"For Robert Lawson, the six weeks he and his family spent picking hops in Kent every year was an almost magical time. For a teenage boy, this was his chance for a first romance, in between making and racing go-karts, fighting off the local lads, learning the hard way about electric fences and, of course, picking hops. Over the Distant Hill is his trip down memory lane to the now-vanished hop fields, a collection of amusing stories and unusual events about the bygone summers that were a highlight of his life - and the lives of many others, for whom the paid holidays were the only escape from the drab London streets of the post-war years."--BOOK JACKET.