The first of the books featuring Henry Ezra Pratt, son of a parrot-strangling Sheffield cutler, follows him from his birth in a back-to-back in 1935 to the beginning of his National Service in 1953. It’s a tour of the English class system as family disasters send him to village school, elementary school, grammar school and posh public school. Henry comes up fighting, and often laughing, after every fresh disaster.
