May’s death in a car accident, two days after my sixteenth birthday and a few days before I took ‘O’ levels, meant I left school with few qualifications.

I returned to East Yorkshire, and worked as a colour printer at an aircraft factory and then a graphics technician at the local art college. I married Val, my childhood sweetheart, and moved to Colchester as a press photographer. Val found work as a teacher in the town. Disenchanted by sensationalism of local news stories, I left the paper to work as a freelance. The flat we occupied was on a farm and I enhanced my income by labouring on the land. During this spell, I started to write fiction as well as the factual photographic articles I’d had published in magazines such as Amatuer Photographer and Photography.

I entered a playwriting contest run by the Radio Times, took 3rd place and had my play, Hitch Hiker, broadcast on BBC Radio 4. They commissioned a second play but the producer left for pastures new and the project was abandoned. A literary agent thought I had talent and encouraged me to write plays for radio and television but, after a number of near misses, I eventually abandoned this activity. The short freelance spell ended when security of tenure was lost at the farm and I needed employment to get a mortgage. I managed a shop until the company decided to sell shotguns and crossbows; a trade I couldn’t support. I took a job selling photographic goods and printing services to shops in East Anglia and East London. Although relatively successful, lying to gain orders was a problem and, after a year, I joined the civil service, working for the Employment Service in many roles.

Domestic life and various other factors, including a lengthy spell of serious illness, had curtailed my writing for a few years. I grew apart from Val and, after eighteen years of marriage, left the marital home to her.

I met my second wife, Valerie, (yes, really) on a training course, Managing Change, and we fell in love on sight. Happy with my new love, I resumed my writing around this time, penning some short stories and winning a few competition prizes.

I worked in the holiday cottage industry after we moved to Settle in the the Yorkshire Dales. Just prior to the Millennium celebrations, I was made redundant along with several of my coworkers. I found a job, in a Comet call centre in Hull, and moved back to East Yorkshire.

Valerie and I have a teenage daughter, Kate, of whom we are prodigiously proud. I currently live as a happily married man in a small market town, working part time for the local authority. A spell of ME/CFS, which caused the need for part time employment, seemed to stabilise after four years, towards the end of 2006. Of course, this complaint never really goes away and I still have relapses; a lengthy one started in February 2009 and is slowly declining.

I know almost nothing about Graham Greene, William Golding or J.K. Rowling but that hasn't stopped me enjoying their books. On the other hand, I know a bit too much about Jeffrey Archer and Katie Price (Jordan) and I have never enjoyed their books.

 

 

Click on picture to go to Amazon.co.uk

'Breaking Faith'

To provide a more detailed resumé of the story, it revolves around the shamelessly libidinous Mr. Leighton Longshaw who enthusiastically and compulsively slots himself into the moist nether regions of his willing photographic models as plentiful opportunities arise. Then, for want of a Girl Friday, he hires the reputed village idiot, Faith, albeit one ready-furnished with a conversational vocabulary of around 100,000 words. Something, I cannot think what – call it male intuition – hints to him that there is more to this woman than meets the eye.

As in all the best moral works, the names of the characters say it all. Faith comes tarnished by the hell-fire religious bigotry of her father but, given a few determined applications of Silvo, is soon all burnished and wondrously bright. Her two sisters are called Hope and Charity. Hope, with heavy-handed (not to mention tasteless) irony is paralysed from the brain down as a result of a surgical misfortune although her abusive father hopes to revive her come what may. Charity is as charity does. She is supplied with seemingly inexhaustible resources and very few requirements for eligibility for hand-outs other than youthful masculine energy and good looks.

And the moral? I have a bit lost count of how many of the characters have spouted it now, so it is almost certainly that free sex is fun but that it has to be stirred through thoroughly with true love and steadfast, honest passion for it to be alchemised into a truly satisfying blend – not a bad moral really.

And not a bad book either. It will almost certainly contain enough pert nipples and lubricated crevices to please discerning customers - there is a passage where Leigh and Netta couple seven times in a night and I think we get all the balls and whistles on each and every one of them – and there is no debating that this is a huge page-turner, partly because it is well-written and partly because the characters are so appealingly fleshed-out in personality as well as in anatomy. Several reviewers both on the jacket and on Amazon state that this book is hard to put down and that was my experience too. At 343 dense large-format pages it is quite a weighty book but I read it effortlessly within two days. You will certainly race through the last few chapters as it makes an unexpected breakneck dash for the finishing line.

Whether this represents a realistic social depiction of an albeit niche 1970s North Country lifestyle is another matter. Maybe it was discoverable in the Yorkshire Dales but it never reached the East Yorkshire Wolds that I ever stumbled across, although I believe that it put in the odd appearance in Holderness from the 1950s onwards. However realism, by definition, is not what moral tales are all about. They seek to point the way towards the ideal, and if some of the dialogue sounds like it has been drafted and voted upon as manifesto composites at the annual conference of the Socially Liberated Party, so be it.