One man's world

the long version

This is the second of Leslie's autobiographical accounts, covering his life up to the outbreak of World War Two, with an epilogue which described briefly his wartime activity and looked back, six years later, to how things had changed in that part of London where he had earlier lived. It deals first with his family and his early years at Castle Leslie in County Monaghan, Northern Ireland, and then reflects amusingly on his less than successful school days and his early career as a soldier. None of this seemed to have suited him, so he resigned his commission and travelled through parts of south-east Asia and Africa, living off a modest quarterly remittance from his family and returning to England "as D.B.S. - Distressed British Subject". These adventures, and his next journey in Labrador, (1928), were described in rather more detail in an earlier book "Wilderness Trails in Three Continents." He continued what appears to have been a somewhat hand-to-mouth existence in Morocco, where he was inspired to become a sculptor, and then embarked on a more satisfying existence as such, living for years among Bohemian art communities firstly in Paris and then in London. Its attractive dust cover correctly describes the book as "full of humour and contrast. It is studded with reminiscences of many famous and unconventional figures of the bohemia of the 1930s, and provides an unforgettable picture of a world that has all but passed away". The book contains eight black-and-white photographs, one of the author in 1960 and seven of his sculptures.