Quite aside from the challenge of re-accommodating to a tamer and routinized lifestyle, postwar returnees like my father, Ron, found themselves jobless and under-prepared for an uncertain future. The shipping industry in which he had been constructing a promising career had sunk, much of it literally. His choice of schoolteacher was impromptu and circumscribed. I… Read More »
It is UK-centric to date the outbreak of the second world war from September of 1939 since Nazi expansionism had already led to brutal suffering elsewhere in Europe, but it was in September that my father, Ron, left Brown, Jenkinson & Co and set about volunteering for the armed services. He had long worn spectacles… Read More »
Only a fully paid up academic could and would equivocate between two alternative and equally arcane subtitles: ‘sociological autobiography’ versus ‘autobiographical sociology’. In fact both make sense. The first and favoured option emphasises autobiography while suggesting a narrative of a life-course shaped by the confluence of time and place, a structured if not structurally determined… Read More »