Book description
“I stood outside the Cross Keys feeling the way I imagine the Pope
feels when he arrives in a new country and the first thing he does is go
down on his kneeds and kiss the ground: humble and at the same time
triumphant.” Great writing about childhood can do much more than evoke a
particular time and place; it can illuminate the universal experience of
being a child in an adult's world-up to the moment when the child
crosses the line between innocence and experience. For Sylvie Haymon,
that moment came at the age of ten, in the home of her nursemaid's
family, who lived opposite the Cross Keys pub in the tiny, staggeringly
poor village of Salham St. Awdry, just four miles from her parents'
comfortable house in Norwich. Sylvie had grown accustomed to living in
two separate worlds-the respectable English home of her well-educated,
well-behaved parents, who left the childrearing to a nursemaid named
Maud Fenner, and the irresistibly dirty, undisciplined, and emotionally
intense household where Maud's family, along with their astonishing
neighbour, Chicken, taught a “proper little snob” about real life. It
was this second, more primitive, world that shone the brighter for
Sylvie. Opposite the Cross Keys is a rich and rewarding work-an honest,
unsentimental, sometimes funny, and sometimes heartbreaking story that
captures the wonder and terror of childhood and childhood's end. 'Robust
and plain-speaking . . . Sylvia Haymon is exceptionally good at the
half-understood overheard conversation of adults when we are children .
. . We are in the presence of one of those runaway storytellers.' Daily
Telegraph Sylvia Theresa Haymon was born in Norwich, and is best known
for her eight crime fiction novels featuring the character Inspector Ben
Jurnet. Haymon also wrote two non-fiction books for children, as well as
two memoirs of her childhood in East Anglia. The Ben Jurnet series
enjoyed success in both the UK and the US during Haymon's lifetime:
Ritual Murder (1982) won the prestigious CWA Silver Dagger Award from
the Crime Writers' Association. Stately Homicide (1984), a skilful
variation on the country house mystery, was praised by the New York
Times as a 'brilliantly crafted novel of detection...stylish serious
fiction', and favourably compared to the work of Dorothy L. Sayers.
