Schemes and Boats and Cranes

This book has no literary pretensions, put together too hurriedly by an impatient old git who could have padded it out Dickens style or in the manner of Hardy’s The Well-Beloved.

It reflects a time when the Battle of Britain was won, the bombing had eased a fair bit and life, although grey and monotonous with the ever present queues for food, was showing the first signs of normalisation. This despite heavy militarisation leading up to D Day.

Homosexuality was scorned by the judgemental masses and severely punished by the military. It was rarely despised by the non-parochial or the intelligent and the real heroine and heroes were of the type who would resist the disparagement or ill treatment of their fellows. They often needed courage to do so.

In another sphere the irrational, spiteful treatment of foreigners, even refugees, conditioned the author to write of events that seared his mind as a youngster.

Like most novels, I suspect that fiction has a certain amount of experience involved in its fabric and certainly the events described could have happened.