The author was born a year before the outbreak of the Second World War. He was the oldest of seven children living in a small terraced house in a South Staffordshire village. After the early death of their parents, he and his brother became Legal Guardians of their younger siblings. He was the first from the village to attend university. He worked as an analytical chemist and as a lecturer in Science and Mathematics. He moved to Devon where he also taught English as a Foreign Language. Now retired, he lives with his wife in a hamlet near Totnes.
The book is a collection of memories of childhood and adolescence, of growing up as one of a family of seven in a small South Staffordshire mining village in the 1940s and 1950s. The family home had no electricity and relied on an open fire for all cooking and heating. The book looks at different as...
