Red, Red Robin

In Red, Red Robin, Light puts herself into history, conjuring her girlhood from the 1950s to the 1970s, growing up in an extended family in Portsmouth, a blitzed city with its collective memory of war. Drawing on the souvenirs of her childhood – from her doll’s house to her infant and teenage diaries, her comics and schoolbooks – she uses her own story to tell a richly-textured social history of post-war England: its popular culture and music, its language and humour.

Warm, witty and often moving, Light recalls the all-singing, all-dancing little girl who becomes a grammar-school snob; the street kid turned fashion-conscious teenager, searching for the ideal boy, navigating a rapidly modernising world and a family life equally transformed. Going to university, she asks: what does it mean to leave home – and do we ever truly leave?

Beautifully crafted and deeply pleasurable, Red, Red Robin is an exploration of the making of an English girl and of her sense of self. It asks whether we can retain a strong attachment to our place of origin – honouring our histories and beliefs – while resisting both nostalgia and disavowal. In this lyrical, analytical and politically astute memoir, one of our most compelling writers evokes a child’s eye view of the past through the lens of her adult reflections, querying too how we document that past and the nature of memory itself.