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 & mother as they coped with life on the dole. Her grammar school decided to groom her for the Oxford entrance exam & 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 & embarked on a full time role of wife & mother when rationing was at its tightest & the housing shortage was acute. After 7 years as a housewife she claimed some time for herself & took up pen & paper. Initially the new medium of TV could not coax serious writers to feed it & so Elaine got in at the ground floor & started a prolific career as a TV dramatist. She wrote for programmes such as How Green Was My Valley (1975) & Testament of Youth (1979) winning two BAFTAs two Writers Guild awards the Prix Italia & 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 & 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 Elaines account of her life & looks at how her career & the Aquatic Ape Theory impacted on her family life.