No Beard No Glasses and Very Much Shorter: Once upon My Childhood

"Which of us has not longed to be transported back to those carefree innocent days of childhood when everything was a blank canvas for our fertile and limitless imaginations. A time when life was simple and every day an adventure. This poignant, sometimes humorous, sometimes sad but always entertaining book started life as short stories for children, but here it is brought together for both children and adults to enjoy and reflect upon their own childhood." Although this is the story of my childhood, this book started as a series of stories told in assemblies at a large Primary school in Birkenhead. The wonder of growing up in a rural suburb in the 1950s was in itself a story to chidren of a large industrial town in the 1990s and 2000s, and yet I was talking about places the children knew. They could relate to the scrapes, the escapades, the ups and downs, the relationships between families and friends, and yet it was so different a world. Eventually the children and teachers persuaded me to write down the stories in order and now, just as I retire from teaching they are finished. Matthew aged 10 inspired the title of the book. Walking along a corridor he said, as we passed, "Sir. When you write down the stories you ought to somehow include the way you start every story." Every assembly, when I was going to use a story about my childhood I would start by stroking my beard and saying "No beard," then shaking my glasses I would add "No glasses," and finally holding my arm out at the height of my head I would lower it slowly to the approximate height that I would be in the story. Hence the title "No Beard, No Glasses (and very much shorter)."