"It was not until he was dead and I was forty that I realised my father was once in Holy Orders," Roy Hattersley reveals, setting the tone in the opening pages of his childhood memoir.A somewhat precocious only child, Roy grew up surrounded by protective adults, equally determined to expose him to books and to shield him from germs - second-hand books were decontaminated by a sharp session in the oven. A ten-year feud with the next door neighbours; unwavering devotion to Sheffield Wednesday; the hardships of the 1930s and the Blitz; the eleven-plus examination and Grammar School - all the pleasures and pangs of northern working-class boyhood are relived.