This moving, thoughtful, wry book is memoir, social history, and elegy for an almost forgotten world. It looks steadily and honestly at the varied texture of that world, from gutting fish off Iceland to working on the buses, from having formal high tea with the Great Aunts to delivering meat on a bicycle, from sharp memories of a fifty-in-a-class primary school to trying for a scholarship to Cambridge University - and leaving that lost world for ever.