A lovely memoir of growing up in working-class Protestant Belfast between the wars. Family life, education, his growing awareness of the world beyond his street and, eventually, beyond Belfast. Although his childhood was in some ways difficult--his parents' strained marriage, his mother's alcoholism, family tensions and divisions, the constraints and limits of the education available to him--this is in no way a misery memoir. He maintains a quiet, thoughtful tone throughout, recovering and pondering memories about his life, without straying into either sensationalism or sentimentality.