The old line that if you remember the 60s you really weren’t there is given a proper pasting by this clear-sighted and intricately detailed memoir. It crash lands right into the middle of that fabled decade and makes sure we’ll never forget it either. Philip Norman (born 1943), biographer of the Beatles, has the journalist’s vital gift of recall – faces, places, tones of voice – but also the funny bones of a satirist. We Danced on Our Desks might be the drollest account of life on a 1960s newspaper since Michael Frayn’s Towards the End of the Morning.
What the book straightaway makes clear is how slow, for most, the 60s were to catch fire. The glum 50s had made very poor kindling. The teenage Norman worked shifts at Ryde pier pavilion on the Isle of Wight, where his ex-RAF father was manager and an alcoholic bankrupt. His mother had abandoned ship long before. Such were the straits that Norman couldn’t afford a badge for his school blazer, while home was the upstairs of a derelict pub he shared with a grandmother who sold rock (16 tons per summer) on the esplanade. It’s a childhood comprising Dickens and Patrick Hamilton, but the bright boy survived to leave school with A-levels and the prospect of a job on the Hunts Post, wangled for him by his mother.
