Henry Williamson began to write in 1918, in an asbestos hut while waiting to rejoin his regiment in France. He has said that he wrote to escape from the world about him. In The Beautiful Years he lived again scenes of his boyhood, writing with the door of his cubicle locked, usually in the evening after dinner in Mess. He wrote with intense shyness, hardly daring to release from himself the stored impressions of his early years; and also with excitement, for the way the story wrote itself.

          For indeed the author did not know what characters would come into his story, or how the scenes would build themselves up. There was the spinney in the Great Wheatfield, where in boyhood he used to sit with the "crowstarver" watching the birds fly down to the winter wheat, rattling an old police rattle, and banging a length of iron rail, to scare them. And since Mr. Williamson’s idol was Richard Jefferies, he must coms into the book, in the person of the dreamy Jim Holloman. Then there was Dolly, who loved him; and Jack Temperley, Willie Maddison’s friend, who lived at Skirr Farm. And Elsie Norman, the beautiful and unattainable, adored in secret by the small boy, who, nevertheless, could only be happy when in open air, among the birds that he loved, especially the white owls.