Backcloth is the final and in many ways the most searching volume of Dirk Bogarde’s four-part autobiography.
As he retraces the patterns of pain and happiness that have shaped his life, Dirk Borgarde looks back once more, first to his childhood, youth and early manhood, then to his later years as a writer in Provence –years bright with a rare and special friendships, but also darkened by the death of many of those friends. Quicksilver memories of a bohemian London childhood, of solitary teenage years spent with relatives in Scotland during the Depression ('The anvil on which my strength, such as it was, had been formed '), memories of olive and rose trees, flower-filled rooms, sunshine ever stalked by the shadows of death at the farmhouse in Provence, all are put on the page as witnesses to the people and events, both trivial and profound, that have become an indelible part of the writer’s life.