The Green Trees Beyond: A Memoir

Readers who enjoyed Lawrence's The North Runner and Secret Go the Wolves will welcome these memoirs of his active, adventurous life. Son of an English father and a Spanish mother, he spent his childhood in Spain. At 15, during the Spanish Civil War, he enlisted in the Republican Army and fought in the infantry. Lawrence escaped to France in 1938, returning to England to enlist in the British Army. He was evacuated at Dunkirk, then transferred to the 7th Royal Tank Regiment, saw action in the desert and, in June 1944, was severely wounded in Normandy. After a long convalescence, he studied biology at Cambridge and found his way into journalism. Dissatisfied with life in postwar England, Lawrence went to Canada in 1954, to homestead in western Ontario. He was totally unprepared for a Canadian winter, and deeply grateful to his neighbors for their help. Relating events of his life in Canada, his love of the North and its wildlife, Lawrence pens a fitting postscript to his other books. Photos. (June)