Pauline's Fantasy Reviews

This is a charming, funny and readable story of a very eccentric wartime childhood. Given that the book was written in old age, one has to wonder how much was actual memory and how much was liberal use of the imagination to fill in the gaps, but it was nevertheless entirely believable.

It is interesting that the author is a beneficiary of the much maligned eleven-plus exam, which dragged innumerable children from homes uninterested in education and threw them into a grammar school, and thence to university and comfortable middle-class jobs. Without such a system, the author would undoubtedly have remained in his childhood environment and we would not have been able to read his entertaining history.