Back in the Day: Melvyn Bragg's deeply affecting, first ever memoir

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All of our books are 100% brand new, unread and purchased directly from the publishers in bulk allowing us to pass the huge savings on to you! a balanced, honest picture' Richard Benson, Mail on SundayIn this elegiac and heartfelt memoir, Melvyn Bragg recreates his youth in the Cumbrian market town of Wigton: a working-class boy who expected to leave school at fifteen yet who gained a scholarship to Oxford University; who happily roamed the streets and raided orchards with his gang of friends until a breakdown in adolescence drove him to find refuge in books. I can’t hope to capture, in the space I have here, this book’s extraordinary emotional geography, let alone its strange, inchoate beauty; the way that Bragg, in his struggle fully to explain his meaning, so often hits on something wise and even numinous (when he does, it’s as if a bell sounds).

Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. A fulfilling pleasure to read and to recommend to those who enjoy autobiographical writing at its very best. Melvyn Bragg’s first ever memoir – an elegiac, intimate account of growing up in post-war Cumbria, which vividly evokes a vanished world. View image in fullscreen King Street in Wigton circa 1955: ‘Bragg was almost paralysingly reluctant to leave Cumbria’. The awkwardnesses of his understanding with his father, with whom so much had to be left unsaid given the nature of male emotional life in the 1940s and 1950s and the character of Stan himself, emerge very strongly.Melvyns reflections are vivid and he portrays with eloquence his feelings and emotions of what was often a challenging and difficult time.

As a young boy growing up in rooms above his parents’ pub, we see that what he has achieved is praiseworthy. No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins.There’s little I could express except the same choked up feeling that roughens his voice as he tries to make it through the last word of the chapter before the wave of memory drowns him. You can certainly hear it: darts hitting a board, a parkie (Bragg’s grandfather was one) shouting at disobedient boys, a choir belting out a hymn.