The Cherry Tree

When the rather delicate would-be poet Adrian Bell left public school at Uppingham, his father, like fathers the world over, urged him to ‘get a proper job’. And perhaps no one was more surprised than he when Bell elected to leave home in Chelsea to work on a Suffolk farm.
But that decision was the making of him. Gradually, under the wise guidance of his employer Mr Colville, he learned to love and understand the land, his health and strength improved, and out of the experience he wrote a trilogy of books that have been loved ever since they were first published in the early 1930s. These were the books that soldiers slipped into their kitbags when they went to war in 1939, to remind them of the country they were fighting for and the lives that many of them had left behind.