Books

So are three friends told, when a fourth’s will binds them in a tontine, a legacy payable only to the last of them to follow him in death, the last man standing. None of them want the money on those terms: How good will all the beer in the world taste over the dead bodies of your best mates? Within months COVID-19 is everywhere. Their friend also leaves a widow and daughter.

The Tuesday-Thursday gang of a Midlands golf club provides the leading players and chorus in the turbulent lives, loves, lock-ins, lockdowns and losses of old men (and some women) behaving badly over the period from 2017 to 2025.

After sometimes comic scenes of modern sexual manners and misadventures, things take a darker turn. Apart from illness, leading characters face issues including abortion, dementia, murder, sexual abuse and suicide. Who will pass this fierce examination of relationships between baby boomers and with their previous and succeeding generations, with hopes of renewal in a calmer and brighter future?

You can’t choose your mum and dad, even when they choose you.

In my early teens I had a taste for horror comics. In one strip I read of a handsome young couple at last alone in their honeymoon suite. He is crisply suited, clean-cut. She, lovely in her wedding finery, offers him the chance to watch her disrobe.

The bride is not shy. She reveals herself, frame by frame, to be a hideous crone gloating at having tricked her new husband. He is unfazed, setting her to screaming as he removes his own head to stow it, grinning still, under his arm. Years later, when I thought of writing a memoir or fictionalised account of my parents’ marriage, the title I toyed with was ‘The Hag and the Head’.

If this gripping narration of a 1960s Fenland boyhood sometimes reads like fiction, the detailed evocation of characters and events, by turns humorous and traumatic, anchors it in remembered facts. The author does not soft-pedal the dysfunction at the core of a wide, supportive family in which the boy faces adult challenges, including jarring discoveries about his parents’ separate and shared history.

Parallel narratives of a schoolboy’s developing first love affair and his career and marriage unravelling 25 years later eventually converge at a school reunion.

Ray Roden is a Fenland schoolboy in trouble with teachers and friends as well as women after his boys’ grammar merges with the girls’ high. He has already met Tina: that girl would give me some of the best moments of my life. And the worst.

Ray Roden is an insurance executive travelling the Caribbean in trouble with his job, his wife (one of them Roper girls), his children – and still women: this last ten days I’ve been kicked out of their beds by my wife, my girlfriend and a … another one. And then there is Hurricane Martin, ‘storm of the century’, heading straight for his home in Puerto Rico.

Alongside humorous scenes in Ray’s unenlightened development from schoolboy clumsiness to mid-life crisis mismanagement are grimmer adult ones including adultery, alcohol abuse, physical and sexual assault. Will he emerge from his school reunion with more than one, one, ‘the one’ or no woman at all?

In an unsettled 1950s household, how will the sisters come up from their shipwrecked childhood? Facing issues including domestic and sexual abuse, physical and mental illness, they struggle to offer their own children a better legacy. Follow them over sixty years to see if all the siblings make it safely to shore.

Angela: Whatever rumours you may have heard, I never knew Dad say my third sister Karen wasn’t his.

Janet: She had promised that on her sixteenth birthday she would finally let him go all the way.

Lucy: I think Jan was away at a Guides’ camp when I got run over.

Karen: Don’t think I’ll be rambling on like Ange … I wouldn’t want to leave you only her version, talk about unreliable memoirs.

Sir Tristram will take seventeen to the match – how many will he bring back? He must reunite his Blood City teammates – Knights, Pirates and Westerners – to win the prestigious Seskie tournament against their oldest rivals. Penalty shoot-outs often end in tears. In Cibola they may end in a fight to the death.

Behind the football match is a bigger power play, a king’s mission to bring down his greatest rival by persuasion, trickery or force. Needing a squad of soldiers as well as footballers, Sir Tristram must also find a place on tour and in his heart for the teenage child he has not addressed by name since infancy…