Another dollop of Barry’s life... with a portion of OXO

AUTHOR SERVES UP A TREAT WITH HIS TASTY SEQUEL TO NOWT TO LOSE

HUDDERSFIELD author Barry Hirst, who first picked up his pen in his 80s to pen Nowt to Lose, a moving account of working-class life from 1939 onwards, has written a sequel.

Another Dollop of Life tells of dastardly school teachers, being chased by the police in Valletta and much more.

Written in an entertaining fashion with an eye for telling detail, this latest book provides an enjoyable follow-up to Nowt to Lose.

Barry’s tale is made all the more powerful and evocative thanks to his family’s straitened circumstances.

He was the youngest of six children and lived in the same back lane in Dalton

as the late actor Gorden Kaye, star of ‘Allo ‘Allo.

Times were hard and when he attended his new grammar school at Hillhouse he was one of only two children in his form lining up for an official photograph without a school uniform. The brutal conditions included a corporal punishment policy that resulted in one of the boys coming “back into our classroom in a dreadful state with marks across his face, neck and legs.”

On another occasion, Barry’s history teacher Zach flew into a rage and boxed a lad’s ears with his bare fists while a woodwork teacher with a wooden leg would think nothing of throwing chisels at any misbehaving pupils.

Mercifully his aim was not good so

Amazon sales are doing

well and I have just published it with Ingrams so it can be purchased

at bookshops.

they tended to end up embedded in the walls. There’s also an amusing account of The OXO Club. A weird art teacher called Sid who “would write OXO in white chalk on a T square and then whack you on the backside leaving OXO imprinted across your trousers.”

And while most of us take the idea of a full English breakfast in our stride, to young Barry, who had never had a meal in a restaurant before, being served this new delicacy onboard the train to London was a surreal experience.

Barry said his new memoir “tells my life story, starting when I went to Moldgreen Church school and then working for Post Office telephones in Huddersfield until I was conscripted into the Army to do my National Service, where I ended up in Malta.

“Amazon sales are doing well and I have just published it with Ingrams so that it can be purchased at bookshops.”

Barry, 81, now lives near Portsmouth and in Javea on the Costa Blanca in Spain.