Back in the Day: A Memoir
MELVYN BRAGG
(SCEPTRE, 416 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • tel 020 7799 4064
On air, Melvyn Bragg explains what’s important about culture and ideas. In this memoir of his early life, he explains what’s important about the people of Wigton, the Cumbrian town in which he grew up. They are more present in this prelude to the broadcaster’s career than he is.
In part, this is because his own story is straightforward. Bragg grows up, learns, after various teenage spills, to work hard at school and eventually earns a scholarship to Oxford. But the book’s really about his roots in the town and its population. Some of the people you would expect to meet in a memoir: Stan and Ethel, his parents, who run one of the lesser pubs, poor but “rich in everything that matters”; Mr James, influential teacher and former Spitfire pilot; rugby coach Jimmie Morton; the vicar; Bragg’s gang of school friends. But there are more: Mrs Barnes, whose orchard Bragg raids; Mrs Bell, the local Labour Party organiser; Kenneth, who sings in the pub; Mr Parker, a superb darts player; men of the town “blasted by the war”; hard-working women who “made plain life undull”; and on and on until you feel as if the whole of ’40s and ’50s Wigton is here. Most significantly, their little acts of “understated, unextravagant, reliable kindness” and love are remembered. “If you think this sounds too idealised,” Bragg warns, “then you would be mistaken”: the book is a hymn to the working-class England of his childhood.