Mike howarth

I was searching for any kind of message in this ghastly long saga and any kind if meaning until the last few pages when suddenly my reading burst into a vision recalling many years ago at a Giggleswick School retirement party for my housemaster with Russell Harty presiding. My table of school chums were all incapacitated except me with whisky smuggled by …….minor. All were divorced or unemployed except me, but I was soon to follow. The scenes later during that night at the Black Horse made these last pages of this book look feeble by comparison, the falling off the bar stool to an unconscious heap, another walking into a pile of stacked chairs and left suspended like a soldier on barbed wire and hanging in the tangled mess. One of us died soon after from cancer. I watched it all. Only now catching up with the book’s message.