This tiny, white-washed Infants’ room was a brief but cosy anarchy. In that short time allowed us we played… — Laurie Lee

The last days of my childhood were also the last days of the village.  I belonged to that generation which saw, by chance, the end of a thousand years' life.

They [Lee’s uncles] were the horsemen and brawlers of another age, and their lives spoke its long farewell.  Spoke too, of campaigns on desert marches, of Kruger’s cannon and Flanders mud; of a world that still moved at the same pace as Caesar’s and of that Empire greater than his – through which they had fought, sharp-eyed and anonymous, and seen the first outposts crumble….

It was then I began to on my bed and stare out at the nibbling squirrels, and to make up poems from intense abstraction, hour after unmarked hour, imagination scarcely faltering once, rhythm hardly skipping a beat, while my sisters called me, suns rose and fell, and the poems I made, which I never remembered, were the first and last of that time….