The Sunny Side of the House

<p><strong style=color: rgba(0 14 53 1)>You can't choose your mum and dad even when they choose you. </strong></p><p><br></p><p><em style=color: rgba(0 14 53 1)>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. </em></p><p><br></p><p><em style=color: rgba(0 14 53 1)>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'. </em></p><p><br></p><p>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. </p>