Time Bomb

It’s the summer of 1949 with four boys between primary and secondary school, heading into what they hope is the freedom of the long holiday to play on the old bomb-site. There are other transitions out of childhood and a range of leavings. The novel has a nicely historical feel but the nostalgia is held at bay from the beginning when one of the children, Eddie, suffers what they all feel is a deep injustice at the hands (and cane) of their primary headteacher on their last day. This sets off a train of clashes with adult authority but also exposes the underlying tensions between the boys and the adults, between them as a group and between the world shown in the films (that Andrew, the narrator, loves) and the ‘real’ one. Bob, who has deliberately failed his 11+ exam to avoid his father, a harsh teacher at the grammar school, stutters since being buried alive for thirty-two hours after a bomb attack; Manny’s ‘life seemed awful’, constantly fussed over and ‘spectacularly unattractive’; Andrew worries about his father’s black market activities and his unfaithfulness to his mother; and then the bomb-site starts being redeveloped. Their frustration and anger becomes in Eddie a deep desire for revenge and then they discover an unexploded bomb… There is a hardness which takes this beyond a ‘what larks’ story. It’s childhood memory coloured by anger, sad confusions and the dubious actions of adults with no mitigating human warmth.