Early on in this memoir of a postwar working-class English family, Alison Light recalls Freud’s admonition that ‘there are no memories of childhood, only memories about childhood’. Anyone writing an autobiography should use Freud’s point – and Light’s book – as aides-mémoire. 

The book is ostensibly an account of her early years growing up in 1950s Portsmouth with her father – a carpenter, fitter and self-styled ‘jack of all trades’ – her mother – from a line of women working in service – her sister, Sandra, and brother, Chris. It is a vivid evocation of ‘the last generation in Britain whose childhood is in black and white’, of working-class family life in the aftermath of the Second World War and during the emergence of the welfare state. Through forensic examination of diaries, photographs and – in a tour de force opening chapter – the doll’s house her beloved father made for her, Light is painfully honest and often very funny about her childhood and about the pretensions of a bright young girl bullied for getting straight As. 

The book’s re-creation of popular culture – from nursery rhymes like ‘Oranges and Lemons’ and ‘Dance to Your Daddy’, which for Light were ‘unconscious lessons’ in national history and class hierarchy, to ‘Puff, the Magic Dragon’, Enid Blyton and BBC children’s TV – is poignant, but never slides into nostalgia.