Imagine a charming and insistent child taking you by the hand and pulling you out of the 21st century.

Suddenly the busy streets of a still-familiar city are also deeply different. Many of the buildings are the same but the sights and sounds of this Norwich include horses and traps, and servant girls scrubbing doorsteps.

Sylvia's books bring 1920s Norwich vividly to life. Pictured is Bonds in All Saints Green. (Image: Newsquest Library) Sylvia Haymon is the seven-year-old child and a garrulous, gifted guide to a world, less than 100 years ago, which is both familiar and utterly strange.

The people she conjures are as real as the places. Soon we are travelling with her, out of her prosperous city life to a village where the inhabitants of crowded, rickety houses scratch a precarious living lifting potatoes, plucking poultry and picking fruit.

Sylvia grew up in the 1920s, the adored and pampered youngest daughter of a prosperous Norwich family. She became a writer of novels, biographies, histories and journalism – and two remarkable memoirs of her childhood which have just been republished by Henry Layte of Propolis Books and the independent Book Hive shops in Norwich and nearby Aylsham.

Henry Layte, owner of Propolis Books and The Book Hive in Norwich and Aylsham, who rediscovered Sylvia's autobiographies and has republished them. (Image: Sonya Duncan) Henry has an impressive track record for discovering and publishing new writers. Now he has rediscovered a writer from the past who had almost slid into obscurity.

Sylvia Haymon’s memoirs, Opposite the Cross Keys and The Quivering Tree, are a joy to read, fizzing........

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