Book excerpt: The middle years of the twentieth century were a time of profound and rapid change. The world had recently experienced the Great Depression and World War II. Nothing could be quite the same again-and, in fact, nothing was. In My Green Age, author Terrence Keough not only recounts his life as an ordinary person, but he also provides a perspective on the years between 1935 and 1963. A series of vignettes interspersed throughout the memoir add piquancy to the comments on the nature of the times. A summer memory: My birthday, June 14, 1940. I heard from my upstairs bedroom my mother talking to Mr. Olson on the doorstep below. "Paris has fallen to the Germans," he said. The Reverend R. MacDonald's Religion 5C class: "If you mow your lawn for up to a half hour on Sunday," he contended, "you have committed a venial sin. If you mow it for more than a half hour, that's a mortal sin." One evening, we took the tube to Knightsbridge to go to my favourite restaurant, Luba's Bistro, just down the street from Harrods and the Brompton Oratory, on Yeoman's Row.