"It was not until he was dead and I was forty that I realised my father was once in Holy Orders," Roy Hattersley reveals, setting the tone in the opening pages of his childhood memoir. A somewhat precocious only child, Roy grew up surrounded by protective adults, equally determined to expose him to books and to shield him from germs - second-hand books were decontaminated by a sharp session in the oven. A ten-year feud with the next door neighbours; unwavering devotion to Sheffield Wednesday; the hardships of the 1930s and the Blitz; the eleven-plus examination and Grammar School - all the pleasures and pangs of northern working-class boyhood are relived.
- ISBN10 0316853836
- ISBN13 9780316853835
- Publish Date 5 July 2001 (first published June 1983)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 30 December 2009
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Little, Brown & Company
- Edition New edition
- Format Paperback
- Pages 300
- Language English