Five Boys Book

Mick Jackson's Five Boys opens with young Bobby being evacuated from a blitzed London to the supposed calm of a small South Devon village. But for Bobby, the eccentrics and eccentricities of his new home are far more dangerous than the German bombs. Billeted with elderly spinster Miss Minter, Bobby soon encounters the village characters--and, identified as a Nazi spy, becomes the latest hapless victim of the local gang, the Five Boys. In time, though, he's befriended by one of the Five, Aldred, an organist's assistant with an overactive thyroid and a passion for a London he's seen only in books. Together, the Boys (now Six) embark on a series of adventures and pranks, climbing the church tower at night to pelt grave stones with plums, sneaking into the house of the suspiciously semaphoric Captain, and getting mixed up with, and carried off by, the mysterious Pied-Piper-esque Bee King. What starts as a straightforward evacuation story shifts into a series of more or less prankish anecdotes (a funeral for a pig, the invasion of US soldiers) before spiralling into a more disturbing denouement. But despite the hints of lurking tragedy, the author keeps the book light, capturing perfectly the bewildered innocence of his young hero, and of a lost England. Jackson's debut novel The Underground Man was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread First Novel Award and won the Royal Society of Authors' First Novel Award--immediate and well-deserved recognition for Jackson's considerable skills at conscientiously re-imagining the past, but with a dash of pure eccentricity. --Alan StewartRead More