A Child Alone

'BB', as all his admirers know, is the pseudonym for D.J. Watkins-Pitchford who appears on 'BB's' book as the illustrator. In this book, 'BB' - much loved naturalist, artist and author - recalls his early life at the beginning of the century and, because illness prevented him from going to school, his lonely childhood at his Northamptonshire home. Many people today have little conception of what the countrysde was like over seventy years ago; 'BB's' vivid writing compels the reader to join him on his roamings through the fields and woods around his home, and to feel the beauty and tranquility of the countryside before the advent of the motor car and toxics sprays. It may well be that if he had gone away to school like his brothers he would never have become an author. But it was art which first took him from home, and when he left the Royal College of Art, he taught at Rugby School for seventeen years before leaving to become a full-time writer. Every 'BB' enthusiast will be fascinated to learn how a childhood stickleback expedition up a local stream later gave him the idea for Folly Brook in his children's classic, The Little Grey Men, for which he won the Carnegie Medal; and how Wild Lone was based on a fox who outwitted the Pytchley hounds for many years. These evocative reminiscences are accompanied by the distinguished line drawings of D.J. Watkins-Pitchford of which the Observer once said 'are a perfect match for the text: almost as if the artist could see into the author's mind.'