A Changing World
Description
This is the story of life in an English town and an English community as seen through the eyes of an ordinary English family ? the author's own.
It focuses on the years from the 1930s through to the 1960s and covers a period when the country was changing perhaps faster that it ever has before or since. From a familiar world in which life was simple and expectations modest, values were upheld and the community spirit prevailed, Britain was plunged into the chaos of war at a time when most people could all too clearly recall the horror of the preceding one.
Never have the British people pulled together so strongly as they did in the war years, but with peacetime in the 1940s came unexpected challenges ? economic strife, a slackening of social mores and moral codes and a new materialism. With these changes came new attitudes to work and its rewards which would greatly hamper our recovery.
Terence Kearey's portrait of an England responding to the pressure of rapid social and economic change has the authority of meticulous research ? yet its intimate perspective renders it far more personal and vivid than any ordinary history book.
More details
Person
Terence Kearey was born in North Harrow in 1935, one of three children of a hard-working lower middle class family. In the 1950s he embarked on a career in the printing and reproduction industry, but dismayed by the industrial greed and strife of the 1960s and 70s, he abandoned a successful career to become a college lecturer. Along the way he developed a keen interest in history and spent many years researching the story of his own family, all the way back to the Irish Ciardha clan of the Dark Ages from which the family name is derived. He has taken a similar interest in his mother's family, the Collinses of Chard in Somerset.
Having studied the lives and times of his forebears over the centuries, he has woven their stories together into a fascinating narrative thread which reaches all the way from the Irish clans of the early centuries AD to his own personal experiences of love, life, work, marriage and parenthood in the 20th century. He is now working on a film script involving moments from the first three of this quartet, Country Ways, History, Heroism and Home and A Changing World. His next book focuses on a key campaign of the First World War in which his father, Regimental Sergeant Major (later Major) Albert Kearey, played a key role.
