A Very English Family (1945-1954) : The First Volume of a Memoir

This memoir is an account of a Georgian and Elizabethan childhood in mid-twentieth- century England. Vividly written and always honest, it depicts the incidents of the author’s life as seen through his eyes when he was a child. The result is always entertaining but, more important, based upon materials written and collected at the time, it provides a detailed account of what it was like to grow up in that distant world of the 1940s and 1950s.

For those who lived through those post-war years, it will be a reminder of their earlier lives. For younger readers, it will give them an account of a vanished world so very different from the world of today: no television, no Internet, no mobile phones, and a largely white, largely Christian and highly deferential society.

The author, Richard Perceval Graves, is a member of a distinguished literary family. His grandfather was the Irish Poet Alfred Perceval Graves of Father O’Flynn fame. His uncle was Robert Graves, the Poet and author of both I, Claudius and Goodbye to All That; and the memoir will have a special significance for all those interested in Robert, since it includes information that was excluded by Richard’s publishers from his biography.

The principal locations in which it is set include Croydon, Brighton and its environs, Cranborne Chase in the heart of Wiltshire, Teignmouth in South Devon and above all Wokingham in Berkshire, where Richard’s father was Headmaster of Holme Grange School for twenty years.