Peter Foreman

Be Lucky! Peter Foreman

There are some books that cry out to be written. "Be Lucky!" is one of them. An autobiographical narrative, it tells of the lives of the author and his father Ted, moving from pre-war London and on through the fifties and sixties to the present. Beginning with Ted Jerrard and his poor working-class upbringing, it goes on to describe his hair-raising experiences in the 1st Airlanding Brigade during World War II and his subsequent struggle with symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder, which deeply affected his wife and family. As his son, the author suffered the consequences of Ted's mental illness and felt compelled to write this book after Ted's death as a means of coming to terms with them. Inspired by a phantom encounter, the author begins a series of letters to his dead father which, interwoven with straight narrative, trace the moving story of the sometimes ambivalent relations between father and son through the decades. Ted's battle with a strong temptation to join his brother Ricky in a lucrative criminal career is strangely paralleled in his son's struggle to become a writer. Both men are obsessed with fantasies to make their dreams come true. Originating in the books and writers he admires, these fantasies fuel the author's dreams and drive him on in a restless and improvident life. Gradually, his fears of failure and sense of his life's meaninglessness increase until he reaches a point of suicidal despair. He is saved, however, by the hallucinatory meeting with his father, which spurs him to write this engrossing narrative, full of observations on people and places, and including some sharply critical comments on the publishing world. Married and divorced twice, the author enlivens the story by recounting his boyhood adventures with the bold girls of Battersea and his adult relationships with women. A tough street life, boozy family parties attended occasionally by London criminals, schoolmates, pet animals, boxing matches, girlfriends and wives - all are involved in his odyssey to discover what he calls the "secret of living". Behind it all is the ghostly presence of his father, with whom he converses in attempts to understand and so forgive the violence and abuse during his childhood. Some names have been changed (including the author's and his family member's), and incidents and places re-arranged for narrative effect, but the story is based on fact and is essentially true.