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Your Peasant’s Guide To What Went Wrong
by Anthony John
Format: Paperback
Publication date: 19th August, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-907179-08-2
Price: €15
The Schooling of a War Child
The year was 1944. One day when the three of us were walking along the shore, I drew Auntie Ba’s attention to an odd bundle stretched on the high tide line. Lying among the seawrack were clothes in the shape of a man, complete with boots at the bottom end and sort of hairy skin at the top… My only concern at this sombre spectacle was vague curiosity. Jane uncharacteristically burst into tears and sobbed almost hysterically. Auntie Ba remained calm. “It’s all right, Jane, Anthony,” she said quietly, her arms around both of us, “that was a brave airman who must have come down in the sea and drowned. He’s not there any more, you see. That’s only his body, and the waves have brought it home.”
About the Author
Born at the start of World War II, Anthony John was raised in the rural surroundings of wartime England. He was educated at public boarding school, and Grenoble and Oxford Universities. For some years he was a charter yacht skipper in the West Indies.
Back in the England of the mid-1970s he worked in a probation hostel and took an interest in the rural communes movement. He was latterly self-employed in building and property renovation. In the early 1990s he retired to a derelict smallholding with a roofless house in the west of Ireland. Here, the restoration of house and land, participation in the partly self-sufficient local community, and literary pursuits, continue to occupy him.
