Pashler’s Lane

Description

A Clare Childhood

About the Book:

Elizabeth Holdgate grew up in Clare, Suffolk, in the 1930s. It was a secure childhood in a quiet little country town, far from anywhere. Though, since then, she has lived in four countries and visited all the world’s inhabited continents, Clare remains the special place of her beginning. She offers this book as a tribute to a community, now long gone, that gave her so much.

Pashler’s Lane is named for the author’s grandfather, whose baker’s shop used to flank it on Market Hill. Freddie Pashler was a Clare ‘character’. From his special chair in the Swan or the Bell, he dispensed local warmth and wisdom. He always enjoyed exchanging news and views with visitors. But he was only one of many local ‘characters’, some of whom are seen here through a child’s eyes.

Nothing much seemed to happen in Clare in the 1930s, yet everything happened there, for it was the centre of its own universe. Between Priory and Common, Castle and Church, the life of a self-sufficient little community rolled on, untouched (so it seemed) by great events, until war came. Read this book and you will meet people whose names could have come straight out of Tolkein: Mugg, Plum, Stiff, Crick, Tuffin, Twitchett and Hurry. Remembered with affection and humour, they live on in one of England’s oldest Shires.