My Brother John

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 aspects of life, such as earliest memories, starting school, wartime experiences, chores and scavenging for fuel, Christmas and leisure activities, immersing the reader in a time, which, though still within living memory is a world away from the 21st century. It is very much a personal account of how a less fortunate family coped in these difficult times and is very different from the usual memoirs of these times. Its final two chapters deal with the death of the parents, when the writer and his brother become the legal guardians of their five younger siblings and can now be considered as finally out of childhood and adolescence.