I didn't read any of Sutcliff's books as a child, so I had no predetermined feeling towards her as I would have had for someone whose books I had read and loved.

I was looking forward to her memoir, which covers her childhood in the 1920s and 1930s and her adolescence in the 1940s, because I was interested to know more about Sutcliff's experiences growing up in that very different age, and about how Sutcliff came to the decision to write books with differently abled characters. I had presumed that this is what the book would be about. I hadn't anticipated that Sutcliff would treat her disability so incidentally.

I largely found the book dull. There were two or three passages that engaged my interest, where Sutcliff talked about how she viewed disability, and the frustrations in the way society views disability. Mostly it was the literary equivalent of going round to the house of an older distant relative that you don't know very well and listening to her talk about people and things you have equally no experience of. Nice enough, but not very engaging.

Still, the conviction that differently abled people are no different to other people was a very positive message in this book, and a better one than the story of how one woman overcame her disability to become a successful writer that I had been presumptuously expecting. ( )

Rosemary Sutcliff is known as one of Britain’s most distinguished children’s writers, with over forty historical novels to her name. Blue Remembered Hills is the vivid and touching memoir of her own childhood. She was born in 1920, the only child of a naval father and a pretty, manic-depressive mother with bags of charm and a wild imagination. As a child she suffered from the juvenile arthritis known as Still’s Disease, which burned its way through her, leaving her permanently disabled, yet Blue Remembered Hills is the very opposite of a misery memoir. It is a record of the growing up and making of a writer, and it is full of poetry, humour, affection, joy in people and the natural world, and the kind of deep understanding that can come out of hard experiences. In some ways, hers was an enchanted childhood, lived among the vivid sights and sounds of the dockyards, which would later feed into her books. When her father retired from the sea the family moved to Torrington in North Devon, and at 14 Rosemary went to Bideford Art School, becoming a skilled miniaturist. In time, though, feeling cramped by the small canvas of her paintings, isolated in the country and wounded in love, she turned to writing. In doing so, she brought the past vividly to life for generations of children, and herself found fulfilment and success.

I have to own that initially Rosemary Sutcliffe’s memoir 'Blue Remembered Hills' didn’t quite come up to expectations, but perhaps those expectations were a little unrealistic as the memoir was the first in a new imprint of Slightly Foxed Pocket editionimprints. It is a gentle, nostalgic memoir that offered whiffs of my own childhood, although it referred to one probably 20 years or so years before mine. In the end I wanted to know more about its writer, who became a writer, although she had only just begun to at the end of the memoir.

I do love the new Slightly Foxed Pocket Edition which holds its own nostalgia as it reminds me of the lovely little hardbacks I used to buy for pennies in the wonderful secondhand bookshops of my youth, many of which still nestle among their more recent cousins. There is something about the size of the volume which rest comfortably in the hand, the texture of the cotton and the heft in some instance (some volumes, like Bleak House for example, are more than 600 tissue thin pages). I look forward to the quarterly editions of this fine imprint. ( )