The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman by Bruce Robinson

A coming-of-age tale by the writer of "Withnail and I" set in the 1950s. And what a strange decade the 1950s were: beating your children was acceptable while masturbation was beyond the pale.

Thomas Penman is 15 and lives with his godawful parents who hate him and each other. His father actively beats and bullies him while his limp and useless mother spends all her time boiling up cheap, nasty meat for her dogs which she allows to shit in the house. By the end of the book you can practically smell the shit and dogmeat. Also living with them is Thomas' beloved grandfather who is dying of cancer. Being 15, Thomas is not so much concerned with the gaping hole that the old man's death will leave in his life, but with what will happen to his grandfather's prodigious collection of pornography on his demise. Grandfather is not a loveable, white-haired, Werther's-toting old gent! Following the trauma of serving in the First World War, he went a bit strange and devoted himself to creating rather eccentric porn - such as erotic stories about boys at public school and pictures of naked women whose bums he has replaced with a second pair of breasts. The jewel in this porno crown turns out to be a picture of a woman with who seems to have a duck up her arse, with just its head sticking out. If Grandad dies, Mum and Dad will go through his things and this priceless collection will be thrown away. And so the young, gonad-driven Thomas begins the sneaky rumaging through his grandad's stuff that will eventually expose all his family's secrets.

I really enjoyed this book, mostly because it is filled with lurid descriptions of rather disgusting things, whether they are old, incontinent dogs, the contents of teenage boys' minds, the hypocrisy of nearly all the adults or the grisly deaths of crabs exploded by Thomas and his best friend as a hobby. All of life is here and looking pretty unwholesome. Here's a taste taken from a description of how Thomas lurks about his home:

"More often than not he located in the hall, wedged between the wall and a piece of furniture called a tallboy. When there was no one around this was his favourite spot. It was a dark, secret place, with bland wallpaper covered in dots. No one else ever got in here. (The only other person who ever got in here was his grandfather who had been known to exploit the isolation to hang his testicles over the banisters.)"

From now on whenever some old timer tries to tell me that things were better in the 50s when children weren't cheeky, women knew their place and gays could probably be burned at the stake, I shall be thinking of the woman with a duck up her arse...