About me

I was born, not in a crossfire hurricane, but in a small suburban town in southern England in 1961. School in the 1970s was as much torture as it was enlightenment, but back then no one knew much about bullying. There was never a caring adult on hand to stop the sensitive ones being beaten to a pulp. I would have loved a Mr Farthing figure (as in Kes) to be there to protect people like me, but alas, I did not live in a novel and did not have a pet kestrel: I had a pet tortoise who lived in a bonfire and which, as long as he managed to escape the seasonal incendiary rages of my father, would emerge each summer, marching across the lawn in search of fresh slices of cucumber, which I would feed him, as I’d decided he was my spirit animal. Somehow, like the tortoise I survived the horrors of a middle class upbringing in a leafy suburb where the most the most exasperating thing we might expect was a power cut. I went to university and then went again for lack of other options . Then I wandered without much purpose through a variety of jobs and countries: I was briefly a journalist, then a freelance, then a teacher of foreign students. By some roll of the cosmic dice I ended up teaching literature in a Japanese university in Tokyo that no longer exists. This was not my fault. I ended up back in England teaching in a ‘proper’ school where I wrote several school plays and novels that almost but did not quite grab the final approval of publishers. Becoming Henry is the first that did, and was one that was, ironically, was a stop gap between more ‘important’ projects. It is a book about being a boy in the 70s, and the eponymous Henry is its focal point: a boy trying to figure out who and what he is at a time of parental disharmony, IRA bombs, punk music, body dysmorphia and abortive relationships. Despite all that, it is a comedy!