1949: Candida Lycett Green describes one year in her magical childhood in the remote farming village of Farnborough in Berkshire, where she lived with her eccentric, bohemian upper-class parents among the local farming community. In one of the bleakest and highest spots in the county, 750 feet up in the windswept downland, Candida ran wild with a Gang of the children of the local farm labourers, and their discoveries and adventures are set against a vivid backdrop of village life and the unfolding agricultural and natural year. Parents play a minor part in the activities of The Gang, whose non-school hours are spent roaming freely around the countryside, and it is during these romps that Candida and her friend June become interested in the concept of Love. Their romantic imagination is fuelled by their secret surveillance of local beauty Ruby Mason, who they discover cleans the cottage of a reclusive German scientist working at the neighbouring Harwell Atomic Research Centre. A romance between Ruby and the German is imagined, or engineered, by Candida and June's stealthy intervention, and the two girls spend the summer revelling in the secret love affair they seem to have instigate