A Key to All My Houses is the story of a quite exceptional childhood spent in a bewildering succession of country cottages and furnished rooms across the length and breadth of Southern England in the 1920s and 30s. It is a humorous, poignant, and enormously readable account of childhood, peppered with grown-up secrets, moonlight flits, and imaginative enterprises to keep food in the pantry. Constantly moving from county to county, village to village, what the author missed inconsistent schooling and long-term friendships, she gained in the experience of life and encounters and escapades ranging from the tragic to the hilarious. The great joy of the book is that extraordinary though the story is, its pages will evoke memories galore for the older readers while those too young to remember the pre-plastic age will be delighted by a glimpse behind the doors of that era between the wars. The author is a well-known judge of dogs (at the international level) and of native ponies. A canine and equine journalist of many years standing, she also has a growing list of books to her name.