Looking back on childhood can be a strange mixture of pleasure and pain. We remember a bunch of flowers in a church window, spirits soaring to a favourite hymn, the intimacy of bedside prayer, the fear of literally burning in Hell for wriggling in church and other amusingly innocent crimes.

This book brings back the full range of those emotions through the work of our most expressive writers. The passages are all the more enjoyable because the diverse experiences they relate ore in the end shared with each other as well as with us.

David Jarman & Celia Van Oss