Everybody, they say, has a book in them, if only the history of their lives up to their graduation from adolescence. I would agree, but with the proviso that these books be openly offered as fiction. When I think what unreliable witnesses my book chums are, especially about each other, I wonder how any trust worthy biographies, let alone autobiographies, ever get to be written. Most of these friends tend to dispute this thesis. But then, they would, wouldn’t they? For if they have not themselves been persuaded against their natural modesty and common sense to write autobiographies, flattered out of their natural caution and canniness to take on huge biographies, they will be reviewing the end-products, or perhaps supplying pre-publication quotes for the ads. At the very least, they are buying, or borrowing, or pretending to have read, the things.

Can there really be, orbiting the globe like space debris, more than enough free-floating material to pad out tome after fresh tome on Graham Greene, or George Orwell, or P.G. Wodehouse, or Evelyn Waugh, or Bernard Shaw, or Cyril Connolly? Must we prepare our shelves for yet another cache of letters, stumbled across like Dead Sea scrolls, every decade? If so, will they, too, rank high with biographers as first-hand testimony to what the subject was genuinely feeling at the time? Unless there is a well-grounded reason to believe that what was written was intended specifically to deceive, any letter seems routinely assumed to be as true as the writer can make it. Yet, after a little research through carelessly unlocked drawers and left-behind handbags, don’t we know that it is when letters are at their most spontaneous and sincere that their authors are most likely to be lying? Indeed, I am sorry to say, I would go so far as to assert that few paper declarations of undying devotion are ever quite so aglow with conviction as the one posted immediately after, though sometimes before, an intimate mingling with some other love. You only have to listen to what a friend is saying to someone else on the telephone. Then you compare what you overheard with what your friend claims to have said. Immediately it is apparent each side of the conversation is being shamelessly rewritten to your friend’s advantage. Where you thought this end of the line was whining ‘I’m sorry ... forgive me ... I was wrong ... give me another chance ... please, please, please ... sorry, sorry, sorry,’ it turns out it was telling the boss to stuff his job, the mother-in-law to take a jump off the roof, somebody to shut up and listen. Any doubt which version the subject would expect the biographer to print or the autobiographer prefer to adopt?

Having said that – as politicians say on TV when wriggling themselves inside out like a glove – I have not the slightest doubt that every word of Mavis Nicholson’s first volume of autobiography is firmly rooted in documented truth. For it is so much harder a slog to invent than to recall – even Tolstoy stole from his wife’s diaries. And such is the heavy pressure of detail here, moulding the senses on every side, that opening the pages is almost like clamping on the headgear for a bout of virtual reality. Retracing her steps for us from the tiny, crowded house without a bathroom, where she shared a bed with her gran, Martha Jane, until the first day she ventures further than a cycle ride from home, her rail ticket in her glove, her worst fears about her future at college in Swansea assuaged by her mother’s promise to keep up the postal supply of STs and avoid her having to visit a strange chemist, Mavis forgets nothing. And I mean nothing. Do you need to know who were her neighbours in Mansel Street as she passed hitching a ride on the greengrocer’s cart? ‘He stopped at intervals to serve Mrs Vigars, Mrs Hill, Mrs Jones, the Misses Gethins, Mrs Harris, Mrs Lane, Mrs Farral, Mrs Hale, Mrs Pike, Mrs Southcourt, Mrs Evans, Mrs Hughes and Mrs Trimnel.’ Or the route she takes as the place expands while she explores it?

I counted the streets on the way to the library in Neath Road, the main road. After Mansel, and parallel with it, were four: Vernon, Grandison, Caroline and Regent. After the library were Ritson, Tucker and Villiers, and if you walked down Villiers Street there was a low bridge we called the tunnel. Once through that and we were at the Docks – the outer edge of the town.