A small softback book with the author's name boldly across the top, the title beneath, in red, at a rakish angle and a picture below of the smiling author in a dinner suit, seated on a sofa, before a bunch of lilies. Inserted are some earlier pictures of the author as a child and as a young soldier. Fitted snugly in the angle between title and composite picture is the information that this is the autobiography of the author of The Magic Army and The Dearest and the Best, plus a Daily Express commendation, but no mention of his early autobiography This Time Next Week.

Comment: Promises to be enjoyable reading.

The first four chapters are given to Home and are elaborations on the Newport background, street life not far from the docks, an irregularly seafaring Father, and a somewhat gentle and wistful mother, leading on to the loss of his father at sea and disappearance of his mother into hospital, already detailed in his earlier book as the start of his move into Barnardo's. The eloquent sadness of the earlier version is not replaced - just embellished.

The four chapters given to The Homes elaborate 'The Gaffer', other members of the Barnardo staff, and the boys with whom he lived in the Barnardo Kingston Home with a finesse developed over the subsequent twenty years, padding somewhat the previously bare pathos. Having stated in the introduction that he had not re-read his early book, he gives special place to the hilarious account of bringing two goats home for the Gaffer from his first book by quoting it verbatim, entirely justifiably, for it had by twenty years later become a chosen study in writng for many a school.

Perhaps the growing up into the turbulent world of broken family relationships, adolescents, and girl friends, is given more detail, and leads easily into the third section, The Virgin Soldier, already made into an independent masterpiece of army life.

Part Four In the Streets describes the tortuous streets and back alleys of the world of journalism through which the author passed on his way to fame and independence, and it is with consummate skill that he clothes the emergence from the struggles of a mostly loveless youngster's life to success as a writer with a humour that holds the pathos without destroying it.

Comment: A good read.

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