In Blackberry Time

A collection of Sid Chaplin's unpublished stories. This is also his own story, told through his tales of the people he knew - as a child growing up in the pit villages of County Durham, then as a pitman during the thirties and forties, and later in the disintegrating working-class communities of Newcastle. In biographical sketches between the stories, his son Michael Chaplin completes and affectionate and moving portrait of Sid the man: 'He was born when the great northern coalfield was at its height and he died when it was on its last legs. A major part of his work is concerned with how people lived this mining life and of how they reacted to its going ... Sid Chaplin found, and fixed forever, what otherwise might have been forgotten.' Sid Chaplin's greatest quality, writes Stan Barstow, was tenderness: 'An instinctive reverence for the rhythms of life, for all living things, and for "the holiness of the heart's affections". It comes through his every line.'


Genre: Literary Fiction