David R Roberts
David R Roberts worked for many years as a lecturer in further and higher education, working mainly with adult students accessing university courses in the humanities and social sciences. He has also written and edited several best-selling textbooks and is a member of the Society of Authors. A social historian, his more recent books include A Rural Revolution: The History of a Staffordshire Family and Their Village and The Flying Erk: The WW2 Love Letters and Diaries of a Stafford Airman.
David says, "Retiring from a full-time career in education freed me to write the type of social history that really interests me: how the lives of ordinary people both reflect and make the society in which they live. It's where biography and history meet. Using material from one's own life runs the risk of taking yourself too seriously. So when writing Slate Days... I wanted to use humour, the surest way to puncture pomposity, to set the tone of the book. Whether or not I've succeeded, I've found it truly liberating to try."
David R Roberts's Books
£8.99
Slate Days and Bottled Pyramids
28 Oct 2022Life in the 1950s Midlands town still reflects the austerity of the immediate post-war period. But amid the greyness there's the promise of better things to come. Change is waiting round the corner.
As the decade draws to a close, our eleven-year-old is finding it hard to adjust to the brutality of his new school. Yet as he negotiates the transition from short trousers to long, his interests are also changing from football and music to music, football and girls (“but not necessarily in that order”). He's starting his journey through that culturally explosive decade of the Sixties, the very best time to live your teenage years.
Told with humour and candour, these quirky anecdotal snapshots of the author's earlier life take us through the highs, the lows and the mundane of his first twenty years. The miseries, fears and misconceptions of a young life are countered with moments of wonder, sheer joy and just plain silliness. At times wistful, even poignant, they are never self-indulgent. They provide glimpses into the spirit and conditions of those rapidly changing times of more than half a century ago.