Framing Myself : A 1940s and '50s Bradford Boyhood

Framing Myself - or ‘Getting myself together’ in Yorkshire parlance - takes the reader into a vanished world, the Bradford of the industrial white working class in the 1940s and 50s, and charts the primary experiences of a boy living in that world - his first discoveries of people, things and places, and the gradual changes in his attitudes and emotions as he develops into the teenager who moved away at the age of sixteen and apparently left it all behind.

On the surface not a great deal happens, beyond the never forgotten tragedy of the death of the author’s father in Italy during the Second World War. In fact it was a rich and varied boyhood, spent among people who were both typical and highly individual, as was the part of Bradford in which they lived.

Recalling that world means finding in it a significance, a wonder and a mystery that were barely apparent at the time, but which continue to resonate for the author decades later. His memories and reflections result in a book that is by turns touching, amusing, stimulating, informative and, throughout, convincing.