Racing the Wind: A Cumbrian Childhood

By Patricia Nolan

This powerful and beautifully-written account is the memoir of Patricia Nolan who lived in a tiny community in Cumbria and it captures the end of an era in the 1950s.

‘When the first organ-transplant was taking place, when computers were starting to revolutionise our lives and television was arriving in the sitting-rooms of Britain, in my house we were still dipping buckets into a stream to make a cup of tea and going to bed by candlelight,’ she writes.

The tale covers three years of the author’s life, made particularly vivid by a traumatic event which opens the book, but which goes on to depict a poor but close rural community with its village school, its annual country show, its Christmas celebrations and its local characters - all set against the dramatic back-drop of Scafell and the surrounding hills and moors on which she and her friends ran free.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Merlin Unwin Books
• Release date: Nov 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781913159139

Patricia Nolan

Patricia Nolan, published poet and novelist, was born in Cumbria and attended her local village school of Boot before being awarded a scholarship to Keswick School. Her mother ran the little Boot post office. Patricia's career was in teaching and she now lives in Belsize Park, London. She served as a Justice of the Peace for a decade at Willesden Magistrates Court.