by Anthony Bailey
In this autobiographical gem, the British-born author takes up where he left off in America, Lost & Found, the book that described his four-year wartime stay with the wealthy Spaeth family in Dayton, Ohio. As the war winds down in 1944, Bailey, at 11, returns to England with so strange an accent that his classmates call him "Yank." The family moves to Portchester, where Bailey plays in an ancient Roman fort. He becomes obsessed with sailing, airplanes, trains, motorcycles and cars. At boarding school he prepares for college, wins a scholarship to Oxford and then must do his two-year stint of military service. He spends his last months as a junior officer in West Africa and ends this book just as his tour of duty is over and he returns to England. His is not the most dramatic of lives, yet his experiences give him a unique perspective from which to view both Britain and the U.S. His writing is so charming that it makes even the mundane, such as his adolescent bumbling with girls, a pleasure to read about. (Viking, $15.95)
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