British Summer Time Begins

Angebote / Angebote:

School's out! Those final clangings of the bell, when summer term ended and you walked out through the gates into freedom, were some of the most sublime moments of childhood.But what happened when you arrived home? How did you spend the long balmy weeks of unscheduled time? And how did those summer months away from school shape the person you are today? That's what Ysenda Maxtone Graham set out to discover, probing people from all walks of life and all corners of Britain for true details of their childhood summers in the years between 1930 and 1980 - the year when the first computer games began to change children's lives.With her acute ear for the hilarious and the poignant, she has created a unique, revealing portrait of how we were, and how families functioned (or sometimes didn't ), through those pre-screen-era summers when expensive entertainments weren't laid on, parents didn't hover, and children, needing to fend off boredom, had to make their own adventures or daydream for hours on end in the back garden or in the local side-streets and meadows.That was until - if you lucky - you went away on holiday - usually not abroad, but to the British seaside, bringing thermoses and threadbare towels in a car fuggy with cigarette smoke, squished in with too many family members. From the author of the beloved Terms & Conditions comes this highly entertaining, joyous and sometimes wistful chronicle of the Great British Childhood Summer: Julys and Augusts when the conforming term-time self was cast off and you could become the person you really were. Could it be that those unscheduled days were in fact the most important and formative of our lives?