A Black Country Childhood: Fears and Imaginings of the Sixties

Black Country Childhood is an offbeat sketch, by turns satirical and rueful, of growing up in an undistinguished West Midlands town in the 1960s. The author challenges the orthodoxy that to be young in The Sixties was a ‘liberating’ experience and, in the process, delves into some murky corners of ‘Englishness’. A family narrative is interwoven with impressions of the years of compulsory schooling, and the year or so beyond. A mother’s deep friendship with a Labour MP and the idealism they shared act as a counterblast to a world of sterile conservatism. The schools the writer attended and the innate conservatism of the English people receive satirical attention. Whilst the larger part of the narrative is factual, some elements are invented. The intention, however, is always to be faithful to the spirit of the times