Emma Smith (author)

"We passed s and playing-grounds, and heard from open factory windows the magnified cheerfulness of ""."

"This was India, made for her amusement. Even the sun invited her to pour out her gladness, to soak up its immense generous heat and sweat out her salty thanks. Even the beggars pranced with hope."

"Supper was as convivial a meal as our picnic had been. They sang songs for us, sitting round the table, unaccompanied, Byelorussian and Ukrainian and Russian songs. And they asked me to sing, in return, an English song for them; but I sing , and couldn't."

"Our display is quickly over, since fireworks, we know, cost money, and we three children, from a very early age, are made aware that money is a commodity of which we have wretchedly little. We also know that we mustn't speak of this. Our poverty, like my fear of explosions, is something to be ashamed of, and so to be concealed from the world outside the family. One day my mother, throwing a handful of scrumpled-up rubbish on the fire, notices with horror that amongst the rubbish is a . Ten shillings is a fortune! Too late! It's gone for ever in a lick of flame. Kneeling on the hearthrug, she bursts into tears. This is the first, but not the last time I behold my mother weeping."

"We meet in Smith's idyllic little house bordering in . There are overgrown roses in the front garden and the shelves are crammed full of books, family photographs and a solitary carved wooden bear. An almost-completed crossword lies on a pile of paper next to her armchair. The whole thing is delightfully redolent of a slightly chaotic . As we sit down to talk, a man from pest control knocks on the door and removes a dead mouse from the kitchen. Smith is unperturbed."

"The opening volume of her childhood s, The Great Western Beach (2009), described the first 12 years of her family life in , where all was not well in her parents’ marriage; As Green as Grass begins when the family moves to a house called Melrose in the village of , , where all continues to be not well between Mummy and Daddy. ... What the book is really about is escape: from Melrose, from working as a local schoolteacher in Devon, from a grinding job as secretary in a stuffy hut in the grounds of . ... After the war Smith decides she would like to work in s, and the next thing she knows, she’s on a boat to India with as well as ‘ — Bunny’. She’s the junior, the dogsbody of the filming team, but adores it and, again, we luxuriate in this new escape. Ralph — Bunny wants her to be ‘his girl’, but she escapes from him, too, and marries a much nicer man, who dies six years later. And then, the long silence."