Days from a Different World

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  • Author: John Simpson
  • Publisher: Pan Books
  • Catalogue: 148361
  • Size: 16x24cm
In this volume of memoirs, John Simpson turns his sights on his own childhood, through which he paints a vivid picture of Britain in the 1940s and '50s.

'I have already touched on my childhood in Strange Places, Questionable People. But the further through life I get the more I want to revisit it. I want to look at the whole of my childhood, the England I grew up in and my family. Family and country seem inextricably linked - in some ways our country is like our family: we know it extraordinarily well, yet we don't always like it. Nevertheless, it keeps its hold on our loyalties in spite of everything else.'

This is not be a mere exercise in nostalgia, rather it is a journey through the England of the late 1940s and 1950s in all its shabby wonder and it will also tell the somewhat strange and often deeply painful story of John Simpson's family.

It begins with Simpson at the deathbed of his aunt, the last of his close relatives to die. As she lay there, half-demented, he found himself talking to her about his childhood - his father, his grandmother, the small and rather depressing south London suburb which his family had built and dominated, and finally declined with.
We meet the great-uncle who returned injured from Passchendaele, unwanted because his injuries were mental rather than physical, the grandfather who drank the family money away and abandoned his wife and children and the grandfather who toured the country with a Wild West show.
We learn, too, of the broken marriages and the unfulfilled lives, about the people who had died, and the lives which were just beginning.

Candid, beautifully written and touching, Days from a Different World: A Memoir of Childhood will enchant all those who read it.