One morning I came down to catch a bus after a snowfall. After over fifty years of travel in many countries, the image of the village [Llandogo] covered in virgin snow remains one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen". So writes the author in this touching yet unembroidered account of life on the Welsh Borders from the 1930s to the 1950s. The Wye Valley is indeed a beautiful area, but was living there on a smallholding idyllic? Not really! Isolated, narrow and repetitive, it seems; yet both war and family events touched many people with tragedy, not least the author and his wife, Joan. How their resilience and optimism won through is faithfully recorded in this finely illustrated memoir of a lost world.