It was not until he was dead and I was forty that I realised my father was once in Holy Orders, Roy Hattersley reveals, setting the tone in the opening pages of his childhood memoir. A somewhat precocious only child, Roy grew up surrounded by protective adults, equally determined to expose him to books and to shield him from germs - second-hand books were decontaminated by a sharp session in the oven. A ten-year feud with the next door neighbours; unwavering devotion to Sheffield Wednesday; the hardships of the 1930s and the Blitz; the eleven-plus examination and Grammar School - all the pleasures and pangs of northern working-class boyhood are relived.