The rainy season - Jill Robinson

Poignant 1960s memoir of girl with alcoholic abusive father who does not believe in education for girls and tries to prevent her studying and going on to university. Jess shares barricaded bedroom with her downtrodden mother and dreams of escape but there are no refuges or help-lines, a woman requires a male guarantor simply to rent a television set, and Jess is paid threepence less than her male colleague in her Saturday job. Meanwhile, the pace of social change is quickening, even in sleepy market towns, with the lowering of the age of majority, decriminalisation of homosexuality, divorce law reform and the availability of the Pill. Social history within living memory,