Back in the Day: Melvyn Bragg's deeply affecting, first ever memoir

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Bragg says “This is about my life from the age of six to 18 in the middle of the last century at a time which now seems like another country.

I feel his narration at times was like we were sat together in the same room talking of old times in Wigton. The really fascinating part is the portrait of Wigtown, his Cumbrian home town that was such a tight community,; his family were right at the heart of this, as his parents ran a pub, and were active in the local Labour Party and in sporting activities. Perhaps, having “stayed on” when everyone else has left, he will choose a job in the local civil service instead of putting his amazing brain to good use in a university. It was, and is, his place, and I wonder if this doesn’t seem to him now like the greatest luck of his life: a better thing by far than all the TV shows, the fame and the money and the peerage.Some of his early television work was in collaboration with Ken Russell, for whom he wrote the biographical dramas The Debussy Film (1965) and Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World (1967), as well as Russell's film about Tchaikovsky, The Music Lovers (1970). Bragg won a scholarship to Oxford, joined the BBC and went on to become one of our best-known broadcasters (presenter of In Our Time on Radio 4) and a life peer: Lord Bragg of Wigton. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer View image in fullscreen ‘Pulling pints is a little knack’: Melvyn Bragg photographed in London, February 2023.

Safe because it was his playground, and dangerous because its streets and pubs contained a threat of direct violence; the pressure created on the growing child by constant fear of brawls downstairs in the pub where his parents were landlords played a role in the mental disturbances in his teenage years that Melvyn revealingly documents here. However, I am glad that I persisted because once Bragg's family move into the Blackamoor Pub, there is a vibrancy and warmth that pervades throughout the book.Wonderful evocation of a long gone time when Melvyn was growing up in the forties and fifties in Cumbria . Be aware that this is written about, although it doesn’t cover many pages, if this would be a trigger. His new memoir, Back in the Day, focuses on his early life and is a remarkable portrait of a childhood and adolescence, a family and a community. Bragg is ten years my senior so his experiences of growing up in the war years, and being a teenager in the 50s were relatable, especially as my brothers were that much older than me.

An only child, he went to the local grammar school and had the opportunity to stay on in 6th form, supported by his parents, when almost all his peer group left to start work. With a gentle voice, Lord Bragg presented recollections of his early life in Wigton, a delight to hear.is set against an unforgettably affectionately drawn backdrop of kind but strict grown-ups who laced the place with a sliver of fear . At times I was reminded of John McGahern's "Memoir", another great book that pays heartfelt tribute to a cherished mother. As a young boy growing up in rooms above his parents’ pub, we see that what he has achieved is praiseworthy.

Above all, however, it is a warm look back on a life flavoured with the realities of life in England’s north-west and of a hard working student’s pathway towards academic success. There’s little I could express except the same choked up feeling that roughens his voice as he tries to make it through the last word of the chapter before the wave of memory drowns him.

It ends with him winning a Scholarship to Oxford University ,but as he so eloquently points out he had to go but he never left his home town of Wigton .