Nicola Briggs

Nicola Briggs grew up in a beautiful Georgian house in Huddersfield, which she loved, but she didn't realise how much until her parents sent her away to a prestigious boarding school at eleven. From then on, the idea of 'home' became a distant dream, a place she could only enjoy for sixteen weeks a year, a home that slipped further from her grasp with every term-time goodbye. In this unflinching coming-of-age memoir, Nicola pulls back the curtain on a respectable Yorkshire family dominated by a brilliant, charismatic, and deeply flawed solicitor father whose bigotry and anti-immigration tirades seeped into every corner of their lives.
Behind the façade of middle-class comfort in 1960s and 70s England lies a harsher reality: the casual racism, social climbing, and suffocating expectations that shaped a generation, expectations that Nicola was expected to accept. But would she?Told with sharp wit, emotional honesty, and clear-eyed insight, her story is not a rose-tinted stroll down memory lane. This compelling exploration of family, class, and identity, highlights one girl's struggle to come to terms with the values she was raised to inherit. Advisory note:Peacock on the Moon is set in a time when language, attitudes, and everyday assumptions were quite different from those of today.
Some readers may find aspects of this original language offensive. References to overt discrimination appear throughout, not for shock value, but to offer an honest portrait of a family whose head was eventually required to stand before a Leeds Race Relations Tribunal in 1979.