Becoming Henry

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In 1961 in suburban England, a strange child is born, arriving on a Halloween morning when the spirits of vengeful ghosts are thronging the air. The child is, superficially at least, male, and he has a resentful stare, as if he objects to the name that has been foisted upon him without so much as a by-your-leave: the name of Henry Truffle. Once he has been wiped clean of excrement, his mother notes that the passage through the birth canal has squashed Henry’s head out of shape. This is another affliction life has visited upon him before he has had any say in the matter.

At school he is bullied and called Triangle Head. It is a head in which he hears strange voices, voices compelling him to count to astronomical numbers, to push his sister off a swing, and to throw ash from the fire in her eyes. It is also a head that imagines wolves creeping into his room at night, and one that wonders whether God and Father Christmas are the same person. It is head that ponders whether the devil can appear in the form of a wasp and sting him when he challenges Him to appear. When he tries it, the devil does.

By the 1970s Henry has fallen in love with David Bowie. If the devil is a wasp, God is David Bowie. Henry decides he wants to be like his idol, both androgynous and thin. He gives up food, wears bangles to school and adopts a foppish haircut. To his surprise, this doesn’t win him the love of his classmates, and the bullying gets worse. Then punk happens, and power cuts, and IRA bombs, so that Henry’s mental turmoil seems to have found an external reflection. Soon he finds himself torn between the Dickensian world of his grammar school , the violent world ‘outside the window’ and the more desirable one depicted in pop music, books and on TV. Unfortunately, as his mother keeps telling him, he cannot live his life in a pop song, or spend it hiding between the pages of a book.

In the end, he is divided between his love of a schoolfriend and his growing interest in girls. As an Oedipal child, he hates his father and loves his mother, but he remains convinced that he is not his parents’ child at all, but a creature of his own creation. Growing up is hard either way. David Jones became David Bowie, but Henry doesn’t have the option. He must become Henry Truffle, and learn to live in his own imperfect skin. No one said it would be easy…

This is a book about growing up in the 60s and 70s with a mixture of wonder and dread. It is my first novel.