Owning Up

With an introduction by the author, this volume includes three memoirs. "Scouse Mouse" is a story of the author's 1930s childhood in a middle-class Liverpudlian household. "Rum, Bum and Concertina" describes Melly's National Service as one of the most unlikely naval ratings. "Owning Up" shows how he slipped into the world of the jazz revival.

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This single volume includes three famous memoirs - Scouse Mouse, Rum, Bum & Concertina and Owning Up, with a new introduction by the author. Scouse Mouse is a funny and frequently touching story of the author's 1930s childhood in a middle-class Liverpudlian household. Rum, Bum & Concertina, the naval equivalent of wine, women and song, describes Melly's National Service as one of the most unlikely naval ratings ever. He becomes an anarchist and connoisseur of Surrealist Art while self-educating himself on some of the wilder shores of love. Once demobbed, Melly comes to London to work in an art gallery, and in Owning Up he describes how he slipped into the world of the jazz revival, revelling in an endless round of pubs, clubs, seedy guest-houses and transport caffs while surrounded by a mad array of musicians, tarts, drunks and arch-eccentrics.