City lights - Keith Waterhouse

Keith Waterhouse was born into a world that has now vanished - a soot-blackened, tramcar-rattling provincial city, still late Edwardian or even Victorian in many of its ways, but full of forward-looking confidence. It happened to be Leeds. Growing up, often playing truant, he would roam the city, and as a youth during the forties he came to know its theatres, variety halls and teashops, and the characters who haunted them. Then as a junior reporter he became a habitu of the pubs and taverns where he rubbed leather-patched elbows with a now extinct breed of provincial bohemians. With keen wit and a remarkable ability to convey a child's point of view, Keith Waterhouse gives a vivid impression of his younger self and a fascinating insight into England's past.