Personally, I laughed till I gasped for breath and I’m not even a Geordie, but the sort of hard to impress Yorkshireman who will gloomily say of a comedian: ‘Aye, he’s all right, I suppose, if you like laughing.’ Not that Douglass sets out to be a comedian. Far from it. His book has a serious purpose. He dips his pen in vitriol as he describes his childhood in a damp pit cottage and the dismally barren schooling that turned him into a rebel at an early age. And what else could a highly intelligent boy become, relegated to the despised ‘C’ stream and told by cane wielding teachers that he was ‘cocky’ because. pursuing his interests, he read books borrowed from the adult library. Soon the young rebel became a revolutionary, trying for size a succession of movements that sought, with varying degrees of realism, to overthrow the system. As a teenager he seems to have taken part in every sort of street battle that the 1960s offered him and those of like mind, culminating in the great 1968 Battle of Grosvenor Square. He gives the best available description from inside of the ‘love’ movement of the 1960s,that ‘raggyarsed working class hippyism’. But some of the most effective writing in the book tells graphically of his demanding stint ‘in the cauldron of hell’, down pits in Durham and Yorkshire. David Douglass was, and remains, a working-class fighter, fiercely proud of his north eastern roots, fiercely loyal to his friends and his class.