Salad Days

"My earliest memory is of you, Arthur. We were children, running across the garden at Granny's house. The sun on your hair made it look like copper wire. Then you stopped, and I cannoned into you. We both went headlong into the rockery. It was 1964, the summer before I started school, so I was nearly five. You would have been just three.

It's strange, isn't it? That my first memory is of you. Or maybe it isn't very strange at all."

Prudence and Arthur take a nostalgic trip down memory lane to the '60s and '70s; turbulent, changeful years that contrasted with their idyllic childhood at 'Salad Days, ' the market garden run by Prue's extended family.

But was it idyllic? Tragedy makes uneasy waypoints in their journey of recollection, and Arthur's overbearing father casts a dark pall. How did he inveigle himself into Prue's close-knit family circle? What was his hold on them?

As Prue and Arthur retrace their youthful attempts to get to the facts, it's clear that truth and memory aren't always the same.

What of the mysteries that defy the clarity of hindsight? The uncanny auspices of eccentric Mrs Glenister, latest in the line of 'peculiar' Glenister wives-why did she only materialise at times of calamity? And most oddly of all, why, in all their reminiscing, does Arthur never speak a word?

Memory is a curious thing-unreliable and awkward. Shaping it into an account Prue and Arthur can both live with might take a lifetime. Or two.