A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEARFrom one of our greatest living writers, comes a remarkable memoir of a forgotten England.''The war went. We sang in the playground, "Bikini lagoon, an atom bomb-s boom, and two big explosions." David-s father came back from Burma and didn-t eat rice. Twiggy taught by reciting -The Pied Piper of Hamelin-, -The Charge of the Light Brigade- and the thirteen times table. Twiggy was fat and short and he shouted, and his neck was as wide as his head. He was a bully, though he didn-t take any notice of me.-In Where Shall We Run To?, Alan Garner remembers his early childhood in the Cheshire village of Alderley Edge: life at the village school as -a sissy and a mardy-arse''; pushing his friend Harold into a clump of nettles to test the truth of dock leaves; his father joining the army to guard the family against Hitler; the coming of the Yanks, with their comics and sweets and chewing gum. From one of our greatest living writers, it is a remarkable and evocative
