Lakara's Warehouse

and Other Stories

The stories:

Me and Adolf is one of the first stories I ever wrote. A boy grows up on the Phoenix Estate believing he looks like Hitler. The idea occurred to me when I was washing up in the kitchen one afternoon. I wrote it in a blur the same evening. "Biting social satire." (Gold Dust Magazine.)

On Banbury Street reflects an ongoing interest in the history of social housing and housing estates. This interest surfaces again in Rita's Cafe and Faith and Grace, which is from my second collection of stories called Swans.

The Big 313 is a story about falling for a backing singer from Detroit. I bet it happens more often than we realise. There are lots of backing singers I'd have fallen for, given the chance, and there are lots of singers from Detroit. Here, the opportunity for a new beginning comes along.

This Life describes those moments when parents get the news they didn't want to hear. Somehow you just cope with it, and you learn, and you grow.

Lakara's Warehouse came immediately after Me and Adolf and originates from my years in special needs when I knew a child like Lakara, and knew her mother. It wasn't an easy story to tell, because the circumstances of their lives weren't easy; but that made it important to tell Lakara's story. When it was completed, I knew the story hadn't ended, that there was more to say. A long time later I wrote Five Years On in order to say it.

An Angel Called Lorraine is an early story about a sixteen year old who met an angel. He thought she was lovely and called her Lorraine. He swears to this day it really happened.

Rita's Cafe. A group of young people gather daily at Rita's Cafe to discuss their lives and ambitions, looking for ways to make progress in this world, a world that has so far offered them very little. They meet their challenges with humour and goodwill. They have plans, and begin to work for a better future.

A note on The Letter. Many of the events in this story, but not all, are based on real life. Real people, real places, real events, all gathered lovingly together, embellished, conflated, polished and transmuted into fiction. But is anything really fiction? Reality and fiction often blur and feed into each other. The differences between the two are sometimes very fine. This story later became the basis for my novel Sicily Amore.