As for Carr’s other fiction, I’ve heard very good things about the football one – How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup.

Over forty years later, after his novel The Harpole Report was a critical and popular success, he was invited to give a talk at Goldsmiths'.A Month in the Country traces the slow revival of the primeval rhythms of life so cruelly disorientated by the Great War. Along with the `The Remains of The Day', `Birdsong' I know I shall be recommending others to read this for the rest of my life. It describes the fragility, longing and loss so incredibly well and the last page is one of the best endings to a novel, similar in some ways to the end of 'Gatsby'. That night, for the first time during many months, I slept like the dead and, next morning, awoke very early.

When he arrives in Oxgodby, he’s going through the motions of what he has to do, almost an automaton.That they have no preconceptions of, and that is short enough to be entirely consumed in one sitting. Mr Ellerbeck preaches at the Wesleyan chapel, and out of a sense of gratitude for their hospitality, Birkin becomes involved in the chapel community although he is a non-believer, perhaps because of the scenes of horror he witnessed in the war. I believe that it’s a particular joy for an avid reader to stumble across a book that no one has mentioned to them before.

The film has been neglected since its 1987 cinema release and it was only in 2004 that an original 35 mm film print was discovered, due to the intervention of a fan. In due course, as was Carr’s wont – because he thought little of most commercial publishers – he bought back the rights and published it under his own imprint of the Quince Tree Press, from which (blessedly) copies are still available (as are Carr’s seven other novels).Day after day, mist rose from the meadow as the sky lightened and hedges, barns and woods took shape until, at last, the long curving back of the hills lifted away from the Plain.