You Found That Rainbow

About the Book

Based in 1820, in Skipton, West Yorkshire. It follows three generations from one family, through poverty, death and sadness. Johnny was born into a very poor yet secure, family. He suffers every year in Autumn as Johnny and his father can no longer work until the following Spring. His father would go to the pub with his mother, returning home worse the wear for drink. This would depress Johnny and so he seeks comfort in his horse in the stable. On one terrible night everything changes for Johnny when his home catches on fire and he looses his beloved parents. Having now been orphaned and with no where to live, he ends up living in a boys home, not being able to read or write. He successfully shows the other boys everything he learnt from his father. Johnny’s son Paul, becomes an orphan as well, when a terrible accident happens to his mother and his father ends up in prison. Paul joins the army but this experience is short lived when he realises he cannot fight in a war and kill people. He finally marries and has a son called Peter. Peter meets the daughter of a foundry owner, his life becomes a far cry from the time when Peter and his father arrive in the village and are treated as total outsiders with folk thinking they will take work from the locals. He and his father were told by an old lady whilst they travel north that they should follow the rainbow in the distance and that that is where their happiness shall be. So they head in that direction towards a village – but do they find the rainbow?

About the Author

Eric Dawson was born on twelve of December 1926. He celebrates his 80th birthday at the time this book is being published. He was born in Worth village, near Keighley in West Yorkshire. It was not a traditional hamlet but instead a rat infested slum. At school he could neither read nor write. He was bought up in a home with a drunken father and a mother who tended to Eric’s wounds as and when his father beat him. He cheated death three times in childhood with serious illnesses; suffering from Diphtheria, Rheumatic Fever and Septicaemia. In 1952 he was approached to play for Burnley FC who were then in the 1st Division, but he declined the offer as it would have meant moving away from his home and his mother, a decision he regrets in retrospect. In 1960 he moved South, to London, and became a long distance lorry driver. He married a girl from Surrey and they had two daughters. This marriage failed and in 1977 he married his second wife. They still live in Surrey and he now has two lovely grandchildren by his first marriage and three grandchildren from the children of his current wife’s first marriage.