Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Jackdaw Cake: An Autobiography
    Unavailable
    Jackdaw Cake: An Autobiography
    Unavailable
    Jackdaw Cake: An Autobiography
    Ebook341 pages4 hours

    Jackdaw Cake: An Autobiography

    By Norman Lewis

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEland Publishing
    Release dateMar 18, 2013
    ISBN9781780600338
    Unavailable
    Jackdaw Cake: An Autobiography
    Author

    Norman Lewis

    Norman Lewis (1908–2003) was one of the greatest English-language travel writers. He was the author of thirteen novels and fourteen works of nonfiction, including Naples ’44, The Tomb in Seville, and Voices of the Old Sea. Lewis served in the Allied occupation of Italy during World War II, and reported from Mafia-ruled Sicily and Vietnam under French-colonial rule, among other locations. Born in England, he traveled extensively, living in places including London, Wales, Nicaragua, a Spanish fishing village, and the countryside near Rome.

    Read more from Norman Lewis

    Related to Jackdaw Cake

    Related ebooks

    Literary Biographies For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Letter Boks

      Feb 4, 2021

      I READ that Christopher Columbus was 41 years old when he went to America, and as a consequence everyone celebrates him to this day. I was 25 when I first landed on the East Coast of the USA, and yet not one book has been written about me despite the

      18 min read

    • Article

      50 Quid Craptic Crossword

      Mar 10, 2022

      50 Quid Craptic Crossword
      1 min read

    • Article

      World of Echo

      Jun 17, 2021

      World of Echo
      2 min read

    • Article

      JEFF BECK & Jimmy Page

      Mar 7, 2023

      One day, maybe soon, geologists and hydrographers will perform studies in and around Surrey, England, to divine the magical compounds that have contributed to a strange and almost unbelievable phenomenon: Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton — thre

      9 min read

    • Article

      Hidden Histories

      Nov 25, 2021

      Edgar Mittelholzer was a Guyanese novelist who should be remembered not just for the quality of his writing, but as the earliest recorded writer from the Caribbean to make his living from the profession. I studied Caribbean literature at university,

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Scourge Of Civilisations

      Mar 14, 2024

      The Scourge Of Civilisations
      3 min read

    • Article

      Top Tips

      Jun 23, 2022

      ITALIAN bakers. Increase the load-bearing capacity of your breadsticks by baking a few lengths of spaghetti into each one as a sort of ‘pasta rebar’. Mark Glover, Coventry TV VIEWERS. When watching any celebrity-based competition, always have an inte

      1 min read

    • Article

      Writing Back to Guy and Harriet Pringle

      May 11, 2018

      I met Guy and Harriet Pringle in the winter of 1987. In those days, Turkish public television had a rather ingenious arrangement with public radio; they would show the dubbed series, and the radio would play the original soundtrack. I do not remember

      9 min read

    • Article

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS

      Apr 14, 2022

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS
      9 min read

    • Article

      Rewriting The Script On Gay Love

      Dec 1, 2022

      Tom Crewe/Chatto & Windus More than 70 years before the first brick was thrown at the Stonewall riots, a small band of English intellectuals dared to envision a new world, where same-sex desire was accepted without stigma as a natural aspect of sexua

      3 min read

    • Article

      Encounters

      Nov 24, 2022

      Encounters
      3 min read

    • Article

      Carol Kaye

      Jun 23, 2023

      If plucking a ripe plum from a tree had a sound, it would resemble Carol Kaye’s signature tone – a tone that made her a ‘first-call’ bassist in the highly competitive studio session world. It wasn’t just that, though. Kaye is arguably the first bassi

      7 min read

    • Article

      Re-Covered: The Mischief

      Dec 2, 2019

      Re-Covered: The Mischief
      8 min read

    • Article

      Le Carré's Dirty Linen

      Oct 18, 2023

      The Secret Life of John le Carré By Adam Sisman Profile Books £16.99 Halfway through Adam Sisman's 2015 biography of John le Carré, something odd occurs. The book simply shuts up shop. You can all but hear the rattle of the roller shutter as if it's

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Choir of Man: Max Porter’s ‘Lanny’ Wants You to Listen

      Mar 25, 2019

      Porter's second book is an attempt to capture a village, entirely, in language, and it does so by trying to represent the village’s breadth of narrative voices. The post The Choir of Man: Max Porter’s ‘Lanny’ Wants You to Listen appeared first on The

      7 min read

    • Article

      Letter Bocks

      Jun 22, 2023

      Letter Bocks
      11 min read

    • Article

      LeTtERbOCKs

      Mar 7, 2024

      letters@viz.co.uk | toptips@viz.co.uk Your correspondence to VIZ editor HAMPTON DOUBLEDAY I HAVE never once seen an advertising campaign encouraging people to eat radishes, and yet there they are on every supermarket shelf in the country, just quietl

      10 min read

    • Article

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS

      Sep 8, 2022

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS
      9 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Jesse Paddock

      Dec 9, 2020

      I’d gotten what I’d wanted—a room full of books and time enough to read them—but at a cost. The post A Year in Reading: Jesse Paddock appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Casey Gerald

      Dec 14, 2018

      There’s a line in my book that reads, “I have been so many things along my curious journey: a poor boy, a nigger, a Yale man, a Harvard man, a faggot, a Christian, a crack baby (alleged), the Spawn of Satan, the Second Coming, Casey.” My reading tend

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Saint and Dr No turn 60

      Oct 19, 2022

      On 4th October 1962, ITV aired the first television adaption of Leslie Charteris’s Saint novels. The star was the 34-yearold Roger Moore (1927-2017), then best known for Ivanhoe and Maverick. When the last adventure aired on 9th February 1969, 118 ep

      6 min read

    • Article

      It’s The Remix

      Feb 8, 2022

      Covid-19 and its unwelcome variants have managed to transform the very landscape of our current whiskey imbibing frontier. It has made dining out and whiskeysponsored happy hours more cumbersome as patrons fumble for vaccination cards, or try to reca

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Sarah Thankam Mathews

      Dec 18, 2020

      By May I was clenching my teeth so hard when I slept that it eventually cracked a filling. The post A Year in Reading: Sarah Thankam Mathews appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    Reviews for Jackdaw Cake

    4/5

    9 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Picked this up in a charity shop. A wonderful, if partial, auto-biography, of the authors' life from infancy to the immediate post-war period, when he would have been about forty two , or thereabouts. The first of Lewis' work I have read. It was expanded into a later, longer autobiog. published under a different title, I understand. Full of unexpected nuggets. There is something terrific about reading the erudite autobiography of a man you knew nothing about; it's something of a mystery tour. Rather struck by the description of Edwardian Llanstephan: "There was no more beautiful, wilder or stranger place in the British Isles."
    • 4/5
      I picked this up almost at random, and realised after a couple of chapters that I'd made a silly mistake and confused Norman Lewis with another celebrated (but very different) travel writer, Norman Douglas. But by that time I was so intrigued and amused by the story of the three eccentric Welsh aunts that I carried on reading anyway...Lewis's technique as a writer seems to be to focus on the oddnesses in the people around him, much as Evelyn Waugh does, but he has a sympathetic way of bringing these out in the text that leaves his subjects with much more of their self-respect and human dignity intact. There are obvious overlaps with the subject-matter of Waugh, Powell and Greene (they all belonged to roughly the same generation, of course), and sometimes you feel that Lewis, writing in 1985, may have borrowed a bit from his predecessors (the captain and sergeant-major in Lewis's field security unit certainly made me think of Waugh's Hound and Ludovic, for instance). But Lewis has a very engaging quality of his own, and having at last discovered him, I certainly want to read some more of his books.