Doodlebug Summer

A story set during World War II. It is the summer of 1944. There have been no air raids for quite a while, and people are beginning to think the war may be coming to an end. Katie and her family don't sleep in the shelter any more, and it's a relief to be back in the comfort of proper beds. One night in June, she wakes to hear a noise like a loud motorbike, coming closer. It stops abruptly, and there are a few seconds of silence - then an explosion that rocks the house. The Doodlebugs have arrived...

This is an eclectic and thought-provoking book, best defined as a modern day fairy tale in which the dreams and lives of four people are inexorably linked together across time, bound by love, friendship, heartache and fateDuring the London Blitz a young woman, Iris, has a vision while reading Tarot cards of two lovers in great peril and knows it will be her destiny to help them. Meanwhile Robert, a wounded and repressed Battle of Britain pilot, dreams of happiness and of a love he believes he can never have.In another time, Charlie, a troubled little boy with amazing blue-green eyes growing up in the repressed suburbs of 1950s South London, dreams of the number ‘80’ and knows only that it means something terrible and evil. Elsewhere, a dark, disturbed man dreams repeatedly of Charlie and knows it is his destiny to kill him.This time-travelling tale moves between present day Dulwich, World War Two London, the gay bars of the 1970s, Eva Peron’s Buenos Aires and Glastonbury Tor in 1989. It is a tale of great love and loss, destiny, tragedy, spiritual transformation and self-acceptance. It asks questions about how much of our lives are destined and how much can be altered and about what the effects of unintentional time travel would be on very ordinary people. This book can be interpreted on many different levels. On one it is a murder-mystery, on another an allegorical tale of spiritual transformation, on a third, a complex tale of two gay men’s individual journeys into adulthood and on a fourth, a simple and beautiful love story.

5ive Aitch, In the meeting of Manikin Ann, is about a quest to help save these thirteen princesses who in their life time had gotten taken advantage of right at the moment when their lives were truly crumbling apart by this unknown stranger who was a true sweet talker and who told them he could set everything right back in their lives that was only if they took up his offer and would be able to keep a promise which they would have to fulfill and keep or if not their souls he would take just as their troubles would never rest a days sleep. While by this poor boy named Podgy who moved to a new town named FallenForHer, it wasnt too long after until he quickly fell in love with this gorgeous girl named 5ive, the older sister of Doodlebug the first friend he made and who was willing to help him win her sisters heart by getting her the one thing that surely would the Book of Hearts . . . the book which held all of the secrets and was the key factor in how to help save each one of the thirteen princesses, while by the love Podgy had and with Doodlebugs help it quickly put 5ive in the spotlight.

On Sunday 18 June 1944 the congregation assembled for morning service in the Guards Chapel in Wellington Barracks, St Jamess Park, central London. The service started at 11 am. Lord Hay had read the first lesson, and the Te Deum was about to begin, when the noise of a V1 was heard. The engine cut out. There was a brief silence, an intensive blue flash and an explosion and the roof collapsed, burying the congregation in ten feet of rubble.This was the most deadly V1 attack of the Second World War, and Jan Gores painstakingly researched, graphic and moving account of the bombing and the aftermath tells the whole story. In vivid detail she describes the rescue effort which went on, day and night, for two days, and she records the names, circumstances and lives of each of the victims, and explains why they happened to be there.Her minutely detailed reconstruction of this tragic episode in the V1 campaign against London commemorates the dead and wounded, and it gives us today an absorbing insight into the wartime experience of all those whose lives were affected by it.

North London cricket followers turned to their morning newspapers for eleven summers, in 1939 and from 1946 to 1955, to see how Robertson (J.D.) and Brown (S.M.) had fared as the Middlesex opening batsmen. They were not often disappointed. The pair opened the batting 366 times and their partnerships put on 14,116 runs, reaching 100 runs or more on 35 occasions. As memories of their endeavours fade, cricket enthusiasts nowadays have perhaps typecast them as the warm-up act to the prodigious talents of Bill Edrich and Denis Compton. But they were more than that. Even that curmudgeonly old critic E.M. Wellings thought Jack ‘a beautifully fluent stroke-maker’, and Syd ‘a splendid county batsman’. He thought selectors looked too hard for flaws in Jack’s top-class batting technique, thus restricting him to 11 test matches; and he reckoned Syd to be among the finest fielders in the deep. Using material from a wide range of sources, Chris Overson here writes on their early influences, their almost simultaneous start at Lord’s in 1934, their inevitable cricketing ups and downs − often in those days before crowds of 10,000 or more − and their lives after they had left the field of play.

Henry Cooper is best remembered for the night he nearly changed boxing history - 19 July 1963. Fighting an up-and-coming boxer by the name of Cassius Clay, later to become Muhammad Ali, his famous left hook (known as 'Henry's Hammer') sent Clay crashing onto the canvas. Arguable Britain's greatest ever heavyweight fighter, Cooper won 40 of his 55 professional bouts, beating most of the true boxing greats along the way. His story is littered with famous names - Rocky Marciano, Floyd Patterson, Sonny Liston, Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, and, of course, Ali. But Cooper's retirement from the sport did not spell then end of his time in the public eye, as he embarked on a successful media career. Disaster struck in the 1990s, however, when his innocent involvement in a scandal surrouding insuracne giants Lloyds of London led to him having to sell his unique collection of three Lonsdale belts topay his bills. He was knighted in the millennium New Year's honours list for his services to boxing, and his death in May 2011 sparkd a huge outpouring of tributes from the sporting community. This is the biography of an intriguing character, a great fighter and a true sporting legend.

In the eyes of Britain’s heritage industry, London is the traditional home of empire, monarchy and power, an urban wonderland for the privileged, where the vast majority of Londoners feature only to applaud in the background. Yet, for nearly 2000 years, the city has been a breeding ground for radical ideas, home to thinkers, heretics and rebels from John Wycliffe to Karl Marx. It has been the site of sometimes violent clashes that changed the course of history: the Levellers’ doomed struggle for liberty in the aftermath of the Civil War; the silk weavers, match girls and dockers who crusaded for workers’ rights; and the Battle of Cable Street, where East Enders took on Oswald Mosley’s Black Shirts. A People’s History of London journeys to a city of pamphleteers, agitators, exiles and revolutionaries, where millions of people have struggled in obscurity to secure a better future.

From the London Blitz of 1940 through to the present day, the author takes us on a very personal journey through her childhood in dwindling parts of the Empire, does anyone remember Aden, Northern Rhodesia and Basutoland? Personal reminiscences of these countries also include some historical tit-bits. On to teenage romances then into the complexities of marriage(s). Worldwide travels follow encompassing flying boats, cruise liners, mokoros and Cessnas. After such an exciting and peripatetic life it is a wonder that she can settle down to retirement - she can't! At an advanced age her journey continues at the University of Oxford with the studying that she abandoned in her teens and we are introduced to the various erudite, but nevertheless interesting, subjects that fill these later years.