FROM farm labourer at 14 in South Yorkshire to award-winning author in later life. That was the extraordinary path of Fred Kitchen, who used his years on the land at the beginning of the 20th century to write a book which became a classic account of country life. Fred's Brother to the Ox, first published in 1940, became such a successful bestseller, harking back to a slower pace of life, that it went into three reprints and was eventually made into a TV drama-documentary. While he used actual events in the book, he disguised his workplaces and villages with fictitious names, to the frustration of many of his readers. Now the author, who was brought up in the area where Fred worked, combines the vivid descriptions of farm and country life with his own local knowledge to trace the real-life places in Fred's book, exploring at the same time the history that surrounds this distinctive and often forgotten part of Yorkshire.