Torments ancient and modern

On one level, this is an account of growing up in the working-class world of the Borderlands of North Wales in the 1940s and 1950s, but it is more, too. It evokes a society now all but vanished - a society still rich with the invigorating influences of Victorian times. It is this, with the near-poetry of the writing, that lifts us out of mundane history and social document.