The Fan Letter by Lee ChildThey say the past is another country, and in my case
it really was: provincial England at the end of the fifties and the start of the
sixties, the last gasp of the post-war era, before it surrendered to the
tectonic shift sparked by the Beatles. My family was neither rich nor poor, not
that either condition had much meaning in a society with not much to buy and not
much to lack. We accumulated toys at the rate of two a year: one on our
birthdays, and one at Christmas. We had a big table radio (which we called