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John Lucas's new
book blends fiction, biography and social history in order
to tell the story of the grandfather he never knew. Horace
Kelly was born in Torquay in 1880 and died sixty years later,
soon after the outbreak of the second world war. Headteacher
of a succession of elementary schools in impoverished areas
of London during the first part of the 20th century, "Hod"
Kelly was also a keen cricketer, a devotee of the music hall,
and included among his friends the great Trade Union leader,
Ernest Bevin. In telling the story of his life, Lucas has
provided a fascinating range of insights into the lives of
ordinary Londoners: their entertainments, domestic arrangements,
experiences of the privations of war, including the aerial
bombardments of 1917 and 1918, and their growing realisation
during the 1920s and 1930s that they were doomed to suffer
it all again. Threaded through is an account of such people's
hunger for education, and of the different ways governments,
church and Educational Officialdom ministered to that hunger.
The Good That We Do is both a study of one man and a of a
period when England was changed, drastically and for ever.
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| Of Lucas's England
and Englishness, Terry Eagleton wrote in the Independent on
Sunday that it "is alive with a quick, erudite sense of
English social history, from which he properly refuses to divorce
the history of English writing", and Peter Porter, reviewing
a collection of Lucas's poems for the Observer, commented that
"John Lucas builds his poems with careful artfulness...
The warmth of Lucas's hope for humanity is always doing battle
with his observation of wreckage and deprivation." |
