Tea in the Heather

This was the first of my swaps from Read It Swap It and it was just the right book to follow my reading of Lorna Sage's memoir of her childhood in North Wales. Tea in the Heather by Kate Roberts, is a brief tale of childhood in North-west Wales in Victorian times.

Other than Dylan Thomas and R S Thomas, I don't think I could name any Welsh writers, which is a terrible admission. I see another distraction looming as I start to investigate the work of Kate Roberts (1891-1985) . According to one website I visited she: 'created the modern form of the short story in Welsh, and through six decades of writing earned a place with this century's masters of the genre.' The World of Kate Roberts (Temple Univ. Press, USA), so I feel time spent on investigating further would be entirely justified and the spring cleaning can be put on hold again.

Tea in the Heather was published in Welsh (Te yn y Grug) in 1959 and translated into English by Wyn Griffiths in1968. This beautiful edition was published by Seren Books. The stunning cover painting is Carneddau by Peter Prendergast, probably the best British landscape artist of modern times. He died, tragically, in 2007 at the age of 60. You can see more of his paintings here.