Sebastian Faulks describes a post-Second World War childhood in a home-counties cottage where small domestic improvisations and shared party-line telephones shaped everyday life. Family holidays were chilly stays in Bexhill-on-Sea or the Isle of Wight. Numerous middle-aged local men concealed wartime experiences beneath suburban routines. Faulks's father, a provincial solicitor, carried a Military Cross for service in Tunisia. A strict prep-school headmaster enforced a regimen that sent privileged boys away to be remade. Faulks rose to head boy and won scholarships to Wellington and Cambridge, then suffered meetings with doctors, pills, panic attacks, agoraphobia, and insomnia.
In the home counties cottage he shares with his parents and older brother, olive oil does duty not in the kitchen but as a bathroom remedy for bunged-up ears. If you are lucky enough to have a telephone (the Faulks are), it will probably be a party line shared with the people next door. Holidays consist of an icy week in Bexhill-on-Sea or, a step up, the Isle of Wight (just as cold but with a nicer class of ice-cream).
Then there are all those tight-lipped middle-aged men busying themselves mowing the lawn and going to work in mysterious offices. Not so long ago they were shooting down Germans or trying to survive the north African desert. Faulks's own father is one of these heroes in hiding a provincial solicitor in a failing practice who won the Military Cross for service in Tunisia.
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