Goodbye to all that | 12 May 2016

Glimpsing the title of Lynsey Hanley’s absorbing new book as it fell out of the jiffy bag, I found myself thinking of my grandmother, Mrs Lilian Taylor. This lady, who died in 1957, spent the first part of her married life inhabiting a couple of furnished rooms on the western side of Norwich and the second part of it living in a white stucco council house on the newly built Earlham estate. She was an intensely respectable woman, implacably opposed to strong drink and strong language, but of what, materially, did her respectability consist?

On the one hand it meant goading my father through the scholarship exam to a place at the local minor public school. On the other, it meant distancing herself from those of the neighbours who took to brawling in the street on Saturday nights and whom my grandfather was occasionally brought out to pacify. It included aspiring to rent a ‘double bay front’ — a comparatively rare kind of council house with twin bay windows.