Dave Joy

My Family and Other Scousers is my first book. As such I have no writing history of which to speak. Indeed, my only claim to fame is appearing on The Big Breakfast after writing lots of those clever/irritating competition tiebreaker slogans and winning holidays all over the world!

They say that when you start out in writing you should begin with what you know. Well, in accordance with that saying My Family and Other Scousers is a memoir. Set in the sixties, it tells the story of my childhood spent at Wellington Dairy, the family's horse-drawn milk business in Garston, Liverpool.

Wellington Dairy was something of a time capsule - though change galloped past, the dairy maintained a steady trot. It had not only survived two world wars, but also the coming of the national dairy companies, which had pushed many local dairies into extinction. Despite being overtaken by huge social and technological advances, the family members continued to run the business on traditional lines - while the world marvelled at the race into space, the Joys were still busy delivering milk in a horse-drawn van.

For me, the dairy was a magical place. The smells, sights and sounds of a working dairy were so different from everything else that was happening in the fab, swinging sixties. I've heard it said that boys in the fifties wanted to be their dads, whereas boys in the sixties wanted to be the opposite of their dads. Well, as a boy that did not apply to me; I definitely wanted to be just like my dad. He seemed to be at the heart of everything that was magical about Wellington Dairy.

It was in an attempt to capture that sense of magic and adventure that I decided not to write this memoir as a retrospective, as a fifty-something adult looking back at his childhood, but rather to tell the story through the eyes of that eager-to-grow-up, eleven-year-old boy. However, an inevitable consequence of that decision was the inclusion of my gang of mates - together with all their nose pickin', swearin', fartin', pizzin' and general mischief making. Bearing in mind that content, you can perhaps imagine my trepidation in asking someone as famous as Rita Tushingham if she would be kind enough to read my manuscript and write a foreword.

To my great relief and delight, Rita found the book to be filled with "such charm and innocence" and "a pleasure to read". I can only hope that you find it so too.