FOND memories of post-war Weymouth are explored in a childhood memoir written by an award-winning poet.

Andy Miller, who grew up in Weymouth but now lives in Derbyshire, looks back on his early life on a council estate in his book, The Naples of England.

Andy, who moved to London in the mid 1960s and later to the Midlands, said it’s a book about growing up.

“I always felt very pleased to have come from Weymouth. I loved it there. As a child it was very safe, and as an adolescent it was very interesting, very challenging.”

The late 60s were an ‘exciting time’ in Weymouth, he added.

“You would get a lot of Bohemian visitors, people sleeping out on the beach, but there was a real innocence about it. I remember an article in the Dorset Echo in around 1964 reporting on these strange long-haired youngsters who came drifting into town.”

Andy’s parents, he says, ‘knew everyone, it being a small town’, and his journey in the book takes him from childhood, to Weymouth Grammar School, to university, via a job in a seafront hotel where he met a waiter who would expand his intellectual horizons.

It was the wild landscape which also formed the basis of Andy’s dreams of becoming a writer.

He said: “My dad took me and my brother to Chesil Beach at Fortuneswell. I was reading J. Meade Faulkner’s Moonfleet at the time and I remember it being quite traumatic as it hit me how real that landscape is. That was the first time I decided I wanted to try to put that emotion into writing.”

But it’s not all sentimental nostalgia as Andy explores the darker side of the town.

“There were two girls who lived around the corner from me who became teenage prostitutes. I don’t know what happened to them. Names have, obviously, been changed.”

After leaving Weymouth, Andy went on to become a special professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Nottingham.

He has won awards for his poetry, and was writing a novel when he began the memoir.

“All these autobiographical episodes somehow kept working themselves into the novel, and it became a side-project.”

The Naples of England is out now and published by Amcott Press.