COCKNEY SAVAGE

About the Book

`Cockney Savage` is an autobiographical fiction, comedy-history, and it is co-written with the author`s father who recollects, as a background, his own childhood during the First World War. Following the evacuation experience, with its ups and downs, and his run-in with the bullying billeting officer to whom he owes the title of the novel, an eccentric youth-club leader, whose motives are never quite clear, enters the story to educate and entertain and to a large extent confuse the adolescent hero with invites to the opera, would you believe, and serious theatre and museum visits, and the occasional private photo-shoot, and there is a growing tension as he tries to extricate himself from the relationship, forward his football and cricket career and his beyond-hope love affair with a beautiful German girl who tells him to forget about the war; all this and the `fifties` and a sudden addiction to jazz and the prospect of National Service!

About the Author

`As a poet and short-story writer Barrie Armstrong has been published in various literary magazines, but this is his first novel and it has taken a long time to surface. He was evacuated as a child from London at the start of the war, and the story focuses on the trauma of that experience and the subsequent emotional, sexual and social outcome. He now lives with his wife Val (over fifty years married) on an island in the Thames and teaches part-time in a local Richmond college. Over the years he has worked at a variety of jobs, from docking to journalism. But always with an eye on writing in his spare time. At present he is assembling another collection of poems for publication. His conversion to Christianity some thirty years back, was the turning point of his life, and marriage, and it is in the spiritual journey of following Christ, he now seeks and prays for inspiration.