The Bucket: Memories of an Inattentive Childhood

In this, his first book for adults, Allan Ahlberg sets out to recover or otherwise conjure up the early years of an oddly enchanted childhood lived out in a Black Country town in the 1940s. He writes of 'fugitive memories, the ones that shimmer on the edges of things: trapdoors in the grass, Dad's dancing overalls'. He writes of childhood and the end of childhood, Flash Gordon and the Claymen, Sir Isumbras at the Ford, and the memorable circumstance of his own four parents: 'Two mothers, two fathers and me like a parcel or a baton (or a hot potato!) passed between them.'

In a mix of prose and verse, supported by documents, drawings and old photographs, The Bucket retrieves a childhood which lovers of the Ahlbergs' classic picture book Peepo! might feel they have glimpsed before but which is now exquisitely brought to life.