Playing Out in the Wireless Days

In this poignant sequel to Headlong into Pennilessness, Sheffield-born Michael Glover, poet and art critic, re-visits the scenes of his childhood and teenage years in and around Fir Vale.

He remembers the death of the Sunbeam Cinema, and how it disappeared in a pother of brick dust. He sees again the tramps from the tramps' ward, hurrying down Herries Road in pursuit of a warm sleeping spot in the Reference Room of Firth Park Library. He watches his mother at her exasperating daily ritual of putting her hair into pink curlers to the general indifference of the entire family, who all co-exist, somehow, in that hot little kitchen in Coningsby Road, site of perpetual warfare between snapping relatives, as the homework gets down, somehow, on the kitchen table covered in its slippery oil cloth.

It's all here, from playing out on your bike in near trafficless streets, to spinning round and round the gas lamp at the top of Blyde Road until the whole world turns giggly-topsy-turvy.