Back in the Day: Melvyn Bragg's deeply affecting, first ever memoir

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His odyssey is emblematic of Britain’s post-war social evolution. An only child born weeks after the invasion of Poland, he grew up above a pub, passed the eleven plus, did well enough at grammar school to stay on at 16, and eventually won a scholarship to Oxford. That generational march was conjured up in his Cumbrian trilogy about a working-class family whose youngest scion blossoms into a globe-trotting television producer. Melvyn Bragg – long-serving host of The South Bank Show and In Our Time, raised to the nobility by Tony Blair – has long been viewed as panjandrum-in-chief of the chattering classes. But he has never let himself, nor anyone else, forget that he hails from an ordinary rural town in Cumbria. Wigton is as essential to his humble northern origin story as Leeds is to Alan Bennett or Wakefield was to David Storey. The whole community took pride and pleasure in the author’s achievements and he gives us some insight into the challenge of “thinking” himself into the role of elite scholar. We see how the old boy network was very much a part of acceptance into Oxford. A greater part of the marks were given to the interview process rather than the exam results, thereby ensuring that intake was very much skewed in favour of public school pupils who would have had much broader life experience as the sons and daughters of wealthy parents.

In this elegiac and heartfelt memoir, Melvyn Bragg recreates his youth in the Cumbrian market town of Wigton: a working-class boy who expected to leave school at fifteen yet who gained a scholarship to Oxford University; who happily roamed the streets and raided orchards with his gang of friends until a breakdown in adolescence drove him to find refuge in books. The book details his life, from his birth to the point at which, compulsory national service having at last been ditched, he’s about to go off to Oxford – and detail is the word. What a memory Bragg has for names and faces; he can describe the new furniture in his parents’ living room as if it were all still there, waiting to be dusted by his indefatigable mum. His text has the feeling of an inventory, albeit a highly poetic one. Bragg is 82; the world he wants, and needs, to describe is now all but gone; time is running out. The writing is plain, in the sense that he wants to get things down, but there is something incantatory, here, too, as though some other force than himself was pushing his fingers across his keyboard. What makes one man succeed and another fail? What is learning for, and why is it better – of any more use – than stoicism and hard work?

Melvyn Bragg

Melvyn Bragg's first ever memoir -- an elegiac, intimate account of growing up in post-war Cumbria, which lyrically evokes a vanished world. King Street in Wigton circa 1955: ‘Bragg was almost paralysingly reluctant to leave Cumbria’. Photograph: The Francis Frith Collection/Melvyn Bragg The lies were to do with my mother’s illegitimacy. I gradually realised my “grandmother” was not my grandmother, my “uncles” were not my uncles… I massively regret that I didn’t ask some of the older people, later on: what really happened? You’re frightened of hurting people involved, yet it might actually help them. In this captivating memoir, Melvyn Bragg recalls growing up in the Cumbrian market town of Wigton, from his early childhood during the war to the moment he had to decide between staying on or spreading his wings.

But you also studied hard . To what extent did getting into Oxford change your relationship with home?This book engaged me right from the start and I guess Melvyn’s childhood was not very much different to a lot of kids growing up during those years. I think he was fortunate in being an only child in some ways because his parents were able to support his choices whereas they might not have been able to if there were a handful of other kids to care for.