'... The Bermuda Triangle where ships disappeared without trace; The China Sea with its pirates; The Antarctic with tales of whales and mermaids; The Suez and Panama Canals where, according to him, cannibals ate little boys!' Highly evocative and sharply written, Freddie Lee details a childhood and adolescence spent in the shadow of Sunderland's shipyards during the 1940s and '50s, as the ship-building industry that had kept the city going began to diminish and die. Freddie grows up in the Sunderland suburb of Monkwearmouth, popularly known as 'The Barbary Coast', where fighting and criminality go hand-in-hand with family feeling and neighbourliness. With a remarkable talent for vivid description and salty dialogue, the author has crafted a tale that is both moving and uproarious, with more than its fair share of outlandish characters - not least Freddie's roguish grandfather Granda Lee, so often accused by the rest of the family of 'filling that bairn's head full of rubbish'.