Ragged Schooling

The ""classic slum"" of the title, where the author was raised in the years immediately preceding, during and following WWI, was the northern English town of Salford, now part of the conurbation of Greater Manchester. Roberts (1905-1974), who became an educator and writer (The Classic Slum), started life as the son of an impoverished, alcoholic shopkeeper and a serious, sensitive mother who strove against her husband's fecklessness to raise seven children in a hardscrabble district. If his youth was not a time of glowing simplicity, it can seem so by contrast to current norms: ""Some spring mornings,"" he writes, ""one leapt like a lamb for the mild joy of living itself."" Roberts's family life was one in which ""a prelapsarian state of innocence seemed to reign. On masturbation, menstruation, copulation or childbirth one never heard a single word."" The world of his childhood, in a neighborhood where everyone knew everyone else's business, was populated by Dickensian eccentrics: a washerwoman who warned against the evils of Roman Catholicism, a scoutmaster whose friendliness raised suspicions and many others who played out emotionally rich lives in obscurity. Rather than a seamless chronological narrative, Roberts's memoir is thematic and anecdotal: at its core are the mysteries of sex, religion, work and the rigors of daily life. Originally published posthumously in Britain in 1976, A Ragged Schooling is gentle, small-scaled, unsentimental and artless in the best sense of the word. (Oct.)