Jackdaw Cake: An Autobiography - Paperback

by Norman Lewis (Author)

With dry, laconic wit, Norman Lewis remembers his transformation from stammering Welsh schoolboy to worldy wise, multilingual sergeant in the Intelligence Corps, on the cusp of becoming a writer.

With a calm, observant gaze from the start, the young Norman moves from Spiritualist parents in Enfield to live with supremely dotty aunts in Carmarthen, whose baking of a weekly cake to feed the jackdaws gives the book its title. Escaping his eccentric family by marrying the daughter of a Sicilian associate of the Mafia, Norman made a living as a wedding photographer and by dealing in cameras, while restoring and racing Bugattis for pleasure. Here we see his first journeys in Spain, Cuba and the Yemen and a wartime spent in Algeria, Sicily and Italy, all of which acted as an apprenticeship for his career as one of the twentieth century's greatest travel writers.