The Boyhood of Burglar Bill

Following My Brother’s Ghost , this is ‘the second in a sequence of stories in which Allan Ahlberg explores his own childhood’. It is part story, part autobiography. Ahlberg is 10, rising 11, and in his last year or so at primary school. For children in that age-group now, especially boys, it is an excellent football story, a vivid picture of the rough and tumble of boyhood rivalries and friendships, and a glimpse of a vanished world. The football counts for most. It is Coronation year, 1953, and the town of Oldbury in the West Midlands, where Ahlberg grew up, has organised a football tournament to mark the royal event. Excluded from their school’s official entries, Ahlberg and his friends enter their own scratch team in the competition. This is the story of their progress, on the field and off. It is comic and serious and curiously heroic, and all children who like football (including girls, who are indeed not totally excluded from the team) will love it.

So will grown-ups, because this is also a gifted author in conversation with his own past. The language moves pliantly between adult and child (‘I knew he’d told nobody what Ronnie and I – no,  me and Ronnie – had done.’). As autobiography, it is rich, poignant and moving. And for anyone who grew up in an industrial town in the 1950s, its truth and evocative detail are unmissable.