What is written here was born of an old man’s loneliness, as he sat in a little cottage perched high on a hill, overlooking the Waveney Valley with no company but his dog. The life that he loved had passed him by. As he puts it, ‘some said I had given up the game—but the game gave me up’, so to pass the time he took to writing down his memories in a penny exercise-book. Subsequently it was handed over to amuse a farmer friend of mine, one day when times were bad with the author, and he had come up to see if there was job for him ‘mole catchen’.