The Hops and the Hopes: a childhood in post-war Kent (Memoirs by Simon Trussler Book 1)

A first-person, vividly recalled memoir of a boyhood in the Weald of Kent during the 1940s and early 1950s. There are recollections of wartime doodlebugs, of post-war rationing, and of popular festivities and radio shows, besides descriptions of the yearly round of farming life, with its annual high point - the season of hop-picking by hand. From his earliest memory in a pram outside a farm worker’s cottage, the author takes us through his time at a "dame school" to success in the “eleven-plus”, by then living in a council house after eviction from the long-time family home by its new owner after the death of his great-grandfather - the town’s oldest inhabitant - at the age of 101. How Great-Grandpa rose from living in a tiny tied cottage with ten siblings and elders to become a respected local figure owning his own fine home and farming his own seventy acres is just one of the mysteries which take this memoir further back into the family past. As the child's eyes gradually open to awareness of his heritage, the author locates the social and political changes taking place in these, the formative years of the "post-war consensus".