www.jrbates-author.co.uk

https://www.jrbates-author.co.uk

The North-East DiariesA Funny Thing Happened in Blyth - is part memoir and part fiction about childhood and growing up in a northern industrial community. It is a remembrance of the pit town of Blyth during the first three years of the 1960s, when children roamed the streets, and made their own entertainment. Christmas excitement, Guy Fawkes night, blackberry week, juvenile rivalries, football matches, running away from home and school life all feature in this entertaining tale of a 60s rite of passage.Characters appear and reappear in many of the chapters and they are held together by the central character and narrator Sidney (Hawky) Brown, a young lad going through his junior school and first Grammar School years in the town. Hawky and his coterie of acquaintances are, or were, real people and the stories are predominantly real-life incidents but the dialogue, now poorly recalled, has for the main part been summoned-up as close to truth as memory permits and is used as the springboard for many of the events.The older members of his family and other adults in his life are viewed from the boy’s perspective in passages shot through with misinterpretations and frustrated expectations. The odyssey from innocence to worldliness starts here. Hawky edges towards a yearned for maturity through revealing encounters, blunders and an eventual success (passing his eleven plus) that peers try to turn into another kind of failure. We leave him in his second year of Grammar School facing a new phase of his life with a trace of uncertainty and a thread of hope.The narrator at times is a curious observer of the supposedly adult world. Several of the more public real-life events of the time (such as the lining up of the planets 1962, Tristan da Cunha, the Berlin Wall, the birth of the Beatles) are perceived through the eyes of Hawky.Names have been changed only for embarrassing incidents – or as they used to say in ‘Dragnet’ – ‘and to protect the innocent’.

Keywords: memoir,faction,blyth,northumberland,grammar,school,kirkcaldy,fiction,mining

Category: Arts & Entertainment

City:

State:

Country: United Kingdom (GB)

Currency :

Avg product price:

Platform: BaseKit

Technologies used:

Contact page:

Stores similar to www.jrbates-author.co.uk in Arts & Entertainment industry.

• Find more shops in category Arts & Entertainment in United Kingdom.

Find BaseKit stores worldwide and make them your client.

Find e-commerce stores worldwide and make them your client.