The Bucket: Memories of an Inattentive Childhood

The enthralling childhood story one of Britain's best-loved children's authors

My mother, who was not my mother, I see her now, her raw red cleaner's hands twisting away at her apron as she struggled to speak. Adoption was a shameful business then in many people's eyes, the babies being mostly illegitimate. Better not speak of it."

Allan Ahlberg was adopted as a baby. In 1938 he was picked up in London by his new mother and taken back to Oldbury in the Black Country. Now one of the most successful children's book writers in the world, in The Bucket he describes an oddly enchanted childhood lived out in an industrial town during the 1940s, in conditions which today we might describe as "deprived." He writes of a father in overalls smelling of wood shavings and oil, of a tough and fiercely protective mother who cries when he discovers that he is adopted, of life assurance policies ("£6 if the child dies under age 3") and fearsome bacon slicers, of half-remembered trips to his mother's sister's grave and to the bluebell woods. And of his first days at school: "Allan could do much better. He is most inattentive and dreamy at times" (school report, December 1946). Using a mix of prose and poetry, supported by new drawings by his daughter Jessica and old photographs, The Bucket retrieves a childhood which lovers of Ahlberg's classic picturebooks The Baby's Catalogue, Burglar Bill, and Peepo! might feel they have glimpsed before but which are now exquisitely brought to life. This beautiful, exquisitely designed book, which will also appeal to fans of Gervase Phinn, Alan Bennett, Roald Dahl, and Nigel Slater's Toast, will be loved by generations of Ahlberg fans.