The Boy in the Photograph

There seems to be a mystery about what happened to Uncle Freddy in the desert during the Second World War. Did it happen? How did it happen? And what were the connections with Stuttgart which came to a sudden halt in the Great War? There is certainly a Lonie in the family, named after a German friend of Uncle Freddy’s grandmother – and dachshunds, too.

The story behind these questions is told through memories delving back to the latter part of the 19th century. Memories which stem from, and return to, the gathering following Uncle Freddy’s funeral, in the room where his young eyes, captured in a photograph, seem to look out and reach through time into the present.

In the short story Grove Mansions, the author remembers her time living in a flat within a grand old house approaching the end of its days. Her life and the tenants within the house, including the ever-present Mr Barker, the caretaker, are recalled with a perception that leaves a lasting impression.

ISBN: 9781852002213

Size: 217x140mm 

Binding: paperback 

Length: 120pp

Rex believes a man needs more than one woman. Hazel doesn’t agree with him. This is the story of their marriage, divorce and subsequent on-off affair.

The War over, Rex and Hazel and Alan and Margaret go to East Anglia to make their lives. Rex is a poet, Alan a farmer, and they and their wives bring clashing political allegiances to the sleepy village of Farthingale. At the beginning of the new decade Rex founds his poetry magazine Review 50, and Alan starts what is intended to be a pacifist farm. 

When Rex leaves Hazel in 1960, Alan and Margaret find her an abandoned old farmhouse and she and her children move in. This is about their plans, ideals, the compromises with reality, and what happens through the 1960s and 70s as their children grow and have their own ideas of freedom and peace. Rex’s view of his daughter Lynnet’s injunction to ‘Make Love not War’ differs from hers. His two wives have babies within months of one another and he glories in the epithet of male chauvinist pig. 

Here unfolds the conflict between men and women, mothers and daughters, and about the nature of Freedom, the constant struggle for it, and how that struggle affects human relationships.

ISBN: 9781852001414 

Size: 217x140mm 

Binding: hardback 

Length: 190pp

The Ryan family have moved to Lancashire. Tom works for the railway and keeps bees, Pearl knits her bitterness into jumpers and socks, and Wendy is on a quest – she wants to find out where babies come from. But it is 1955 and this information is not available. She knows something big is going to happen to her soon, but what it will be is a mystery.

This is the Cherry Pink and Apple-Blossom White year, killers are hanged by the state, there is a General Election, and they hear tell of cinemas and theatres ripped up as Bill Haley Rocks Around the Clock. In Makerfield three boys are knifed to death and there is a plague of frogs which come up from the Moss.

Wendy skates on the icy flash, falls in and catches pneumonia. She pores over women ’s magazines for clues about babies, goes with Tashy to Mab’s stone, visits the seaside with Catty and her parents, is sexually approached by an adult family friend, and runs away to ride on freight wagons to Manchester with the most disreputable boy in the school.

At the end of the year the bees fly away, never to be seen again, the Ryans return to their home town, and Wendy discovers what she wants to know. 

ISBN: 9781852001339 

Size: 217x140mm 

Binding: hardback 

Length: 168pp