It all began with Angela's Ashes.

Back in 1996, Frank McCourt secured a deal to publish his life story. Unlike the stars of the other autobiographies which lined the shelves of bookshops, no one had heard of the Irish-American school teacher and from the blurb on the back of the book it seemed few ever would.

McCourt summed up his early years as "the pinnacle of the miserable Irish Catholic childhood", and the following 400 or so pages described in graphic detail the failings of his alcoholic father and a young life never far from abject poverty and death.

It was far from an easy read, but the book shot up the bestsellers list, earned McCourt the following year's Pulitzer Prize and opened the floodgates for the tidal wave of misery lit which was to follow.

Since then we've had Dave Pelzer's A Child Called It, Stuart Howarth's Please Daddy No, Toni Maguire's Don't Tell Mummy and a thousand more besides.

While once those with harrowing childhoods, unable to fund a regular spot in the psychiatrist's chair, had to put up and shut up, suddenly publishing a book became their therapy and when publishers realised the misery memoir could sell just as well as its light-hearted cousin chick lit, they went out of their way to satisfy the demand.

Today, in the top 100 bestselling paperbacks, tales of horrific abuse and neglectful parents make up almost 10 per cent of sales and figures show the misery memoir market has doubled from £12m in 2005 to £24m last year, prompting Waterstone's to launch a section in their stores dedicated to Painful Lives.

Fans describe the endless volumes, which usually end with a satisfying triumph over adversity, as inspirational, but others have begun to wonder what's wrong with a tale of childhood where the most horrific thing to happen was spending your pocket money on a comic only to find the free gift was missing. One of them is Gervase Phinn.

Since the former schools inspector from Rotherham embarked on turning a lifetime of teaching anecdotes into a series of popular books, he has met more than his fair share of authors who have laid bare the tale of their torrid childhood.

"On literary lunches I sometimes meet writers who have come from the most dreadful homes and experienced the most harrowing childhoods with cold cruel parents who neglected or abused them and who told them frequently how very disappointed they were in them," he says.

"One only has to read the blurb on the back covers of many biographies and autobiographies which line the bookshop shelves to appreciate what difficult, miserable and sometimes unbearable lives some people have led as children.

"I thank God that my childhood was so very different. I wasn't locked in a cupboard, I wasn't beaten and my father didn't swear at me. Growing up I imagined that all children had loving, amusing, supportive parents like mine, who wanted the best for their children, who read to them every night, talked with them, sand to them, laughed with them."

Realising that there were other people like him, who looked back on their formative years only with fondness, Gervase set out to compile an anthology of more innocent childhood memories. The result, All Our Yesterdays, is an antidote to the misery-lit and with contributions from the likes of Ian Botham, Alan Ayckbourn and Tom Courtenay, it's proof that sometimes out of ordinary backgrounds great people are born.

"There is a view that those of us who had a pretty ordinary, uneventful childhood really have nothing to much to write about," he says. "Growing up in Rotherham in the 1950s,the biggest event was going to the sweetshop after rationing and the regular trips to the barbers.

"Some people say that those who remember their childhoods as being happy are in denial, their rose-tinted glasses prevent them from remembering the bad times. I just don't think that's true.

"Over the years, I've had so many letters from people telling me about their happy memories growing up and I also began collecting snippets from other autobiographies with the hope of one day of bringing them all together in one book."

With the publication coinciding with one of the most turbulent economic times of recent decades, Gervase hopes it will give readers something to smile about.

"I was coming home on the train the other day and all people were talking about was stabbings, crime and companies going under," he
says. "In times like these it makes you realise how important the little things in life are and I hope this collection will prove that ordinary childhoods can not only be happy and full of humour and insight, but have been most certainly worthwhile and worthy to be shared with others."

To order All Our Yesterdays by Gervase Phinn (Dalesman, £9.99) from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232 or go online at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing is £2.75.


'HOME WAS A PLACE OF WARMTH AND CARING'

Geoffrey Boycott, born on October 21, 1940 in the mining village of Fitzwilliam, near Wakefield

Apart from the number on the door, it was indistinguishable from any other red-brick terraced house in the neighbourhood: a Coal Board house with two small rooms downstairs and three smaller ones above. As houses go, it wasn't much to write to the National Trust about. But it was home, which was infinitely more important. A place of warmth and caring, a little part of a true community, which seems hopelessly out-moded and old fashioned now but which was in many ways better than the society which is overtaking and replacing it... We had never heard of community spirit – that's the sort of catchphrase which seems most used when genuine community spirit is missing. Our sense of community was spontaneous. It was simply a way of life.



Fred Trueman, born February 6, 1931, in Stainton near Maltby

I was the product of a working class generation that possessed little in the way of expectation. I had been brought up in a family and a community where we were taught not to have great hopes, because invariably that would result in disappointment. In the main, most men worked in the pits, in agriculture as farmhands, or in manual labour. No one I knew ever aspired to do anything different. Young people simply accepted that they too would embark upon such work for the rest of their lives. Which explains why rather than being a cricketer for Yorkshire, my ambition was to become a brick layer


Ian Botham, whose father Les was born in Beverley and whose mother Marie hailed from Bradford.

Once I found my way out of my confinement, nothing was going to stop me as I found a variety of ways to get myself out and cause parental palpitations. If I was left outside the house in my pram, brake or no brake, I would bounce it up and down until I eventually succeeded in getting the thing moving. I managed to cover some fairly impressive distances, but luckily everyone knew who I was and where to return me.

Alan Ayckbourn, who arrived in Scarborough in the 1950s as a 17-year-old and went on to become artistic director of the resort's Stephen Joseph Theatre.

If public school taught me anything, it was just generally to shoulder your way to the front when you wanted to. I begin to see now more of what I was then and why I'm like I am now. The relationships with people, which are quite hard to establish. I don't have vast numbers of friends. That's probably all from quite a lonely childhood


Tom Courtenay, born on February 25, 1937 in Hull.

Grandma Quest was a typical Fish Dock worker's wife. She defended me stoutly when the little girl in Eton Street ratted on me for lifting up her skirt. "He only wants to see what's under there," she said, and I was grateful for her support.


Austin Mitchell MP for Great Grimsby.

Our family had co me a long way with our inside lavatory, but when I went to stay with my grandma in Halifax, I always hated the outside
toilet. In winter, I'd be in the snow, by that was always detected. So I took to constipating, but that's a crime in Yorkshire, treated
with Andrew's Liver Salts, to which I was long addicted, particularly mixed with sherbert.