The Bucket: Memories of an Inattentive Childhood

One of Britain’s best-loved children’s authors tells the enthralling story of his adoption and childhood in the Black Country

Allan Ahlberg sets out to recover the early years of an enchanted childhood lived out in the Black Country in the 1940s. He writes of his first days at school (‘Allan is most inattentive and dreamy at times’ - school report, 1946), and the memorable circumstances of his own four parents- ‘Two mothers, two fathers and me like a parcel or a baton (or a hot potato!) passed between them. ’ Most memorably he describes the day he was told by a girl in the street that his mother was not in fact his biological mother. He instantly believed her.