Secrets and Lives is a totally unique, intimate and highly sensitive portrayal of other people's lives, and the ways in which they may speak of our own.This is a collection of 60 utterly comepelling true stories, each in the subjects' own words, taken from years of conversations with nearly 100 people from a typical English market town where the author herself grew up. The result is a portrait of the English as has never been painted before. The Middle England Mary Loudon so subtly exposes is an England of extremes and opposites: Middle England is, in fact, most of us. Through telling tales of their lives, her subjects speak of a whole century's worth of emotion and experience, and each other, with unparalleled candour. Morris dancing, hairdressing, hunting, selling shoes, standing for Mayor, getting divorced, contemplating suicide, forgiving the Japanese, shopping your son to the police, being the only Muslim in town, being ordinary, being famous, being invisible.