A Canterbury Childhood

In "A Canterbury Childhood", Kenneth Pinnock tells how, as a child, he came to explore and try to understand the little city into which he had been born just after the end of the first World War.

It begins in the shadow of the Victorian age, in a gas-lit house still equipped with speaking tubes for communication between floors, with the thousand-year-old cattle market just outside the front door, and abundant evidence that the age of horse-drawn traffic is only just ending.

But beneath the tradition-bound and outwardly placid surface, powerful forces are at work...Vividly recalled, and fortified by delving into local newspapers, this is a picture of the patterns of life, changing under the stress of new technologies and marketing strategies, in a small English town three generations ago.