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

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Melvyns reflections are vivid and he portrays with eloquence his feelings and emotions of what was often a challenging and difficult time. Melvyn Bragg’s memoir, Back in the Day, is a portrait of the town in which he grew up, Wigton in Cumbria.

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’d come home, have tea at about half past four and while my parents went down into the pub, I just worked and worked.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. 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. Though he’d long since moved away from the town – first to Oxford, and then to London – he had never really left it. This may result in small marks to the dustjacket and title page, please also bear in mind that each signature will be a little different from the one we show here. As a result, he grew up knowing people from those settings, as well as school and Scouts, swimming and all his other childhood activities.

Cast loose from my own town of birth at 18, I responded emotionally to the portrait painted here of my adopted home, as seen through the loving but clear eyes of someone who went out into the wider world but never really left. Setting the speed to 80% and listening to sections several times does make it possible to hear the lines. Melvyn Bragg, Baron Bragg, FRSL, FRTS (born 6 October 1939) is an English author, broadcaster and media personality who, aside from his many literary endeavours, is perhaps most recognised for his work on The South Bank Show.This probably doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that should have a critic gently weeping on the number 38, and what’s strange is that, in the context of Back in the Day, it’s not even close to being the most sweet-sad detail; Bragg’s book, the best thing he has ever written, imbues the overused literary adjective “piercing” with real meaning.

He discovers the enjoyment that can be found in books, in reading and studying and analyzing what he personally draws from a given author’s writing. Melvyn Bragg’s first memoir (Back In The Day: A Memoir, published 26 th May 2022) covers the period up to the moment when he left home for University in Oxford. His mother, Ethel, was illegitimate, fostered by “a Victorian matriarch” whom Bragg believed to be his grandmother until long after she died.It's an affecting and evocative account of his working-class upbringing in the small Cumbrian market town of Wigton and a vivid Cider With Rosie-style portrait of a particular place and time. His years in the 6th form, his first love, and how he got to Oxford, or nearly didn't, rivetting stuff. Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. Melvyn Bragg's first ever memoir - an elegiac, intimate account of growing up in post-war Cumbria, which vividly evokes a vanished world. When I was at Oxford, I remember writing, out of nowhere, a long short story, but was too shy to send it anywhere.

The story itself did not disappoint, and reflected Bragg's undoubted literary genius, and his ability to paint a compelling picture of his experiences "back in the day". This is also particularly interesting for me being from Wigton myself, knowing the author and many of the characters mentioned, as well as all the backstreets and lanes of Wigton, and what it is to be from the town.

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