Down in the Valley - H W Freeman

Down in the Valley

Paperback book, 352 pages

H W Freeman

Published 2005

Price £7.95

ISBN 1-903366-92-5

The death of his mother releases Everard Mulliver from a duty-bound life and enables him to follow his instincts. With a new sense of freedom, his focus shifts from an inherited grocery business in Bury St Edmunds to an idyllic Suffolk village, where he buys a cottage.

Everard soon integrates into village community and spends less and less time in the town. H W Freeman traces the young man’s growth and development as he forms new relationships in his rural surroundings and displays his own deep-rooted passion for the land.

Down in the Valley, first published in 1930, was Freeman’s second novel. As in Joseph and his Brethren and Chaffinch’s, the Suffolk countryside and farming play strong roles in the story.


		The village of Lindmer featured in Down in the Valley bears many of the characteristics of Kersey with its winding street, ford and dominating church. Kersey is about ten miles west of Ipswich

The cover picture, 'Kersey Village Street, Suffolk', is a pastel by Leonard Squirrell that dates back to 1928. Nearly eighty years later the view has changed little except on the surface. The photograph was taken in October 2005.

		Freeman published Down in the Valley in 1930. That year his parents moved to this house at Offton, near Ipswich, about six miles from Kersey. The 1932 photograph shows the house surrounded by the farmland that Freeman loved. (Leita Minns collection.)