‘I have already touched on my childhood in Strange Places, Questionable People. But the further through life I get the more I want to revisit it. I want to look at the whole of my childhood, the England I grew up in and my family.’ This is not a mere exercise in nostalgia, rather it is a journey through the England of the late 1940s in all its shabby wonder, which also tells the somewhat strange and often deeply painful story of John Simpson’s family. Here we meet his father and his grandmother, still living in the small and rather depressing south London suburb which his family built, dominated and, finally, declined with.