A BOOK setting down memories of a childhood in Oxford in the 1920s is being published for the second time.

Phyl Surman,who grew up in Howard Street, East Oxford, put pen to paper in the 1970s, but died seven years before her book hit the shelves.

She finished An Oxford Childhood: Pride of the Morning in 1978 and it was kept by the Centre of Oxfordshire Studies Library in the Westgate until local history publishers Suttons decided to publish it in 1992.

Born in 1917, Mrs Surman’s book describes life in the years following the First World War, including the clothes she wore, furnishings of her parents’ house and the food they ate.

She also takes the reader back to her schooldays at SS Mary and John Infant School, shopping in Oxford, street games, and the arrival of the Welsh miners who walked to Cowley from Wales to find work at the new Morris Motor Works.

Her only son, David Surman, 60, of Mill Street, Kidlington, is pleased the book is getting a second airing by publishers The History Press.

He said: “She was very interested in family history and she started off writing something called Eliza of Otmoor which was a book about her grandmother.

“She wrote it by just talking to family members. Then from that she started putting things together about her early life in East Oxford and being brought up in Howard Street.”

The part-time teacher added: “I’m really pleased it’s getting a second airing.

“The first time it was published people said they liked finding out about an area which has changed a lot.

“It’s the ordinary, little things which I like.

“There is a story when my mother was a little girl she found out one of the pigs at the bottom of the garden was going to be killed. She was upset and went to talk to the pig, and fell in the pig sty.”

Other anecdotes include the fun she had with her siblings with a newly made rag rug, and baths in front of the fire where her mother covered the hearth in newspapers to stop water marking it.

Mrs Surman worked as a secretary to her architect husband Max, who died a year after her in 1986.

She became a local historian in her later years and often broadcast on BBC Radio Oxford.

The book is on sale at Borders, Blackwells and WHSmith in Oxford or at thehistorypress.co.uk