John Rawlings

This Old Shirt of Mine: a 1950s Urban Idyll John Rawlings

Based upon the author's childhood memories. 'This Old Shirt of Mine' is an evocation of life and times of Jimmy Barton, a London kid of junior school age brought up in Islington's notorious Popham Street "Cottages' during the late 1950s. The street, the bomb ruins and the flats themselves provide a unique backdrop to descriptions of everyday life and to some not entirely fictional anecdotes. The book does not dwell on the seamier side of tenement life but portrays in a gently humorous way the more positive aspects of a vanished working class culture when Britain 'never had it so good!'