In Blackberry Time

Sid Chaplin influenced and was admired by a generation of post-war British writers, from Stan Barstow and John Braine to David Storey and Keith Waterhouse. This book shows why. In Blackberry Time is a collection of Sid Chaplin's unpublished stories. It 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 an 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.'

About the Author :
Sid Chaplin (1916-1986) was a novelist and short-story writer noted for his mastery of detail and local colour in his depictions of working-class life in North-East England. The son of a coal miner, Chaplin went down the mine at 15 and continued to do so while obtaining an education from the Worker’s Educational Association of the University of Durham (1932–46) and the Fircroft College for Working Men, Birmingham (1939). He was a branch secretary of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (1943–45) and finally was able to quit the mines in 1950 when he became a writer for a number of coal publications and a public relations officer for the National Coal Board. The Leaping Lad (1946), a collection of short stories about the Durham mining community, established Chaplin as a talented regional writer. His next novel, The Thin Seam (1950), was another acutely observed portrait of coal-mining life, and The Day of the Sardine (1961) was a definitive portrait of a working-class youth’s coming of age. Chaplin’s subsequent works include the novels The Watchers and the Watched (1962) and The Mines of Alabaster (1971), and the short-story collections On Christmas Day in the Morning (1979), The Bachelor Uncle (1980) and the posthumously published In Blackberry Time (1987).

Review :
Chaplin sees and reveals the bewilderment, fury and tenderness of human beings. Chaplin makes the darkness luminous; he is a genuine creator.