Racing the Wind : A Cumbrian Childhood

Beautifully-written memoir of Patricia Nolan’s childhood in early 1950s Cumbria, which captures the end of an era. With no running water or electricity at home, this is a tale of contented poverty in a close rural community. Her tale covers three years which begin with a tragedy and end in triumph.

This powerful and beautifully-written account is the memoir of Patricia Nolan who lived in a tiny community in Cumbria and it captures the end of an era in the 1950s. ‘When the first organ-transplant was taking place, when computers were starting to revolutionise our lives and television was arriving in the sitting-rooms of Britain, in my house we were still dipping buckets into a stream to make a cup of tea and going to bed by candlelight,’ she writes. The tale covers three years of the author’s life, made particularly vivid by a traumatic event which opens the book, but which goes on to depict a poor but close rural community with its village school, its annual country show, its Christmas celebrations and its local characters - all set against the dramatic back-drop of Scafell and the surrounding hills and moors on which she and her friends ran free.