Martha Jane and Me

Today, television interviewer Mavis Nicholson regularly rubs shoulders with the famous. As a girl in the 1930s and 1940s she dreaded her friends finding out how closely she rubbed shoulders with her grandmother, whose large feather bed she shared until she left home. Mavis' different childhood memoirs conjure up her vanished world at 5 Mansel Street, Briton Ferry, South Wales, the small terraced house crammed with grandparents, parents, brother and sister. She describes the daily round, the weekly highlight of the Kinema, Jerusalem Chapel, the boys and the gradual awakening to life beyond the Ferry. And, above all, the bittersweet memories of the possessive, baleful, increasingly bitter Martha Jane, her grandmother and the dominant figure in Mavis' young life.