Early to rise: A Sussex boyhood

From the front-inside dustcover: “… ‘Early To Rise’ is a pure childhood autobiography, a cottage-based view of life in the author’s native village of Rottingdean [Sussex, England] – a rural community unchanged for centuries, until in 1924 the first great farm sales in the area signalled the final collapse of a traditional way of life. Born in 1915, a member of the folk-singing Copper family who, as the stones in the church graveyard bear witness, have been farming people of Rottingdean for many centuries. Bob Copper recreates life in and around the farmworker’s cottage: the village shop, encounters with travelling tradesmen, schooldays, fishing scenes, long Sundays as a choirboy in the village church, and that momentous day when at the age of twelve he took his first art-time paid job, flint-picking in the fields, a farming task, which symptomatic of the times, was soon to give way to lathering in one of the village’s vital social arteries, the barber’s shop. Illustrated with many line drawings by the author and many photographs of life in old Rottingdean, Early to Rise also completes the publication of the Copper family’s collection of folksongs begun in his first book.”