Leaning on a Lamp Post is the true story spanning almost eighty years, concentrating on a period in my early childhood during the winter of 1952. In many ways this book flows on from For God, England & Ethel, (another of my factual historical novels) the story of my grandfather's service with 6 Squadron when it was fighting over the Western Front during WW1, as my grandparents also feature extensively in Leaning on a Lamp Post.  

 

Though most of the book is set in London, there are three large 'flashback' chapters, two set in the early nineteen hundreds in Basingstoke, UK, in which Fred and Ethel (the main characters in For God, England & Ethel) tell the story of how they met and a third chapter set in Reading, UK, in 1944, four days after the D-Day landings and featuring my parents, Arthur and Denise Johnson.

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The ISBN number of Leaning on a Lamp Post is 978-1-7851-0036-9. You can buy a copy direct from the publisher Feed-a-Read (click on the button below), or if your prefer from any of the bigger on-line book stores. If you would like a signed copy, please send me a message via the CONTACT page.

 

If you look carefully at the background image, you will notice a solitary man sitting in front of more than 100 seamstresses and male workers. That man is my great-grandfather, the father of Fred, whose job was to manage the suit-making department in the original Burberry's clothing company. For a time, back in 1910, my grandmother (Ethel, Fred's wife) worked for Thomas Burberry as a buyer in the ladies clothing department, also located in Basingstoke, UK.

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To see a map of old Basingstoke overlaid on a recent satellite image, click HERE.