The Boy With No Shoes: a Memoir by William Horwood

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Headline Book Publishing| 2004| Hardback edition| 440 pages| 5*

Five-year-old Jimmy Rova is the unwanted child of a mother who rejects him, and whose other children bully him. The one thing he can call his own is a pair of shoes, a present from the only person he feels has ever loved him. When they are cruelly taken away, Jimmy spirals down into a state of loneliness and terrible loss from which there seems no recovery.

This triumphant story of a boy’s struggle with early trauma and his remarkable journey into adulthood is based on William Horwood’s own remarkable childhood in south-east England after the Second World War. Using all the skills that went into the creation of his modern classics, Horwood has written an inspiring story of a journey from a past too painful to imagine to the future every child deserves. (Amazon)

William Horwood is an English novelist. He grew up on the East Kent coast, primarily in Deal. His first novel, Duncton Wood, an allegorical tale about a community of moles, was published in 1980. It was followed by two sequels, forming The Duncton Chronicles, and also a second trilogy, The Book of Silence. William Horwood has also written two stand-alone novels intertwining the lives of humans and of eagles, The Stonor Eagles and Callanish , and The Wolves of Time duology. Skallagrigg, his 1987 novel about disability, love, and trust, was made into a BBC film in 1994. In addition, he has written a number of sequels to The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.

When I saw The Boy With No Shoes on the secondhand bookshelves in my local village hall I thought I’d like to read it. It was a great choice as I think it’s one of the best books I’ve read this year. It’s important to read the Author’s Note carefully before you read the book, and not dive straight into it. I had to re-read it after I’d read a few chapters as I was beginning to wonder if this was really fictional. I also wasted time searching on maps to find where he lived growing up.

In his Author’s Note at the front of the book he explained why he wrote about himself as Jimmy Rova:

When I was thirty-four and had been iller than I knew for two long years, my recovery began in the strangest and most magical dream of ways. |I woke one day from dreaming and saw myself when very young, as clearly as in a black and white Kodak photograph. I saw how desperately the little boy I once was had needed someone to talk to in a world where no one wanted to listen. I decided there and then to travel back in time and let myself as adult be listener to the child. This book and my final healing is the result of that imaginative listening, over very many years.

Because the boy seemed other than himself he gave him a different name and changed the name of his home town. By so doing he was able to fill in gaps, paper over the cracks and visit distant places of emotion that he would never have reached.

It is a long and detailed book that took me nearly a month to read. It is beautifully written and as he tells the story of his very early life there are many times when it moved me to tears. His writing is so clear that the places and people he describes spring to life as you read. All the characters have depth and are believable as people.

He is just as good at portraying Jimmy’s feelings and emotions. I could feel his depth of despair, fear and confusion as he describes his first memory about the man in a time long ago who bought him a pair of shoes. That day entered his heart and stayed there forever. He called him The Man Who Was, the man who left him standing in the rain, holding his Ma’s hand, full of fear that he would not be there to keep him safe from Ma, who treated him appallingly, and he would be all alone. All that was left to him were the shoes. So, imagine how awful it was when the shoes disappeared, cruelly taken from him.

But life for Jimmy did eventually get better, especially when Granny came to live with them, but even she could not protect completely from his abusive Ma. I loved all the details of Granny’s time in Africa with ‘The African Gentleman’, who wore a funny hat on his grey and grizzled hair, and his clothes were striped black and yellow. In his hand he carried a wand like a magician. Also unforgettable is his first love, Harriet, and how his mother ended their affair.

There were others too who were kind to him. I loved his description of a new English teacher at the Grammar School, who in contrast to the Head and other teachers believed in the boys. He inspired Jimmy and transformed his life by showing him how to believe he could succeed and how to prepare for his O levels.

There were others too, His Uncle Max who took him hiking in Snowdonia. Moel Saibod was the first mountain he climbed and then others, including Snowdon, the tallest mountain in Wales and England. Then, Mr Boys who taught him to read, Mr Bubbles, a fisherman and his wife, who lived along the shore and taught him all about fishing. I could go on and on, but really if this interests you the best thing is to read the book for yourself. It is a wonderful book, that captures what life was like in the 1950s and even though my childhood was nothing like his, it brought back memories of growing up. I too, as a young woman) climbed Snowdon – Welsh name, Yr Wyddfa (I did not take the Snowdon Mountain Railway either up or down) and also Moel Saibod.

Nonfiction November 2025: Week One

Published on by Margaret18 Comments

It’s the first week of Nonfiction November and this week (27th October – 2nd November) we are hosted by Heather at Based on a True Story.

The challenge is as follows:

Celebrate your year of nonfiction. What books have you read since this time last year? What were your favorites? Have you had a favorite topic? Is there a topic you want to read about more? What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November?

Even though I love nonfiction I don’t read a lot and this year’s total is even lower than usual, with just seven books and I’ve only reviewed four of them, marked *, plus three in Nov/Dec 2024 to make it the full year. I’ve linked the titles to Amazon for those books I haven’t reviewed.

*Keir Starmer: the Biography by Tom Baldwin

Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn – a remarkable book, about abandoned places: ghost towns and exclusion zones, no man’s lands and fortress islands – and what happens when nature is allowed to reclaim its place. It’s not a book to read quickly, but rather one to take your time to take in all the details. It’s fascinating, thoroughly researched and beautifully written.

*Wintering by Katherine May

*The Boy With No Shoes: a Memoir by William Horwood – I loved this book

Little Ern!: the Authorized Biography of Ernie Wise by Robert Sellers & James Hogg

*The Spy in the Archive by Gordon Corera

Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark by Alan Taylor – review to follow later

The following are books I began reading in November 2024. I haven’t reviewed any of them, although I wrote a few paragraphs about two of them in my Book Pairings post on November 13th 2024.

Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews In Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017 by Ian Black – This is an extremely detailed chronological account of events in this conflict from the years from 1882 preceding the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to 2017. Ian Black was a British journalist who worked for The Guardian holding the posts of diplomatic editor and Europe editor as well as Middle East editor. I’m quoting from his obituary in January 2023: ‘he embodied the correspondent’s duty to show fairness to both parties. That refusal to reinforce the narrative of one side alone informed his writing on the Israel-Palestine conflict from the start.’ So I thought this could be a good place to start. And as far as I can tell it is an unbiased and factual account,with many references to Black’s sources, and it took me a long time to read it

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Everyone Needs to Know by Don Waxman – This book is more readable than Black’s and is written as a series of questions and answers covering the conflict from its nineteenth-century origins up to the present day (2019). It explains the key events, examines the core issues, and presents the competing claims and narratives of both sides.

Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappé – this ‘examines the most contested ideas concerning the origins and identity of the contemporary state of Israel’. (Amazon)

By participating in Nonfiction November I’m hoping this will encourage me to read more nonfiction rather than picking up the next novel to read and I’m looking forward to seeing what others recommend.

Updated 30 October 2025

Wintering by Katherine May

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

Synopsis

Wintering is a poignant and comforting meditation on the fallow periods of life, times when we must retreat to care for and repair ourselves. Katherine May thoughtfully shows us how to come through these times with the wisdom of knowing that, like the seasons, our winters and summers are the ebb and flow of life.

A moving personal narrative interwoven with lessons from literature, mythology and the natural world, May’s story offers instruction on the transformative power of rest and retreat. Illumination emerges from many sources: solstice celebrations and dormice hibernation, C.S. Lewis and Sylvia Plath, swimming in icy waters and sailing arctic seas.

Ultimately, Wintering invites us to change how we relate to our own fallow times. May models an active acceptance of sadness and finds nourishment in deep retreat, joy in the hushed beauty of winter, and encouragement in understanding life as cyclical, not linear. A secular mystic, May forms a guiding philosophy for transforming the hardships that arise before the ushering in of a new season.

The title and the description interested me, so I wanted to read Wintering: the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May. I liked the beginning where she defines wintering as

Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. Perhaps it results from an illness; perhaps from a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. (page 9)

She then goes on to say that this book is

about learning to recognise the process, engage with it mindfully, and even to cherish it. We may never choose to winter but, we can choose how. (page 12)

This was the start of a period in her life where she felt as though she had fallen through into ‘Somewhere Else’, just as dust shifts down between the floorboards, a lonely and painful place. It was the time when her husband suddenly became very ill during the celebrations for her fortieth birthday and told her he’d vomited. Her reaction was to think:

what a nuisance it was. We’d have to cut the day short and head back home, and then he’d probably have to sleep it off. He was clutching his middle, but that didn’t seem particularly troubling under the circumstances. I wasn’t in any hurry to leave, and it must have shown, because I have a very clear memory of the sudden shock when our friend – one of our oldest ones, known from schooldays – touched me on the shoulder and said, ‘Katherine, I think H is really ill.’ (pages 2-3)

She still didn’t think it was anything really serious. But they went home, he went to bed and two hours later he said he thought he needed to go to hospital. She took him, after leaving her son with neighbours, and went home after midnight when he still hadn’t been taken to a ward. The next morning she returned to find him screaming in agony and suddenly realised she could lose him.

Whilst he was still in hospital she noticed a grumbling pain along the right side of her abdomen which she thought was in sympathy with H’s appendicitis. But about a year later she admitted to her GP that she’d ignored all the major signs of bowel cancer. This shocked me and I was concerned to know more – she’d ignored it for a year! She was referred for urgent tests and signed off sick. Was it cancer? I was worried, but it was only many pages later, she revealed that a nurse eventually told her she ‘held within her a mass of spasms and inflammations, a wonderland of malabsorption.’ This was life-changing as it wouldn’t just go away – it involved a three day diet of low-fibre eating. I felt this was tucked away within information about other topics.

There are so many topics covered that it would be an extremely long post if I went into more detail! It is divided into chapters headed October through to March, covering different topics. But I found it rather disjointed and muddled, moving from one topic to the next and from one occasion to the next, but not in a chronological sequence. It’s a mix of memoir/self-help book, intermingled with her own personal issues, experiences and reminiscences.

She writes a bit about the Danish concept of hygge, which represents cosiness as a kind of mindful practice and homely comfort, but it is more than this as she broadens her scope to include such things as, visits to Iceland and Norway; Halloween, folklore, the starkness of winter, sleep, hibernation, night time waking , SAD, Stonehenge and druids, prayer, Christmas and New Year, pregnancy, wolves, snow, swimming at New Year in the sea at Whitstable, ants, bees, Sylvia Plath’s poem Wintering, robins, and losing her voice and singing, as well as others.

It wasn’t what I’d expected, but overall I enjoyed it, although I think it could really do with an index to guide the reader to the individual topics.

Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark: Book Beginnings on Friday & The Friday 56

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.

Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark is a book I’ve had since 2017, when I bought it from Barter Books in Alnwick, one of my favourite secondhand bookshops. One of my favourite books is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, so I was hoping to love this book too. I did enjoy it, but not as much as Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

The book begins:

One day in the middle of the twentieth century I sat in an old graveyard which had not been demolished, in the Kensington area of London, when a young policeman stepped off the path and came over to me.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, but she is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. You grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

Page 55-56:

Several people turned round to look at Edwina as she spoke with her high cry. People often turned round to stare at her painted wizened face, her green teeth, the raised, red-blood fingernail accompanied by her shrieking voice, the whole wrapped up to the neck in luxurious fur. Edwina was over ninety and might die at any time, as she did about six years later. My dear, dear Solly lived into the seventies of this century, when I was far away.

Description from Amazon:

A funny and clever novel about art and reality and the way they imitate each other, from the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. With an introduction by Mark Lawson.

Would-be novelist Fleur Talbot works for the snooty Sir Quentin Oliver at the Autobiographical Association, whose members are at work on their memoirs. When her employer gets his hands on Fleur’s novel-in-progress, mayhem ensues when its scenes begin coming true.

If you have read this book, what did you think?

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

The summary on Goodreads:

A wickedly clever satire uses comic inversions to offer telling insights into the nature of man and society. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.

Gulliver’s Travels describes the four voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon. In Lilliput he discovers a world in miniature; towering over the people and their city, he is able to view their society from the viewpoint of a god. However, in Brobdingnag, a land of giants, tiny Gulliver himself comes under observation, exhibited as a curiosity at markets and fairs. In Laputa, a flying island, he encounters a society of speculators and projectors who have lost all grip on everyday reality; while they plan and calculate, their country lies in ruins. Gulliver’s final voyage takes him to the land of the Houyhnhnms, gentle horses whom he quickly comes to admire – in contrast to the Yahoos, filthy bestial creatures who bear a disturbing resemblance to humans.

I think Gulliver’s Travels is such a strange book, definitely not a children’s book as I had thought. There are very many editions of this book. The edition I read is the e-book edition based on the text of Swift’s 1726 original, with the 1899 illustrations of Arthur Rackham. It’s a satire on human nature and the imaginary travellers’ tale literary subgenre about Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon who travels to four strange and distant lands.

This is one of those books that I’ve known of since childhood and have known bits of the story, but have never read. I did see a TV cartoon version several years ago and I’ve been meaning to read it for years. It’s a book, which operates on several levels, as the Introduction in one of my copies (an Odhams Press Limited publication) states:

An embittered, middle-aged man sat down to write a book that would scourge the vices and follies of mankind. That book, with its sting mellowed during the passage of two hundred years, has become – of all things – a children’s classic. ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ was the splenetic outburst of a passionate mind, whose genius gave immortality to so transient a thing as satire; but that immortality had a permanent basis – a child-like delight in marvels, a freshness of invention, a limpid style and a selective perception that created images of giants, dwarfs and fabled races with a vivid pulsating life of their own.

I don’t think I’d have liked it very much if I’d read it as a child as there are many passages that would have bored me stiff and which even now I found tedious and heavy going in parts. It satirises the political situation during Swift’s lifetime, and is full of political and social allusions, a lot of which, interesting as it is, passed over my head.

But it is a fantastical fantasy set in such different places, the ones I found most interesting are Lilliput inhabited by tiny people Brobdignag, the land of giants, and the country of the Houyhnhms, where a race of talking horses, rule the Yahoos, strange, filthy humanoid animals that Gulliver viewed with contempt and disgust. Gulliver became a part of one of the horse’s households and grew to admire and wanted to emulate the Houyhnhms’ way of life, which left him horrified with humanity. Less interesting is his visit to Laputa, a flying island and it’s rebellious cities.

It was not really what I expected, and whilst I think a lot of it is absurd and amusing, it’s certainly not a book I can say that I enjoyed, I think it was worth reading and I’m glad I finally got round to reading it.

The Classics Club Spin Result

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

The spin number in The Classics Club Spin is number …

which for me is

Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault

The rules of the Spin are that this is the book for me to read by 21 December 2025.

Synopsis from Amazon

In the first novel of her stunning trilogy, Mary Renault vividly imagines the life of Alexander the Great, the charismatic leader whose drive and ambition created a legend

Alexander’s beauty, strength and defiance were apparent from birth, but his boyhood honed those gifts into the makings of a king. His mother and father, Olympias and King Philip of Macedon, fought each other for their son’s loyalty, teaching Alexander politics and vengeance from the cradle. Hephaistion’s love taught him trust, while Aristotle’s tutoring provoked his mind and Homer’s Iliad fuelled his aspirations. At age twelve, he killed his first man in battle; at sixteen, he became regent; at eighteen, commander of Macedon’s cavalry; and by the time his father was murdered, Alexander’s skills had grown to match his fiery ambition.

I read Mary Renault’s Theseus books, The Bull Must Die and The King from the Sea years ago and loved them, so I’m looking forward to reading Fire from Heaven and hoping I’ll love it too.

Did you take part in the Classics Spin? What will you be reading?