Sylvia Haymon's memoirs on life in Norfolk 100 years ago

Imagine a charming and insistent child taking you by the hand and pulling you out of the 21st century.

Suddenly the busy streets of a still-familiar city are also deeply different. Many of the buildings are the same but the sights and sounds of this Norwich include horses and traps, and servant girls scrubbing doorsteps.

Sylvia's books bring 1920s Norwich vividly to life. Pictured is Bonds in All Saints Green. (Image: Newsquest Library) Sylvia Haymon is the seven-year-old child and a garrulous, gifted guide to a world, less than 100 years ago, which is both familiar and utterly strange.

The people she conjures are as real as the places. Soon we are travelling with her, out of her prosperous city life to a village where the inhabitants of crowded, rickety houses scratch a precarious living lifting potatoes, plucking poultry and picking fruit.

Sylvia grew up in the 1920s, the adored and pampered youngest daughter of a prosperous Norwich family. She became a writer of novels, biographies, histories and journalism – and two remarkable memoirs of her childhood which have just been republished by Henry Layte of Propolis Books and the independent Book Hive shops in Norwich and nearby Aylsham.

Henry Layte, owner of Propolis Books and The Book Hive in Norwich and Aylsham, who rediscovered Sylvia's autobiographies and has republished them. (Image: Sonya Duncan) Henry has an impressive track record for discovering and publishing new writers. Now he has rediscovered a writer from the past who had almost slid into obscurity.

Sylvia Haymon’s memoirs, Opposite the Cross Keys and The Quivering Tree, are a joy to read, fizzing with fun and freighted with the undertow of an adult understanding of this child’s-eye narration.

We meet Sylvia’s family, passionately protective and almost culpably hands-off, a wealthy and eccentric neighbour, and most importantly of all her nursemaid, Maud Fenner, who introduces young Sylvia to life beyond the confines of respectable middle-class Norwich.

Henry Layte, owner of Propolis Books and The Book Hive in Norwich and Aylsham, who rediscovered Sylvia's autobiographies and has republished them. (Image: Propolis Books) Salham St Awdrey (based on Horsham St Faith) is close enough for a little girl to get there from Norwich, alone, by bicycle, and yet also seems to be from a much more distant past where families live without running water in dark and dirty hovels, draw water from outside pumps, and scratch a precarious living lifting potatoes, plucking poultry and picking strawberries.

Clever, cosseted little Sylvia adores it. The outside pump and privy are places of wonder, and beside her, we too overcome the stench, the dirt and the gristly stews to glory in the richness of life with the Fenners.

Opposite the Cross Keys tells the story of how Sylvia leaves the city to join Maud’s life, at first for a day, then for weeks at a time – shrugging off the accoutrements of her privately-educated, bathed and waited-upon family life. With her we meet Ellie, the lumpen Fenner family beauty, roguish enigmatic Chicken building an ark-like boat next door, the heartbreakingly sassy and vulnerable Nellie Smith from the gypsy camp nearby,

Sylvia Haymon's autobiographies have been republished by Propolis Books. (Image: Propolis Books) The Quivering Tree opens with 12-year-old Sylvia arriving to lodge with two schoolmistresses in their edge-of-Norwich, secret-filled home. Again the innocence of the child, translated through her adult self, makes this a remarkable read.

Henry found The Quivering Tree first, of the two memoirs, in a secondhand bookshop. 'I thought it looked interesting and I had never heard of Sylvia Haymon, despite her success as a crime writer, so to start with I was just intrigued to find out who this woman was,' he said.

'There is a long list of famous Norwich writers who are celebrated, and her name never came up. That has been rectified recently on the Norwich Book benches around the city, but it seemed very strange to me not to know about this apparently much-admired writer.

'It's the voice of Sylvia the young girl which immediately spoke to me.

Horsham St Faith was the inspiration for Salham St Awdrey in Sylvia's books. (Image: Newsquest Library) 'The character that is written is so appealing: she is funny, headstrong, independent, as well as being able to laugh at herself when her guard drops and she bursts into tears or throws up! I also loved the world of Norfolk in the past - it's simpler, no doubt, and quieter, but the characters are no different to people we know today - the snobs, the petty criminals, the kind ones and troubled ones, the out and out horrors.

'Amazing too in that book to be dealing with sexuality and abuse of power - such relevant themes today - in a world which is another age away.

'After reading the second volume I sought out the first and loved that too and then started asking people if they had heard of her. Almost no one had, so I thought I should try and put that right!

'The best part of loving any book is being able to recommend it to others to read - and in my case celebrate it in the shop.'

Sylvia died in 1995 but Henry tracked down her daughter, Alison, who gave him permission to republish.

'She came to see me in Norwich, the first time she had been here in 50 years!' said Henry. 'Sylvia herself left Norfolk and never returned, although she set all her crime novels here, wrote these memoirs and also a history of Norwich itself. As Alison said to me - spiritually, Sylvia never really left.'

Sylvia's books bring 1920s Norwich vividly to life. Pictured is Orford Hill. (Image: Newsquest Library) Sylvia Haymon was born in Norwich in 1917. Writing as S T Haymon, her first crime novel, Death and the Pregnant Virgin was published when she was already in her 60s. Her second, Ritual Murder, won the Crime Writers Association Silver Dagger Award. Her previous books had included a history of Norwich, a novel about Kett’s Rebellion and an autobiography of Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Then, in her 70s, came the two autobiographies. They are charming, hilarious, intriguing and fabulously good reads.

It is entrancing to join Sylvia on treks through the city before it was cut through by ring roads, and into rural rhythms of abundance and hunger. Characters and landscapes spring from a sparky, spiky, wide-eyed, child’s-eyed view, filtered through the gloriously comic commentary of the adult Sylvia.

Opposite the Cross Keys and The Quivering Tree, by Sylvia Haymon, are published by Propolis with new introductions by Esther Freud.