From 1927 to 1934 the young Dirk Bogarde lived in a remote cottage in the Sussex Downs with his sister Elizabeth and their strict nanny, Lally.

For the children it was an idyllic time of joy and adventure: of gleaning at the end of summer, of oil lamps and wells, of harvests and harvest mice in the Great Meadow.

This lost world, visited fleetingly in A Postillion Struck by Lightning, the first volume of Dirk Bogarde's autobiography, is seen here through the eyes of an innocent but shrewd eleven-year-old. With great sensitivity and poignancy it captures the sounds and scents, the love and gentleness that surrounded the young boy as the world outside prepared to go to war.