Many of the earliest of H. E. Bates’s short stories were lyrical sketches, almost prose poems, in which the world and its complexities were seen with crystalline purity through the eyes of children. Now once again, in The Watercress Girl, he shows us the child’s world with all its strange enlargements and compressions of vision, together with its joyous and painful clarity, its fears, its hopes, its make-believe, its adventurous excursions, and its trust and mistrust of the adult world.

A little boy, charmed by the golden-throated Miss Mortenson, witnesses her fall from grace in The Pemberton Thrush. Three children become entangled in a forbidden love when they witness a man attempting suicide in A Great Day for Bonzo. A father reveals more of his past than he intends to in The Far Distant Journey. Throughout all there is a feeling of wonder but also of unease; an unease of not yet understanding, of not yet feeling totally safe in a world that you are not fully a part of yet.

Though these stories are all about children they are not for children; and though they show us, physically, the world of childhood, what they really reveal, in essence, is the world of grown-ups: a world where we adults still play soldiers, make excursions into the unknown, are afraid of the dark and so often make believe that we are something else than what we really are.

First published in 1959, The Watercress Girl is a rich collection of stories, exploring a world full of darkness and light, fascination and mystery.

The Watercress Girl will be published as a paperback 12 May 2016.