How It Was: Memories of Growing Up in the 1930s, '40s and '50s

In How it Was Howard Temperley describes growing up at a time of expanding opportunity and rapid social change. Like others of his generation 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 a gift for writing, 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