Two volumes of Joan Kent's endearing, poignant, entertaining stories about the characters who peopled her upbringing in rural Kent between the World Wars. In HAYWAINS AND CHERRY ALE, Joan Kent recreates the enchanting yet difficult days of her 1930s childhood in Kent. With humour, warmth and perception she reveals the quirky characters - human and animal -that colour her memories. Kubla Khan, the ferocious cockerel lost beneath the ice one frozen morning; Miss Letty, held in check by her tyrannical sister until one sunlit morning when a soldier passes by her bedroom window . . . and strait-laced Aunt Florence, held bolt upright by her iron maiden corsets, convinced that Joan's family would all be sent to hell. In BINDER TWINE & RABBIT STEW we see both the hard years of the thirties and the war years of the forties. In 'Hayforks and Blisters' a procession of haystackers pass through the author's farm from unwilling relatives and unsuspecting boyfriends to Land Army girls and Italian prisoners of war (who did not always keep their hands on the pitchforks). Joan Kent's dad gets his own back on the Admiral's niece in 'The Sweet Smell of Revenge', and in 'It's Just Not Cricket' the rivalry between Lockley Green and the author's village behaviour.
