Knock 'Em Cold, Kid

Knock ’em Cold, Kid is the autobiography of award-winning Welsh writer Elaine Morgan. Born in the Rhondda Valley in 1920, Elaine vividly describes the relationship between her father and mother as they coped with life on the dole. Her grammar school decided to groom her for the Oxford entrance exam and she entered Lady Margaret Hall in 1939. It was a very different world from the one she knew, but she enjoyed the experience. In 1945 she married Morien Morgan, a Welsh schoolmaster and embarked on a full time role of wife and mother when rationing was at its tightest and the housing shortage was acute. After 7 years as a housewife, she claimed some time for herself and took up pen and paper. Initially, the new medium of TV could not coax serious writers to feed it and so Elaine got in at the ground floor and started a prolific career as a TV dramatist. She wrote for programmes such as How Green Was My Valley (1975) and Testament of Youth (1979), winning two BAFTAs, two Writers’ Guild awards, the Prix Italia and the Writer of the Year Award from the Royal Television Society along the way. In 1972, in a change of direction, she wrote The Descent of Woman, an account of human evolution seen from the perspective of the female of the species. This became a bestseller, and the next forty years of her life were dedicated to defending the controversial theory of the Aquatic Ape, as put forward in her book. Knock ’em Cold, Kid is Elaine’s account of her life and looks at how her career and the Aquatic Ape Theory impacted on her family life.