Where Shall We Run To?

A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEARFrom one of our greatest living writers, comes a remarkable memoir of a forgotten England.'The war went. We sang in the playground, &quote;Bikini lagoon, an atom bomb's boom, and two big explosions.&quote; David's father came back from Burma and didn't eat rice. Twiggy taught by reciting &quote;The Pied Piper of Hamelin&quote;, &quote;The Charge of the Light Brigade&quote; and the thirteen times table. Twiggy was fat and short and he shouted, and his neck was as wide as his head. He was a bully, though he didn't take any notice of me.'In Where Shall We Run To?, Alan Garner remembers his early childhood in the Cheshire village of Alderley Edge: life at the village school as 'a sissy and a mardy-arse'; pushing his friend Harold into a clump of nettles to test the truth of dock leaves; his father joining the army to guard the family against Hitler; the coming of the Yanks, with their comics and sweets and chewing gum. From one of our greatest living writers, it is a remarkable and evocative memoir of a vanished England.