Without Warning and Only Sometimes: 'Extraordinary. Moving and heartwarming' The Sunday Times

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This memoir is an astonishingly good evocation of the dream and reality of migration to postwar Birmingham, a city that must have seemed flush with cash to anyone moving from elsewhere. Her haphazard mother rarely cooked, forbade Christmas and birthdays, worked as a cleaner, nurse and childminder sometimes all at once and believed the world would end in 1975.

As a Brummie of a certain age, I am undoubtedly biased in my evaluation of this lovely memoir, redolent of a particular time and subculture (1970s Birmingham), but this book's only fault is that it finishes too soon. Life got even worse for them when their mother became a Jehovah’s Witness; then Christmas, birthdays, singing hymns and having ungodly fun were all forbidden. Download Without Warning and Only Sometimes: Scenes from an Unpredictable Childhood by Kit de Waal in PDF EPUB format complete free.My only complaint is that the book feels a little short (but I almost could have listened to this forever) and occasionally a little anecdotal and surface level. Her experiences through these years are wonderfully captured with a poignancy and a sense of achievement. Mom and Dad, Sheila and Arthur, aren’t so much bemused as utterly thrown by life as it is presented to them.

When Mandy O’Loughlin was little, she fell hard off a table at her home at 70 Springfield Road, Birmingham while singing along to (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction on the radio. A great memoir that brought a vivid picture of her unusual childhood - with Irish, Caribbean, Jehovah's Witnesses, Birmingham elements. The themes of the book seemed to be around feelings of exclusion due to race and also about the disturbing and damaging effects of extreme religion. WITHOUT WARNING AND ONLY SOMETIMES is a story of an extraordinary childhood and how a girl who grew up in house where the Bible was the only book on offer went on to discover a love of reading that inspires her to this day. Caught between three worlds, Irish, Caribbean and British in 1960s Birmingham, Kit and her brothers and sisters knew all the words to the best songs, caught sticklebacks in jam jars and braved hunger and hellfire until they could all escape.The vast majority of the memoir is about the author’s childhood and their relationship with their parents, but though the stories changed they were all very similar, and other moments like the author’s later life were examined superficially, brushed off mentions of death in exchange for a nester ending.