EVERYDAY life in the countryside, as well as the city, has changed considerably, some might say dramatically, over the years, which is why a new book looking both lovingly and wistfully at the way it was more than half-a-century ago in a small village is a welcome addition to bookshelves.

Many of the adventures of yesteryear, the changes over decades, are irrevocably lost in the mists of time, although there are pockets in suburbia but more likely in quieter rural areas, where it might still be possible to glimpse what life must have been like in the 1950s for a young boy.

Beef Cubes and Burdock: Memories of a 1950s Country Childhood, is exactly that.

Written by Worcestershire journalist and author John Phillpot, it is a collection of stories from the days of his boyhood growing up in the village of Churchover, near Rugby in north Warwickshire.

And it’s one I can, and I am sure many others of a similar age, will find they have great resonance with as many of the adventures and escapades of yesteryear also happened to those of us who grew up in the city.

Phillpot says: “The rural landscape that I knew back in the 1950s has changed irrevocably over the last half century. The M6 cut through the parish in the late 1960s, and the inevitable development soon followed, urbanising what had hitherto been rolling farmland.

“The book is both a lament and a celebration of a vanished rural idyll. It also serves as warning that when we cover countryside with concrete and tarmac it is lost forever.”

Those of us who are former city dwellers can appreciate his feelings having lost green areas too with spreading development on the outskirts where ‘our gang’ also used to go armed with nets foraging for sticklebacks and other species along the Dingles on the edge of Birmingham, woodland adventures, and soapbox races too in contraptions comprising old wooden boxes, planks and pram wheels!

But there is no way, even back then, that I could have sampled a chobbled beef cube and a swig of burdock together! Pass the lemonade please… Life was slower back then, we made our own fun keeping fit out in the fresh air and got by without computer keyboards and games.

It’s an affectionate glance over the shoulder to how it was in a more innocent age - but times do change. However, the author, on his occasional pilgrimages back home, knows what still remains. His much-loved River Swift. But here again, much water will have flowed beneath its bridges… Some references to people and places are perhaps a little repetitive at times but it doesn’t diminish the warmth of this pleasant read or the author’s love of the characters who helped shape his early life, and his love for the countryside - his own place of paradise - and its pursuits, and thoughts too of one Maureen Gardner!

Beef Cubes and Burdock: Memories of a 1950s Country Childhood is published by Austin Macauley and can be bought at bookshops as a paperback (£6.29) or hardback, and also as an e-book via Amazon.