Down the Kitchen Sink

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Timber Press, Jul 18, 2006 - Biography & Autobiography - 202 pages
Down the Kitchen Sink has much in common with its famous predecessor, Down the Garden Path, in which Beverley Nichols described his early forays into the realm of gardening. When he began to write the first, he could not prune a rose. When he began to write the second, he could not boil an egg. Perhaps this is why both books remain fresh and eminently readable. The phrase 'kitchen sink' may suggest squalor and disillusionment, but Beverley Nichols transforms it into a symbol of merriment and adventure. With a new foreword by Roy Dicks and Val Biro's charming drawings, the Timber Press edition of Down the Kitchen Sink deservedly takes its place among Beverley's classics on gardens, homes, cats, and other friends.

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Contents

Gaskin
9
The Making of a Manservant
17
April in Paris
30
Copyright

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About the author (2006)

Beverley Nichols (1898–1983) was a prolific writer on subjects ranging from religion to politics and travel, in addition to authoring six novels, five detective mysteries, four children's stories, six autobiographies, and six plays. He is perhaps best remembered today for his gardening books. The first of them, Down the Garden Path, centered on his home and garden at Glatton and has been in print almost continuously since 1932. Merry Hall (1951) and its sequels Laughter on the Stairs (1953) and Sunlight on the Lawn (1956) document Nichols' travails in renovating a Georgian mansion and its gardens soon after the war. His final garden was at Sudbrook Cottage, which serves as the setting for Garden Open Today (1963) and Garden Open Tomorrow (1968). The progress of all three gardens was followed avidly by readers of his books and weekly magazine columns. Val was born Balint Stephen Biro, in the city of Budapest, in Hungary, on the 6th October 1921. He attended a small primary school till he was eleven, when he entered a large school of seven hundred pupils run by the monks of the Cistercian order. It was one of the three great monastic schools of Hungary. The politics of the mid thirties, dominated by the rise of Nazism and Fascism slowly came to increasingly influence the people of Hungary and Val's father, recognizing what was happening, arranged in 1939, for his eighteen year old son to go to London to study art. Val never saw his father again. Val hero worshipped his father who sadly died in 1944 only two days before the Gestapo called to arrest him as a political suspect. Val left for England in July 1939, and stayed at Polperro with the McCloy family whose son had spent the previous summer with the Biro's in Budapest. Val was required to register in September as an 'Enemy Alien' with the police. Val Biro lives in West Sussex with his wife. He was born in Hungary and trained as an artist in Budapest before coming to London to study at the Central School. He worked in publishing before coming a freelance illustrator and starting this popular series. Val designed 30 book cover illustrations for Nigel Tranter's, 'Scotlands Storyteller', books between 1951 and 1980.

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