How It Was: Memories of Growing up in the 1930S, '40S and '50S

In this inspiring book, Howard Temperley describes his childhood during a time of expanding opportunity and rapid social change. As a young boy, he experienced the poverty of the 1930s and the social dislocations of war. For him, however, the war proved a liberating experience. As an evacuee he spent three glorious years more or less running wild in the Lake District. Back in the urban North East and bored by schoolwork he took refuge in reading, drawing and wildfowling. It was, therefore, a great surprise when, halfway through his second Sixthform year and in spite of a hitherto mediocre school record, Oxford awarded him an open scholarship. In his later chapters he describes his adventures as an improbable cavalry officer, Oxford undergraduate and Yale postgraduate, touching along the way on his encounters with English snobbery and American affluence. With a sharp eye for detail and exceptional writing skills, he paints a vivid picture of what it was like to belong to that upwardly-mobile generation who, thanks to the 1944 Butler Act and other changes in social policy, were granted educational opportunities far greater than had been dreamed of by their parents. Let this moving autobiography take you back in time and relieve one man's incredible journey from a war refugee to a successful Ivy League graduate!