‘A spokesman of the English country life, the very spirit of place, who can conjure the smells, sights and sounds as well as the mysteries, silences and portents of night and day down on the farm, along the winding lanes, and through the lush woodland . . .’ Richard Church
Good afternoon from a sweltering Hoxton Square. This week has been one of the hottest of the summer yet. We’ve had the fans on full blast – which has admittedly caused some difficulty with paperwork flying around the office – and have been basking in the sunshine over lunch breaks. On these hot summer days, the last place we want to be is in the city, and we’ve all been yearning after the British countryside. What better, then, to escape into the writing of John Moore, admired by Harold Nicolson who named him ‘one of our best writers on the English countryside’, Richard Church, Sir Compton Mackenzie and many others besides.
Portrait of Elmbury is the first volume in a trilogy based on Moore’s home town. Born in 1907, he grew up in Tewkesbury at a time when such small English market towns still had a distinct and sturdy life of their own. Mass travel, mass media and the changes brought about by two world wars would gradually destroy this self-contained rural society, but in this book Moore caught and preserved it in captivating detail.
Moore’s Elmbury, with its surrounding farms and orchards, its river meadows and great Romanesque abbey, is a joyful hymn to the fullness and variety of small-town life. Moore later became a journalist, wrote many books and spent some time in London, where he found the inhabitants of Bloomsbury ‘as conventional as the heroes and heroines of their novels’. But he always returned to Tewkesbury, where somehow ‘emotions seemed larger, pleasures were keener, sorrows sharper, the tragedy more profound and the comedy more riotous’. In Portrait of Elmbury he left a wonderful account of that vanished world – of a ‘life that will never come back’.
Please scroll on to read an extract from the preface to Portrait of Elmbury, written by the late Jeremy Lewis.
With best wishes, as ever, from the SF staff
Isabel, Rebecca, Edie, Ruth & Jennie
P.S. We are thrilled to announce that tickets for our annual Readers’ Day are now on sale! Please scroll to the bottom of this email to find out more.
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