Wild Olives

As a five-year-old child, William Graves is taken in 1944 from England to a mountain village in Majorca, where his father, the poet Robert Graves, had returned with his new family to the place where he had lived before the war with Laura Riding. Young William grows up in the writer's shadow, while experiencing the ways of life of the Majorcans which have hardly changed for hundreds of years, and participating in the day-to-day activities of the village. In this book William Graves conveys the texture of life in Majorca - the food, the pattern of the season, the camaraderie and rivalries within the village, and the growing sense, from the Sixties onwards, that his fragile paradise was under threat. The book is also a portrait of Robert Graves, his "Muses" and his entourage, and a study of how the son of a famous father finds his own identity.