Tony Klinger

This is an extract from the start of my new book, its first draft not yet complete, which I would like to share with you, I hope you enjoy it and find it enticing…

It’s West London, just puffing at the fag end of the Second World War. It’s a very different place to the vibrant, colourful London of the present. England is a shambling wreck of a place. It should be great, after all we won, but the price has been very high. Too many men who fought haven’t come home, or the experience of being away, fighting for so many years has changed them, lessened some, made others bigger, but blunted the edges of most.

The women got used to making their own way, earning their own money, making their own fun. Some of them have learned how to say no, and its from here, this point of time, that women realized they didn’t have to continue with the old ways anymore.

The children are going to be different, bound to be.

Post war London is pock marked with bombsites and unsafe buildings. Everything is grey and a bit dirty, dust seems to encrust our lives. There are still tram-lines in some parts of the town, and overhead wires for the trolley buses. Shiny lino is on the floor of our houses, and the fires are made with coal. There is little fruit out of season, and its exotic to have a black and white television. Radio is the national entertainment. Big girls still wear stockings and pointy bras. Bloody hell, they still ration some sweets!

Despite the odd unexploded bomb its considered safe to play outside with your mates. If there are any child molesters around we don’t know anything about them. Life for children is a perfect idyll; you play outside until it gets dark.

But the shops are shut tight on Sundays and after closing time, which is usually 6 sharp. There are hardly any people in England who are not white British people. Being a second generation Brit I am considered more than a bit exotic.

The country, the whole world, might be ready to explode into the sixties, but the fifties were, in fact the fag end of the war years and a mentality and class structure that was Edwardian.