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Posted On: October 2nd 2026, 10:45 am
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Can you recall the novel that took you away from the nursery bookshelves and into the realms of Grown-Up Books – a gateway book, if you like? . . .
I happened upon mine after months of resisting efforts both at home and at school to get me to read something more challenging. Until then, as a pony-mad child without a pony, I’d sought refuge in my tattered copies of thrilling stories like Show-Jumping Secret and We Hunted Hounds by the Pullein-Thompson sisters. Then one day, entirely of my own volition, when I was perhaps 12 or 13, I reached for the blue, cloth-bound copy of Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man.
Most readers encounter Sassoon as the brave soldier-poet with the Military Cross, the mentor of Wilfred Owen, who has shaped our thinking on the First World War perhaps more than anyone else . . . But that afternoon, as I devoured the first of Sassoon’s three volumes of lightly fictionalized autobiography, I met him as a boy in the person of his alter-ego George Sherston, clip-clopping to a distant meet alongside Dixon the groom, his fingers numb and a melting hoarfrost on the hedgerows.
– Flora Watkins @subs_please_check on Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man in Slightly Foxed Issue 79 🦊📚️
I happened upon mine after months of resisting efforts both at home and at school to get me to read something more challenging. Until then, as a pony-mad child without a pony, I’d sought refuge in my tattered copies of thrilling stories like Show-Jumping Secret and We Hunted Hounds by the Pullein-Thompson sisters. Then one day, entirely of my own volition, when I was perhaps 12 or 13, I reached for the blue, cloth-bound copy of Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man.
Most readers encounter Sassoon as the brave soldier-poet with the Military Cross, the mentor of Wilfred Owen, who has shaped our thinking on the First World War perhaps more than anyone else . . . But that afternoon, as I devoured the first of Sassoon’s three volumes of lightly fictionalized autobiography, I met him as a boy in the person of his alter-ego George Sherston, clip-clopping to a distant meet alongside Dixon the groom, his fingers numb and a melting hoarfrost on the hedgerows.
– Flora Watkins @subs_please_check on Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man in Slightly Foxed Issue 79 🦊📚️
Comments (4)
a month agowisewordsbookshop
Was it Sassoon or Pat Smyth’s autobiography? Both about the same time I think. Along with Airs Above the Ground.
a month agonigel_parkes
The book of the film 'The sea shall not have them' at my '70s Welsh primary school. The headmaster let me keep it as I was the first one to pick a book from the 'grown up section' all my classmates were jealous (most of them thought we were still fighting the Germans)
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