Cryers Hill by Kitty Aldridge
Jonathan Cape 2007, 352 pages
Cryers Hill, Buckinghamshire, 1969. Man has landed on the moon and eight year old Sean thinks he’s an astronaut as he shuttles around the half-built houses and countryside near his home on a new development. Sean and his class mates are part of an experiment; they have been taught to read with the Initial Teaching Alphabet but having learned the “liar” alphabet, Sean struggles to read true words. Rewind thirty five years to 1934 and Walter Brown is working for the water company in Wycombe, a clerk like his father and grandfather before him. However, he is in love with Mary Hatt and aspires to be a poet. But Walter doubts that he will ever be a real writer, not if he remains in Cryers Hill; he needs to sample life and so he enlists with the Royal Artillery.
Every now and again a book comes along that blows you away and this time around Cryers Hill was the one that did it for me. A truly exceptional novel: superbly written, funny and intensely moving this is a book to give as a gift or to keep and return to again and again because, like Walter’s war-time letters to his sweetheart, it should be tied with a ribbon and cherished.
