Book description
The Cherry Tree was first published in 1932 and is the final volume
in Adrian Bell's classic rural trilogy. The first two volumes are
Corduroy and Silver Ley. In The Cherry Tree the author describes
further farming experiences, his marriage, and becoming habituated to
country life. Taken together these three volumes have been described
'as the classic account of a twentieth-century Englishman's conversion
to rural life'.
Adrian Bell (1901-1980) was born in Lancashire, grew up in London,
and was educated at Uppingham School which he hated. His father, news
editor of the Observer, was a republican and a socialist and had no
truck with university education. His son was to do something useful; in
1920 he went to East Anglia to work as a farm apprentice. He
subsequently became a farmer himself. These experiences provide the
material for his famous rural trilogy, Corduroy, Silver Ley and The
Cherry Tree. In total he wrote over twenty-five books, he also set the
first Times in 1930 and continued to devise crosswords for the paper for
the next thirty years.
