'TILL I WAS TWENTY'.

"I just wanted to write something for my descendants. Tell them what it was like". And so he did, the result being a tough, uncompromising story told with wit and compassion by someone growing up in a world of destruction and constant change. 'Till I was Twenty' is essentially a personal story, packed with incident, absorbing enough in itself, but threading throught the book are vivid, extremely detailed descriptions of life in the pre-war East End, evacuation to a Leicestershire village, the bombing and V weapons of wartime London, then as a teenager in the tough post war austerity years, ending with his two years as a National Service squaddy, which mark this book as a true social document of those times.