Everything I Have Always Forgotten

The story of Owain Hughes’s childhood in the 1940s and 1950s, Everything I Have Always Forgotten chronicles the author’s time spent in boarding schools, his family’s large but dilapidated house, and on the banks and waters of the Dyfi estuary. His stories of boating, horse riding, and walking amid the landscape of north Wales culminate in the three-day hike through Snowdonia by 12-year-old Owen and a friend—a hike which led to their being stranded for two weeks on Bardsey Island. Hughes’s free-range childhood owed much to the policy of “benign neglect,” intended to encourage independence and self-reliance, adopted by his parents, the acclaimed novelist Richard Hughes and artist Frances Bazley, a cousin of the Duke of Norfolk. His parents’ connections lend an air of exoticism to Hughes’s recollections, which include visits to castle-dwelling cousins, meetings with spies, and cameos by the likes of Bertrand Russell and Clough Williams-Ellis. Packed with vivid anecdotes, these memoirs capture the final years of aristocratic society in postwar Britain and include fascinating insight into the life of the major novelist Richard Hughes, making this an engaging book about memory and the experiences that define a person.