George Ewart Evans

[3] As a boy he assisted in the delivery rounds travelling by pony and trap through the neighbouring farms and villages until the business closed following the 1924–1925 coal strike.

After an unsuccessful attempt to move to London, he obtained work during the 1930s as a schoolmaster at Sawston Village College, Cambridgeshire, married, and started a family.

After serving in the Royal Air Force with wireless equipment during the Second World War, he moved briefly to London, and then in 1947 to the remote Suffolk village of Blaxhall, where his wife taught in the school.

The Evans family lived relatively simply, moving their home in the neighbourhood to Needham Market and Helmingham to follow the teaching posts, and at his wife's retirement they settled down finally in Brooke, a small Norfolk village, where George continued to write.

It was here at this time, and with the dressing and elaborating on it later, that I transposed the Blaxhall community in my own mind into its true place in an ancient historical sequence, keeping the continuity that was for ever changing, and for ever remaining the same, until an irreparable break substituted the machines for animal power, and put an end to a period that had lasted well over two thousand years.