Today’s blog tour is for My Own Worst Enemy by Robert Edric. Thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours and Swift Press for my copy of the book to take part today. All views expressed are my own.
My Own Worst Enemy is a wry and moving memoir of a working-class childhood in 1960s Sheffield, and the relationship between a touchy, tragicomic bully of a father and a son whose acceptance to grammar school puts him on another track entirely.
With a novelist’s eye, Robert Edric vividly depicts a now-vanished era: of working-men’s clubs; of tight-knit communities in factory towns; and of a time when a woman’s place was in the home. And he brings to colourful life his family, both close and extended – though over all of it hovers the vanity and barely-suppressed anger of his own father.
My Own Worst Enemy is a brilliantly specific portrait both of particular time and place – the Sheffield of half a century ago – and a universal story of childhood and family, and the ways they can go right or wrong.
A memoir of Robert Edric’s working class upbringing in Sheffield of the 1960s. This, in a lot of ways, reminded me of my childhood (1970s/80s Oldham). So, I was already invested in Roberts’ story after reading the blurb.
Robert Edric was, in some ways, one of the ‘lucky’ ones. He got to attend a local grammar school and even managed to get easy from his poor working class roots to ascend into a middle-class world. His story is one that puts on display the ‘snobbishness’ of the poor, the importance of keeping up appearances, even if your electric had 10p left on the meter you WOULD make your friend a brew. Damn what happened after they left, as long as they didn’t realise you had no money.
It brought memories back for me while reading this. The working clubs of the time, this had to be a Northern thing. My grandparents and parents all spent so much time in ours. The community that was inside was such a tight knit one. That was just the club! The actual community was the same. All these things, the author writes of, really made me feel nostalgic.
The difference for me is his father. Saying that, though, I truly empathised with what Robert had to endure. The caravan holidays in Skegness for him were, for me, holidays in Cleveleys (a small town right next door to Blackpool). Such a poignant book, and it did touch me and made me reflect.
Robert Edric made me look at my own past and really think about the things long gone that were a part of my upbringing. I could definitely empathise with him throughout the book. The similarities of an upbringing over the hills in Sheffield to one here in Oldham are many. I got so involved with Roberts that I lost all track of time. I read without interruption for the best part of a day.
A book that made me feel like I was almost revisiting my own past. It is a cracking read that brings the Northern childhood of the 1960s and 1970s into the present so vividly. It left me thinking, but that is the sign of a good book.
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