Sunny Side of the House (The) [Hardback]

Sunny Side of the House (The) [Hardback]

When Life Gives You Strawberries - Memories of a Fenland Boy (I)

David G Bailey

Hardback

A memoir from the author of 'Seventeen', 'Them Roper Girls' and 'Them Feltwell Boys', in hardback.

  • New title
  • ISBN 9781800422834
  • Published Aug 2024
  • Hardback
    229 x 152mm (270 pages)
  • Also available as:
    Paperback £12.99

£22.99

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.

Visit www.davidgbailey.com and author Facebook page at bit.ly/D-G-B

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