The lies were to do with my mother’s illegitimacy. I gradually realised my “grandmother” was not my grandmother, my “uncles” were not my uncles… I massively regret that I didn’t ask some of the older people, later on: what really happened? You’re frightened of hurting people involved, yet it might actually help them.

This proves to me one thing very loud and clear. Do not give up on a book too soon. A book you dislike at the start can turn around and give you something very special and meaningful, something that speaks to you, something that you will be glad not to have missed! The whole community took pride and pleasure in the author’s achievements and he gives us some insight into the challenge of “thinking” himself into the role of elite scholar. We see how the old boy network was very much a part of acceptance into Oxford. A greater part of the marks were given to the interview process rather than the exam results, thereby ensuring that intake was very much skewed in favour of public school pupils who would have had much broader life experience as the sons and daughters of wealthy parents. Melvyn Bragg – long-serving host of The South Bank Show and In Our Time, raised to the nobility by Tony Blair – has long been viewed as panjandrum-in-chief of the chattering classes. But he has never let himself, nor anyone else, forget that he hails from an ordinary rural town in Cumbria. Wigton is as essential to his humble northern origin story as Leeds is to Alan Bennett or Wakefield was to David Storey. His odyssey is emblematic of Britain’s post-war social evolution. An only child born weeks after the invasion of Poland, he grew up above a pub, passed the eleven plus, did well enough at grammar school to stay on at 16, and eventually won a scholarship to Oxford. That generational march was conjured up in his Cumbrian trilogy about a working-class family whose youngest scion blossoms into a globe-trotting television producer. You used to help your parents in the pub. Can you still pull a decent pint? And how is your darts game?King Street in Wigton circa 1955: ‘Bragg was almost paralysingly reluctant to leave Cumbria’. Photograph: The Francis Frith Collection/Melvyn Bragg His mother Ethel, born on the wrong side of the blanket, bore the inherited shame like a secret stigma. The Oedipal intensity of their bond is not quite a match for Sons and Lovers, but decades later Bragg would discover that she opposed his staying on at school as she knew that way she’d trap him in Wigton. His father Stan, by contrast, unobtrusively urges him to seize the opportunities denied to him. Even he is thrown when Oxford is mentioned. “That’s where the toffs go, Ethel,” he says. The rest is television history. This is the prequel capturing a period of optimism in British life when social mobility suddenly accelerated. Melvyn Bragg, BBC broadcaster, author and parliamentarian, presents here a memoir of his youth. He was born on October 6, 1939, so, right at the very start of the Second World War. He writes of growing up in the town of Wigton, located in Cumbria, a region in northwestern England of which the beautiful Lake District is part. The book concludes on his having been awarded and having accepted a scholarship to Oxford. As a young boy growing up in rooms above his parents’ pub, we see that what he has achieved is praiseworthy. We look at the how and why of his achievement. We observe where he came from, his parents and family, and the townsfolk he rubbed shoulders with. How his upbringings shaped him and what motivated him are central questions. There were so many hours to fill in each day without computers, mobile phones or TV. Walking, cycling, singing, dances, swimming, rugby all played a part in developing MB’s character and still left many hours free for study.

The best thing he’s ever written . . . What a world he captures here. You can almost smell it’ Rachel Cooke, Observer The book details his life, from his birth to the point at which, compulsory national service having at last been ditched, he’s about to go off to Oxford – and detail is the word. What a memory Bragg has for names and faces; he can describe the new furniture in his parents’ living room as if it were all still there, waiting to be dusted by his indefatigable mum. His text has the feeling of an inventory, albeit a highly poetic one. Bragg is 82; the world he wants, and needs, to describe is now all but gone; time is running out. The writing is plain, in the sense that he wants to get things down, but there is something incantatory, here, too, as though some other force than himself was pushing his fingers across his keyboard. What makes one man succeed and another fail? What is learning for, and why is it better – of any more use – than stoicism and hard work? The audiobook is narrated by the author. He sounds so darn dreary. Listening to him talk is depressing. I didn’t appreciate this given the few hours of sunlight and the cold dreary weather I have had to deal with currently. The author’s speech is not clear; he mumbles. I did not like the narration, and this has nothing to do with the broad Cumbrian dialect. The dialect was not the problem! Setting the speed to 80% and listening to sections several times does make it possible to hear the lines. Two stars for the audiobook narration. Bragg should have gotten someone else to read the audiobook. Well, that is my opinion at least. I feel like I know every nook and cranny, every little alleyway and footpath in Wigton yet I have never been to Cumbria let alone that town.

Melvyn Bragg's first ever memoir -- an elegiac, intimate account of growing up in post-war Cumbria, which lyrically evokes a vanished world. But you also studied hard . To what extent did getting into Oxford change your relationship with home? I’d have got into local government or gone down to the factory and worked in its accounts department or been a junior clerk.