Please, Miss

Book excerpt: Bernadette was just ten years old when her father packed her off to a convent school in Dublin. Seven gruelling years later, she returned home to Liverpool at the start of the swinging sixties. Bernadette had dreamed of being a teacher ever since she was a little girl so she promptly began a course at teacher training college, determined to give children the sort of education she wished she'd had. Bernadette got her first job at 21, teaching five to seven year olds in a school in one of Liverpool's toughest slum areas. The poverty and deprivation she saw at the school shocked her to the core. Children would frequently turn up shoeless and starving, but gradually Bernadette could see she was making a real difference to their lives, and found that teaching changed her own life in ways she hadn't expected... Rich in period detail, PLEASE, MISS is an uplifting and moving book that opens a window onto the colourful and fascinating world of 1960s Liverpool.