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FIRST EDITION, the marginal notes and underlinings of Henry Williamson throughout, largely in pencil, pp. 400, [8, list], crown 8vo, original green cloth, the lettering to backstrip and upper board in white, that to backstrip a little rubbed away, the cloth a little musty and blotched in patches, lean to spine, tail edge roughtrimmed, faintest of spotting to edges, dustjacket with a design by Norman Hepple, a little browned and chipped with a couple of light marks, good. Henry Williamson's copy of this scarce roman à clef offering a portrait of North Devon life between the wars (though it includes a Mediterranean excursion, with a memorable description of a brothel-visit) with his notes throughout making clear his distaste for both the work and its author. His sarcastic remarks begin on the dustjacket, where he adds the subtitle 'and in every way I am not getting any forrader', then alight on the 'Poor Aunt!' to whom the work is dedicated submitting that she would 'have to leave Croyde after reading this book' and continuing with the identification of places and characters through the text, including, towards the close, an encounter with himself, as Cocbarlie Bilfather (and glossing the metonymic basis for the name: 'Cock' for 'Hen', 'Barley' for 'Rye', etc.), 'our Novelist', once 'penniless, obscure' but now 'perched upon the rail of fame'. That he has done so, she avers, 'chiefly by studies of our local ways [.] to the great enragement of some of the persons mentioned therein', is somewhat ironic given the infuriation caused to Williamson by Shayne's own account of the region. Of her contention that the author's library 'evinced his struggles' against both Women and War, Williamson rebuts that 'this is gossip' that she couldn't possible have deduced from their meeting remarking that 'this woman is a "teaser"'. This last label is applied recurrently by Williamson to Shayne, generally in a sexual context. Whether their contact extended beyond the encounter described in this work is unclear but his antipathy is unequivocal. Shayne was the name adopted by Louise Crawshay Parker, who had moved from Batheaston to Devon with the aunt to whom this book is dedicated, to escape the 'slights and insults' that she had begun to attract; this work, and this copy in particular, is testament to the fact that her integration there had not been unproblematic. It was her only book: she found more success having returned to the Bath area at the end of the 1930s in the field of ballroom-dancing, establishing a club for soldiers during the war.
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