There's mischief in the air from the first pages of this vividly evocative 'pawnography' (a genre described by the author as 'the biography or autobiography of a pawn in the game of life'). In the beginning it is no more than the comparatively innocent escapades of a group of young boys growing up in the Sussex countryside against the distant background of the Second World War. Their scrapes will evoke keen nostalgia in anyone who remembers a time when children were free to roam and learn by misadventure. As the boys grow up and girls begin to dominate their thoughts, the mischief becomes...