Permanent Moments

Book excerpt: When clearing out his mothers fl at Stephen discovers a tin of old photographs under her bed. Each image evokes a memory of childhood and we get to meet the people who inhabit those memories wayward friends and sensible friends, strict teachers and hopeless teachers, ugly girls and gorgeous girls, Aunts who are not Aunts and Uncles who are not Uncles and a grandfather who revels in the art of mischief. In this funny and sometimes moving novella Stephen Mitchell wonders whether our memories can really be relied upon to provide an accurate reconstruction of our childhood years and especially those of an ordinary child growing up in the North of England in the 1960s.