 He was educated at Wells House preparatory school in Malvern, Repton School and Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he read English.During the 1930s he briefly tutored the young son of the publisher Jonathan Cape, but devoted most of his time to writing short stories about working-class life in the industrial North.These were published in most of the leading publications of the period, frequently anthologised, and collected in the 1948 volume "Land Without Heroes".