helena Drysdale on BB, The Little Grey Men & Down the Bright Stream

In 1970 I told BB how much I loved his books. I wrote the letter sitting at the window in a house tucked into a Devon cliff, with pine woods behind and the sea in front. I’m sitting there now. It’s the sort of place BB would have adored, the recesses of undergrowth and exposed headlands teeming with wildlife. This, I imagined, was the setting for The Little Grey Men (1942). Here were all the ingredients, including wood dogs (foxes), fernbears (badgers) and above all a winding stream. In my mind this was the Folly Brook, up which the last gnomes in England travel on their heroic quest to find their missing brother, and down which they flee in their boat the Jeanie Deans, in the 1948 sequel, Down the Bright Stream.

Buy related issues of Slightly Foxed


Buy related books or goods