Memories

Lucy Boston wrote of her own life in Perverse and Foolish and memory in a House. To celebrate her centenary both books were reissued in this one volume with a linking passage and postscript by her son, Peter Boston, who illustrated her books.

Born one hundred years ago, Lucy Boston was brought up in Lancashire in a house run on strict Wesleyan principles, where at an early age she demonstrated her fierce independence of spirit. In her own frank and candid way, she describes her early years and her contribution to two world wars. She tells of the purchase and the restoration of The Manor, Hemingford Grey, and the creation of the garden, now famous for her collection of old roses.

It was this house, with its nine centuries of history and its atmosphere thick with the past, that inspired her books and provided the setting for the adventures through time of the characters in her stories. ‘All my water,’ she once said, ‘is drawn from one well...I am obsessed by my house. It is in the highest degree a thing to be loved.’

Jill Paton Walsh in her introduction, sets Lucy Boston’s high literary achievements in their rightful place and gives an appreciation of her remarkable personality.