Hardback, Faber, first edition, 1939.
Book condition: Boots ex-library copy, re-bound as was Boots' custom (in green cloth), with Boots sticker on the front cover; a reading copy only.

The publisher's blurb to the 1959 edition reads:

This is a companion book to the author's A Clear Water Stream and to his earlier Salar the Salmon. For the clear water stream runs only a hundred yards away from the Devon cottage of Shallowford where his children grew up, and it was Salar's own river.

The earlier [first] edition was put together at night after ploughing, harrowing, making roads and restoring barns and cowsheds, on the Norfolk farm to which the Williamsons emigrated from Shallowford in 1937. It was published just after the outbreak of war, and though it sold out as the war went on, it never took firm root. Partly this was due to the unfortunate time of its appearance; partly, as the author now realizes, to the fact that it contained too much about himself. Now he has taken out the extraneous matter and replaced it by other scenes of happy family life at Shallowford.

'I enjoyed re-reading this book,' he writes to his publishers, 'after twenty years (despite some impatiences with myself) because it was true, because it brought back those wonderful days in the valley of the Bray, and because I had written so faithfully of the children. So here, then, are the children as they were, a little covey kept together by their understanding, gentle and tremendously patient mother. Father doesn't come out too badly, despite occasional foolishness, but Loetitia is the heroine.'

(For a further consideration of the book and the background to the writing of it, see Anne Williamson's The Children of Shallowford.)