Longer Days – Memoirs of an Edwardian Childhood and a Rebellious Youth
By Fred Roy
Hazel Roy £12.99

FRED ROY’S death just short of his 92nd birthday left his daughter with a dilemma: what to do with thousands of pages of scribbled notes, diaries and press cuttings, constituting the outline of his memoir. For years they remained in an old chest, until finally pieced together and transcribed during lockdown, creating a fascinating chronicle of a vanished London from 1907 through to 1946.

Roy, a working-class lad, growing up in south London, experienced WWI as a child and WWII as a young adult. His vivid descriptions of life for working-class people in London during the first half of the 20th century conjure up the harsh realities but also the small joys of a care-free life he experienced as a youngster.

The book’s dramatic, full-colour cover, showing a dashing-looking author, a squadron of Nazi bombers, a hammer and sickle and moments from his life, promises an exciting read but the text doesn’t quite live up to that promise.

The early part reads somewhat like a shopping-list chronology of family members and friends, coming-of-age pangs and detailed descriptions of daily life, rather than offering a rounded narrative. It is also very much self-centred, with much name-dropping — characters he got to know — but few today will know or have heard of them.

His descriptions of his schooling under martinet teachers who resorted to physical punishment rather than pedagogical skill. The cringe-worthy jingoism of the war years and of the almost insurmountable barriers facing working-class children, both in the educational system and in the workplace do bring that period alive with perceptive insight and underline the importance of humour in developing resilience.

He was clearly a man with a literary flair and an ambition to become a writer — he was an inveterate writer of letters to his local papers — but with his lack of formal education and the need to survive, he was not given the opportunity to flourish.

Contracting Spanish flu after WWI, while still at school, robbed him of a scholarship and was obliged to leave school at 14 to contribute to the family income, working in a variety of manual jobs. He soon found that the few jobs available were both poorly paid and exploitative. He became a voracious reader and was largely self-educated.

Always a rebel, Roy found a release through books, the music hall, cinema and the theatre and through cycling and hiking. He reveals himself as a man with a sharp sense of humour and a lust for life.

From the outset Roy had a clear class understanding, even if he was not overtly political to begin with. His first real political action was helping to disrupt meetings of Moseley’s fascists in Peckham.  

Only in the penultimate chapter, though, do we hear about his evolving political life, first joining the Labour League of Youth, then the Communist Party, before becoming a member of the Labour Party in retirement and a local candidate in Torbay, to where he had moved.

But of his life in the CP, we only hear only that he was obliged to distribute leaflets and sell the Daily Worker, and he doesn’t tell us how long he was a member. For me, what is missing here is more reflection on the issues of the times and his deeper philosophy of life.