Footsteps From East Coker

David Foot has been a journalist and writer for more than sixty years. He has developed a distinctive style that has won him many admirers both in his native West Country, which he has never left, and among cricket lovers who have read his work for The Guardian and his lavishly praised books on the game.

In Footsteps from East Coker he looks back across his life. He reflects on the lost feudal world of his childhood in East Coker in Somerset ; his early years as a journalist on the Western Gazette and the Bristol Evening World; his love of theatre, his fascination with scandal – and his lifelong enchantment with the game of cricket.

There is the austere visitor who talks to David Foot’s father in East Coker church, a man whom they later realise was the poet TS Eliot. There is the well-dressed charmer who stops to ask about local girls and who turns out to be the murderer Neville Heath. There is a young Peter O’Toole learning his trade at the Bristol Old Vic, the great West Indian cricketer Viv Richards sitting quietly in the Taunton dressing room after a triple century, talking about God; a snatched interview with Noel Coward, a glimpse of the acting genius of Harold Macmillan and the strange discovery that an American professor has published a paper concluding that he, David Foot, was no more than a nom-de-plume for his one-time colleague on the Evening World, Tom Stoppard.

The stories tumble out: from a frightening moment during National Service to the offer to become a full-time joke-writer for the comedian Freddie ‘Parrotface’ Davies.

But never is the cottage back in East Coker left far behind. David Foot may have become one of the finest journalists of his generation, but he has never lost touch with his roots – and it shows in the warmth of his writing.