Written by Alan Fleet
ISBN: 978-1-901253-18-4
188 pages, paperback, 146mm x 208mm.
Price: £ 8.99 Postage and Packing: £ 1.82
Published by Leonie Press, July 2000.
Reprinted December 2000.
It paints a picture of division and prejudice between church and chapel in the communities of Over and Wharton during the pre-war generation, and in the 1960s between native 'Woollybacks' and incoming 'Scousers' from Liverpool who flood in, changing everything.
The author also examines the bad blood between those forever divided by the 11-Plus Examination into a striped-blazer Grammar School elite and secondary modern 'failures'. The situation is seen through the eyes of Joe, a working class boy who passes the exam and is then persecuted by jealous former companions who immediately regard him as a 'snob'.
The whole story is told as a thread running through the moving deathbed reconciliation between the adult Joe and his salt miner father. In spite of a mutual yearning for love and respect, their relationship has been marred by a lifetime of painful misunderstandings and barriers built up on both sides. At last, each is able to set the record straight - but can Joe bear the terrible burden that his dying father unwittingly places upon his shoulders?
"Winsford provides an excellent background to this story of the relationship between a father and his son," said Alan. "Some of the characters are composites of people I knew in my childhood, but most are fictional, with one or two harmless exceptions whom everyone would recognise, like Jasper the shopkeeper in the High Street."
Alan's hero starts as a raw schoolboy and ends as an educated married man with children. The story is told in a series of flashbacks and in each the author enters into the mind of Joe or his father, expressing himself in the way the character would have done at the time.
"I wanted to show how stupid prejudice was and how it can cloud judgement and hinder development. Change in life is inevitable. We simply have to acknowledge change and grow with it, not grow apart because of it," said the author.
Alan Fleet has lived in Mid-Cheshire all his life, apart from three years at Manchester University. He is a consultant geophysicist in the international oil industry and lives in Northwich with his wife Doreen and their children Adam and Danielle.
He and Doreen devote much of their time to the study of Aikido, which he describes as "perhaps the most spiritual of the martial arts".
Much of the conversation in the book is in Cheshire dialect, as spoken by Alan's father and preceding generations, though not so common now. Alan's original version was much closer to how the characters would have sounded, but he decided to water it down because it was hard to read on the page.
"I knew exactly how it all sounded in my head but it could have been off-putting to someone who wasn't familiar with the dialect," he said. "In places the language is a bit rough, but that's how men would talk to one another in the mine or the pub. They didn't speak like that at home."
The cover illustration, showing a number of wellknown Winsford buildings, has been drawn by Hartford artist Patricia Kelsall.
Amazon Customer Review - Rating *****
Fascinating. As soon as opened this book I could not put it down. I was captivated from the first page. My husband tried to get the book from me so I could cook his tea, needless to say he went without. - A reader from England, 17 October, 2000
We hear that "Woollyback" is being transformed into a film script. (Feb 2003)
