Why do adults treat children so badly? And before you start congratulating yourself (never smack, never shout, never, ever lose my temper) ask yourself if you've ever been evasive or condescending or just plain dismissive in your dealings with a child, because as far as Leila Berg is concerned, that's almost as bad. In this bits-and-pieces memoir, she uses the hit-and-miss technique of stream of consciousness to recreate with gut-wrenching accuracy the joys and miseries of childhood and adolescence. Her family happened to be Jewish, and Berg herself happened to be an academically brilliant Young Communist who lost two lovers to the Spanish Civil War - but the brightly-coloured immediacy of her style means that there are many moments here which children and ex-children everywhere will recognise as their own.
