Searching Fifty Shades Of Grey

In the years after 1972 when my father died, I realized how much I owed to him the chance of an education, an interest in history, a sort of determination to look for good in things – and I realized that I had never been able to say so to him. There were also those ‘endofterm moments’ in school when the pupils asked about their teacher’s own life, and I found myself ‘talking about the war’ in the way that developed over a long time into this book. It is a work of imagination, but cannot escape from being largely autobiographical in content, or personal in reaction to events, for example, the passing of the 1944 Education Act. I also though that my grandchildren might be interested in the way life has changed in the last sixty years. It is a whitehaired book, almost of necessity, but I hope it will inform and entertain younger people as well. There was a funny side to what happened, as well as an underlying sense of extreme sadness, both of which I hope appear in the story without me dwelling on them overmuch.

As I have already said, my father, represented by George in the book. I watched the TV soaps like ‘A Family at War’ and serious documentaries like ‘The World at War’ in the sixties, and thought I could add a personal tuppence worth of my own. The incidents seemed interesting to boys and girls at school. As you see, I was a history teacher, and after spending forty years in and out of pulpits, I value the storyteller’s art.

I found that telling this story enabled it to assume its own shape, and the interaction of the characters as they took off into their own lives interested me greatly. One of the most important characters in the book is the house we lived in at Oxford. When I went to draw it for the cover, I had all sorts of feelings of resentment, remorse, gratitude, anger, as I sat sheltering from the rain in the porch of the house agent’s office which has replaced the shop that was across the road. The real George and Edna, the real Graham, Joyce and John, the real Mrs Wilson and her two daughters, seemed still to be there . . . as I actually was.