In Kathleen Raine’s first autobiography she writes of the idyllic setting in Northumberland where she spent the first three years of her life, before moving to Ilford in Essex where she spent the rest of her childhood.

An early memory is of a fair northern summer’s day when she was pushed in a pram.

We set out my mother, my Aunt Peggy and my infant self in my little push car. We crossed the farmyard with its scent of camomile and cow-dung, and through the one of its several gates which opened upon the high bare pasture where the peewits are always wheeling over the outcrop of rock where they nest, their high domain, set out towards the wild hills. We were already above the level of trees, and as we climbed the turf became finer and softer, with wild pink and wild thyme and rock-rose. We came to the little crag where in the warren there were always a few black rabbits among the brown – I knew the place well later. Wild it seemed, without wall or man-made road, the creatures wild in the rocks, and far and wide. …

And there- so memory has composed the picture, or imagination has – the sun was setting their crests on fire with gold, and we were walking along the green road of the long summer day towards those bright hills until it seemed to me I could see the purple of the heather on their slopes … after tea [at a nearby farmhouse] we walked long in the garden among the phloxes and sweet peas and late summer flowers.

After moving to Ilford in Essex, Raine found consolation in the fields that were then behind their terraced house. She describes a summer day at the start of WW1.

On the last of childhood’s timeless days, I was gathering buttercups in the meadow behind the house when I heard a sound new to me, of a steady relentless humming in the air; and I looked up and saw aeroplanes approaching, with a terrible slowness; like four-winged mechanical gnats. The intensity of that sudden terror has left an imprint on my mind, like a photograph, of that moment, and the very place in the sky where I saw the enemy planes. I fled to my mother; and, as so often later, we sheltered in the cellar. I remember sometimes sleeping there, among the sacks of potatoes grown by my father on his allotment just beside the house.

This first book of her autobiography, written in 1973, is poignantly called Farewell Happy Fields as Raine sadly documents the increasing housing developments and road building that transformed Ilford, which then lay on the edge of the countryside into a sprawling suburb. Trees, fields, wildlife and wild flowers all swallowed up by “progress”.