'If a pantomime fairy in a gauze ballet skirt had appeared, and offered, with one wave of her tinsel wand, to wipe out the last two years, and with them the grey ache of loss that they had left behind, I would not for one moment have considered accepting her offer. Because of those two years, something in me which, without them, would probably have remained green and unawakened, had has a chance to flower and fruit and ripen. Because of those two years I was going, in some odd way, to be able to write as I would not otherwise have been able to do.' Blue Remembered Hills is a memoir by the acclaimed British historical novelist Rosemary Sutcliff of her first thirty years. It's a classic of perfect writing about her close and not always easy relationship with her bipolar mother, life in the naval dockyards where her father was based, and the beloved family dogs, interspersed with her stoic endurance of physical and emotional pain. Sutcliff's lyrical descriptions of the beauty around their remote house in Devon distract the reader from the excruciating clinical treatment she underwent for years as a child to repair the damage to her joints caused by Still's Disease. Her isolation and her awareness of being physically different informed some of her best-loved novels, as did her early love affairs. This new edition of Sutcliff's classic memoir includes an introduction by disability campaigner and sociologist Tom Shakespeare.