Book of a lifetime: English Songs and Ballads by TWH Crosland

From The Independent archive: Marina Lewycka keeps an old gifted book that, while her thoughts about its contents have changed, continues to provide a special link to the past

Thomas William Hodgson Crosland, British author, poet and journalist, died in 1924 (Public domain)

After the Second World War, my family moved from a displaced persons camp in Schleswig-Holstein to a refugee camp in Sussex. From there we were taken in by English families. My mother worked as a domestic, and my father as an agricultural worker. Our first “host” family were the Dobbses of Whatlington. Rosalind Heyworth Dobbs (née Potter) was an artist and mother-in-law of Malcolm Muggeridge, connected through her parents and eight siblings to the Bloomsbury set. After she died in 1949, we transferred to Miss Winifred Morton in nearby Burwash Common.

I don’t remember much about the more colourful Dobbses, but I remember Miss Morton as a large, stern, bedridden lady, swathed in silk dressing gowns, fond of fresh peaches. And I remember her because she taught me English and gave me my first ever book.

You might think English Songs and Ballads, compiled by TWH Crosland in 1903, and overloaded with gloomy accounts of maritime battles, was a strange choice of Christmas gift for a Ukrainian-speaking four-year-old. And I have sometimes wondered unkindly whether her gift, well-thumbed and pencilled with cryptic marginalia, was of the oh-hell-I-forgot-to-get-something-for-that-girl variety. But I have treasured it all my life.