Product Description
This autobiography is a re-living rather than a remembering. The children's author and writer on children and education, Leila Berg, re-experiences her early Jewish childhood and adolescence during the 1920s and 30s, up until the day when the first air-raid siren sounded. She introduces the sad, funny and passionate child who is seen growing through the years. Recounting the riches of Manchester - the theatre, the bookstalls, the music, the cinema, her joyful love of the surrounding countryside - she grows into a fiercely independent young woman, and joined the anti-fascists, then the Young Communists. Refusing to go to university, appalled by her brief experience of teacher-training college, she falls in love, but both her lovers are killed, fighting in Spain in the International Brigade. Leila Berg is the author of "Risinghill, Death of a Comprehensive School", as well as the children's books, "Little Pete", "My Dog Sunday" and the "Nippers" series.
About the Author
Leila Berg grew up in a Jewish immigrant neighbourhood in Salford in the twenties and thirties, when the scissors-grinder and the ragman and the bagel-seller still came round the houses, and grandmothers kept barrels of pickled herrings and onions in the living room, and Manchester was full of books and concerts and theatre and films. "A good place to grow up in", she says. "Much better education than school."
She has cared all her life about what we currently call 'the empowerment' of children, writing stories for children (Little Pete, and the Nippers series among many) or stories about children (Risinghill, Death of a Comprehensive School, Reading and Loving and Look at Kids). She was awarded the Eleanor Farjeon Medal in 1973 for her services to children's literature. Her latest book, Flickerbook, an account of her childhood, was the first book ever to be made Book of the Month by a unanimous vote of Waterstones booksellers.
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