Publisher's Synopsis
This is Richard's story of growing up during and after the Second World War. Readers will discover what happened to the Lord family between 1939 and 1945, enjoying a narrative that is interspersed with interpretation and discussion about how the war changed things in a much wider way. Although Richard became a history teacher later on in life, his lifelong passion for retrospection was triggered, long before he could even read, by three things: the pictures in an old schoolbook, wartime news bulletins read by the BBC's Alvar Liddell, and his father's recollections of life in the trenches in 1918. His father was 'The Gauleiter'. He was not a Nazi party boss, but Headmaster of Glossop Grammar School, near Manchester, and his son was one of his pupils. The kids picked up the word 'gauleiter' from Alvar Liddell and it became the Head's nickname. At school, young Richard was taught a body of old-fashioned knowledge by old-fashioned methods and he recounts this, and the classroom scene, in detail. When he began this book, being then an educational 'progressive', he had expected to mock the workings of rote learning in an elitist milieu. However, in writing he changed his mind and instead covered the eventual post-war dissolution of grammar schools. Although Richard Lord takes his history seriously, his typically irreverent humour is woven throughout the book. There is also a poignant element in a memoir that sometimes takes a confessional turn.
