Lay Gently on the Coals

Lay Gently on the Coals, a fictional family saga, set in The Boroughs in Northampton, on the eve of the Second World War, is a sardonic account of a family at war, its trials and tribulations.

The family of ex-Sergeant Jack Fulthorpe struggles to make ends meet. His is a mixed marriage - Jack is a Protestant, his wife Margaret a devoted Roman Catholic.

On Friday nights there is the ritual of welcoming home the breadwinner with his paypacket. The evening meal is invariably interrupted by the local parish priest, calling to collect the family's weekly contribution to the Poor Relief Fund. The priest chastises Mrs Fulthorpe for not having her offspring attend church and warns her that they're headed for purgatory.

Jack points out how odd it is that the priest should mention purgatory. He works there himself.

'Good preparation for the fires of hell,' says the priest.

'Aye!' says Jack. 'I'm a stoker in the gasworks, Father, and I make firebricks of fallen priests to line the furnace - but defrocked priests I lay gently on the coals.'

Such is life in The Boroughs that follows a pattern of conformity from which there seems no escape. The outbreak of war, however, changes all that when one after the other, the Fulthorpe children, all barely old enough to serve, don uniforms to help wage war: they enlist in the Royal Navy, the Army, the ATS and the WAAF.

Margaret Fulthorpe is the adhesive that holds the family together. When peace returns, their duty done, the one-time warriors put away their medals and get on with their lives. And the devoted daughter of Holy Mary, Mother of God, finds redemption for the fury she invoked in producing a brood of little heathens.

Full of rollicking good humour and Dickensian characters ... A celebration of the comic grace of ordinary people during a time of hard knocks.' (Judge James Clarke, author of A Mourner's Kaddish, Dreamworks, How to Bribe a Judge)