Peter John Fyles was born in Burnley, Lancashire, in 1963. He left school at sixteen and worked various menial jobs. Several years later, he returned to education and went on to acquire three university degrees. Then he travelled around the world: he picked up tulips in Holland, sexed chickens in Israel, drove across America and picked up dirty overalls in Australia. When he returned to Europe, he bought a two-acre plot of land in Ireland and tilled the soil for four years. After he had met his Swedish girl in Athens in 1986, he went to live in Sweden, where he became the CEO of the largest free school group in the country. He has three children; Alice, John and Billy, and this book is his story of growing up in the north of England in the 1970s.
It is a book from the 1970s which contains and depicts, racism, sexism, homophobia and working class grit. It is a book that reflects a time long gone where inequality was the norm, where people used the launderette and when people still knocked on doors, to greet, to pay and to play.
