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Time and the Hour
Beginning just before the outbreak of the First World War, this is the story of the moral values of the age. It is a story of illegitimacy and deception - where a child has to come to terms with discovering who his mother really is. It is a story in which romance is set against the backdrop of the growth of fascism in Europe, where London has become a refuge for persecuted Jews, and where Dunkerley newspaper reporter Joe Morrison has become a thorn in the sides of the European dictators. It is a story in which the looming Second World War and the intrigue leading up to it take on a frightening reality. This is the third volume in Howard Spring's 'Hard Facts' trilogy.
548 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1964
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39 people want to read
About the author
Howard Spring
63 books33 followersHOWARD SPRING was an immensely popular and successful writer, who enjoyed a large following of readers from the 1940s to the 1960s; and though, since his death in 1965, he has become rather neglected, his books are still worth seeking out for their terrific storytelling and the quality of the writing. He was certainly painstaking and professional in his approach. Every morning he would shut himself in his study and write one thousand words, steadily building up to novels of around one hundred and fifty thousand words. He rarely made major alterations to his writings (all completed with a dip-in pen!).
Howard Spring started out as a journalist, but from 1934 produced a series of best-selling novels, the most successful of which were My Son My Son and Fame is the Spur.
He was born in Cardiff in 1889 in humble circumstances, one of nine children and the son of a jobbing gardener who died while Howard was still at school. He left school at the age of 12 to begin work as an errand boy, later becoming an office boy at a firm of accountants in Cardiff Docks, and then a messenger at the South Wales Daily News. Spring was keen to train as a reporter, and was largely self-taught --he spent his leisure time learning shorthand and taking evening classes, where he studied English, French, Latin, mathematics and history. He mastered English grammar by studying a book on the subject by William Cobbett.
He worked his way up to become a reporter on the South Wales Daily News, and then in 1911 he joined the Yorkshire Observer in Bradford. By 1915 he was on the Manchester Guardian –proof that he was a young man with much talent. Soon afterwards he was called up for the Army Service Corps, where he served as a shorthand typist. After the war, he returned to the paper in Manchester and worked as a reporter on a paper that allowed journalists to write and express themselves. In 1931, after reporting on a political meeting at which Lord Beaverbrook was the speaker, Beaverbrook was so impressed by Spring's piece (he described the man as ‘a pedlar of dreams’) that he arranged for Spring to be offered a post with the Evening Standard in London, where he eventually became a book reviewer –a successor to Arnold Bennett and J.B. Priestley.
At the same time, Spring was developing his ambition to become a full-time writer. He thought he could do a lot better than many of the so-called authors whose books he was asked to review! His first book, Darkie and Co, came out in 1932 (in this period he wrote a number of children’s books for his sons), followed by his first novel, Shabby Tiger (September 1934) and a sequel, Rachel Rosing (1935).
His first major success came in February 1938 with My Son, My Son (originally titled O Absalom, but, happily, changed when William Faulkner used a similar title in the United States), and in 1939 he was able to move to Cornwall to become a full-time writer (he and his wife, Marion, eventually settled at The White Cottage in Fenwick Road, where they remained for the rest of their married life). In 1940, his best-known work, Fame is the Spur, the story of a Labour leader's rise to power, was published. This is without doubt a superb novel, and probably the one book by Spring that is still being read more than 40 years after his death.
During the war years Spring wrote two other novels, Hard Facts (1944) and Dunkerley's (1946), and, subsequently he published There is No Armour (1948), The Houses in Between (1951), A Sunset Touch (1953), These Lovers Fled Away (1955), Time and the Hour (1957), All The Day Long (1959) and I Met a Lady (1961). Spring also produced three volumes of autobiography--Heaven Lies About Us (1939), In the Meantime (1942); and And Another Thing (1946)—which were later published in one volume as The Autobiography (1972). His last book was Winds of the Day (1964).
It is relevant to note that many of his books had Manchester settings, which led to him being referred to as ‘The Manchester Man’, and
Howard Spring started out as a journalist, but from 1934 produced a series of best-selling novels, the most successful of which were My Son My Son and Fame is the Spur.
He was born in Cardiff in 1889 in humble circumstances, one of nine children and the son of a jobbing gardener who died while Howard was still at school. He left school at the age of 12 to begin work as an errand boy, later becoming an office boy at a firm of accountants in Cardiff Docks, and then a messenger at the South Wales Daily News. Spring was keen to train as a reporter, and was largely self-taught --he spent his leisure time learning shorthand and taking evening classes, where he studied English, French, Latin, mathematics and history. He mastered English grammar by studying a book on the subject by William Cobbett.
He worked his way up to become a reporter on the South Wales Daily News, and then in 1911 he joined the Yorkshire Observer in Bradford. By 1915 he was on the Manchester Guardian –proof that he was a young man with much talent. Soon afterwards he was called up for the Army Service Corps, where he served as a shorthand typist. After the war, he returned to the paper in Manchester and worked as a reporter on a paper that allowed journalists to write and express themselves. In 1931, after reporting on a political meeting at which Lord Beaverbrook was the speaker, Beaverbrook was so impressed by Spring's piece (he described the man as ‘a pedlar of dreams’) that he arranged for Spring to be offered a post with the Evening Standard in London, where he eventually became a book reviewer –a successor to Arnold Bennett and J.B. Priestley.
At the same time, Spring was developing his ambition to become a full-time writer. He thought he could do a lot better than many of the so-called authors whose books he was asked to review! His first book, Darkie and Co, came out in 1932 (in this period he wrote a number of children’s books for his sons), followed by his first novel, Shabby Tiger (September 1934) and a sequel, Rachel Rosing (1935).
His first major success came in February 1938 with My Son, My Son (originally titled O Absalom, but, happily, changed when William Faulkner used a similar title in the United States), and in 1939 he was able to move to Cornwall to become a full-time writer (he and his wife, Marion, eventually settled at The White Cottage in Fenwick Road, where they remained for the rest of their married life). In 1940, his best-known work, Fame is the Spur, the story of a Labour leader's rise to power, was published. This is without doubt a superb novel, and probably the one book by Spring that is still being read more than 40 years after his death.
During the war years Spring wrote two other novels, Hard Facts (1944) and Dunkerley's (1946), and, subsequently he published There is No Armour (1948), The Houses in Between (1951), A Sunset Touch (1953), These Lovers Fled Away (1955), Time and the Hour (1957), All The Day Long (1959) and I Met a Lady (1961). Spring also produced three volumes of autobiography--Heaven Lies About Us (1939), In the Meantime (1942); and And Another Thing (1946)—which were later published in one volume as The Autobiography (1972). His last book was Winds of the Day (1964).
It is relevant to note that many of his books had Manchester settings, which led to him being referred to as ‘The Manchester Man’, and
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 26, 2017
I always know when I pick up a Howard Spring book that I'm in for a treat. He didn't usually write adventure books but you always felt you LIVED.
In this book we follow the lives of mainly four characters, (and about a dozen all together) and how their lives intertwined from being children in WW1 to being a little too old for active duty in WW2.
Never all-rosy, never all-villanous, the characters are nothing if not real. Another great read!
CONTENT:
PROFANITY: Mild
VIOLENCE: mild
SEX: one occasion behind closed doors
In this book we follow the lives of mainly four characters, (and about a dozen all together) and how their lives intertwined from being children in WW1 to being a little too old for active duty in WW2.
Never all-rosy, never all-villanous, the characters are nothing if not real. Another great read!
CONTENT:
PROFANITY: Mild
VIOLENCE: mild
SEX: one occasion behind closed doors
August 21, 2025
Confession: I pinched this book from a pub that’s made cosy with shelves of old books from floor to ceiling. Well, I didn’t exactly pinch it - but I didn’t pay for it. This was with the publican’s permission, I hasten to add. He cheerfully said I was welcome to take it, as he only paid a pound a meter for multiple lengths of old books from a major wholesaler of vintage stock designed to “create ambiance” in pubs and restaurants. Well, who knew!
I have to say, the book wasn’t especially attractive to look at - and it’s by a writer who I don’t think sets modern readers’ hearts fluttering. It looks pretty daunting to read with 450 pages, dense blocks of paragraphs and a small typeface.
For the first 100-odd pages I felt anxious about remembering who all the people were who were constantly being introduced. It wasn’t immediately obvious who the principal characters were going to be, and who were the secondary cast, so I felt obliged to pay attention to everyone. And this got quite exhausting, as even apparently minor folk seemed to be given detailed back-histories and significant airtime.
Mind you, all this was surprisingly interesting, and I found myself pleasantly distracted as I meandered from Edwardian music halls to nighttime toboggan runs, from Methodist chapels to bohemian Paris of the 1890s.
By around page 100, I decided that Anthony Bromwich and Chris Hudson were probably the principal characters, although both were frequently absent from the main narrative. They’re the two boys in the school playground at the very beginning of the novel, with Anthony rescuing Chris from bullies.
Anthony’s kind and straightforward; he saves a mouse as a child. Chris is resentful, petulant and aloof; he’s mortified at being seen out with his embarrassing father. The boys don’t really change much as they grow older and the world changes around them. They’re too young to fight in World War I. Both come into wealth. Anthony becomes a gentleman restaurateur. Chris goes to Public School and Oxford, and becomes a lawyer. They don’t much like each other. They grow apart and their importance and presence diminishes as the story progresses.
Other characters whose lives weave around Anthony and Chris are provided with detailed back-stories and time in the spotlight. They include:
- Anthony’s adoptive parents, enigmatic Aunt Jessie with her theatrical past, and hypochondriac Uncle Horace with his herbal tobacco and mysterious job.
- Chris’s father, Dick Hudson, a top-of-the-bill celebrity music-hall artist who despite his fame and fortune remains a simple Bradford lad at heart.
- Edna Wayland, Aunt Jessie’s posh next-door neighbour, with a surprisingly unorthodox past and social aspirations, constantly hard at work, constantly disappointed. She provides board & lodgings and private tutoring to the young, callow Chris Hudson.
- Edna’s daughter, Lottie Wayland, fluent in French and fitting in so well, she always seems slightly invisible. It’s quite a surprise when she - in typically low-key fashion - finally marries Anthony. She helps him establish his swish London restaurant and brings up the children in leafy Pinner.
- Mrs Emily Freilinghausen (anglicised to Fieldhouse at the start of the First World War), formerly the glamorous music-hall artiste, Florrie Finch, and now a staid surgeon’s wife, who turns out to be Anthony’s mother.
- Septimus Pordage, Anthony’s pink, portly and idiosyncratic private-tutor who lives quaintly in the Yorkshire Dales and rises to the status of Colonel DSO without ever seeing active service.
- Mill-owner, Ada Halliwell, Mr Pordage’s self-made, hard-as-nails, heart-of-gold local neighbour, and her breezy, self-confident daughter Joanna.
- Dulcie Dearmer, the music-hall chanteuse famed for “smiling through” with “songs about streams and dreams and all such languorous things” (p138), born Alice Box, a vicar’s daughter, and afflicted by loneliness and cocaine-dependency.
- Joe Morrison, Anthony’s old school chum, ginger and chubby, a determined and highly-principled young journalist who becomes an important foreign correspondent trying to warn about the rise of Fascism.
- Leonard Morrison, Joe’s confident and slightly overbearing father, who marries Emily Fieldhouse, now a very wealthy widow.
- John Shrubb, a shy war invalid and architect, who’s commissioned by indomitable Ada Halliwell to restore the ballroom of the local Georgian Assembly Rooms.
- William Scroop (Sir William, Eleventh Bart), an impoverished, highly-strung young aristocrat, who’d “been through the Somme and Passchendaele” (p212) with his pal John Shrubb, and has a doomed marriage with Joanna Halliwell.
As the title suggests, the novel provides a sweeping panorama through British history, from Yorkshire in the 1890s to Europe on the verge of war (again) in 1937. We’re very seldom told the date explicitly but we’re constantly aware of the passage of time as the characters grow from childhood into adulthood. This the “Time and the Hour” which Howard Spring, like Shakespeare before him, observes passing remorselessly, running on indifferent to human passion and toil (“Our life itself is the passing, and if some of it is pretty rum, a lot of it is not to be sneezed at” p320).
The period setting is fascinating. Period vignettes that particularly intrigued me included:
- Dick Hudson’s famous music-hall act involving his impersonation of six different characters in quick succession (p57).
- The Territorial Army on exercises in the Yorkshire Dales, under the leadership of volunteer Captain Freilinghausen, singing and cooking breakfast in the morning sunshine (p72).
- A summer holiday at an elegant country-house hotel on the eve of the First World War, where Anthony Bromwich meets elegant and enigmatic Mrs Fieldhouse, unaware that she’s his mother (“He sat on the stile for a moment, looking at the immemorial scene, listening to the larks invisible in a sky whose blue was pale with heat, and he was troubled again with a pang of perfection, the more unendurable because of the grave matters that Mrs Fieldhouse had revealed to him” p119).
- The head boy at Anthony’s boarding school reading out in chapel the names of former pupils killed in the war: “There were three names, and ten, and twelve, and some of the names were of boys who had bathed with him in the river that ran through the school grounds, and walked with him in the hills, and laboured with him in class rooms and study” (p139).
- Survivors of the war - the wounded, the bereaved, the traumatised - struggling to adapt to civvy life (“I find my local pub comforting. There are plenty of men like that at the moment, you know. They’re rather at sea - looking round for something in place of lost comrades” p234).
- The Silver Star, the Soho nightclub, supposedly glamorous but quite unsavoury, where the disillusioned “Bright Young Things” of the 1920s dance and have champagne and oysters (p207).
- Enterprising new businesses - like the morally ambivalent Mr Frinton’s conglomerate - springing up in modern glass and steel structures on the site of old aristocratic town houses.
- The casual antisemitism experienced in London by Rudolph Schwann, the emigre German-Jewish lawyer, while his family in Germany was facing even more horrific racial hatred and violence.
- The rise of Fascism across Europe and the tendency of many to ignore, or appease, rather than confront the growing threats.
I was struck on many occasions by how small, apparently insignificant, details were picked up and repeated many pages later. For example:
- Dandelions first appear in the picture that Edna Wayland’s bohemian artist friend paints of her in Paris; they reappear pages later in between the cobbles of Megson Street much to Edna’s vexation; a hundred pages on, they form part of Anthony’s nostalgic memories of the street where he spent his boyhood with his Auntie Jess; and towards the end of the novel, at the baptism of Anthony and Lottie’s baby Liz, Jess remembers and mocks Edna about “keeping down the dandelions”.
- Austin Sinclair, a young curate in Dulcie Dearmer’s father’s parish, who gives Dulcie moral support in her struggles with her vicious new stepmother, reappears ten years later as her priest confessor at an East End mission.
- Valpy, Septimus Pordage’s pampered pony, who’s been loveable and quixotic on multiple occasions throughout the novel and whose death made me blub (“And nothing can be done, and you stand and watch them die … and it is death and the sadness and the revolt that death brings” p287).
- Festus, the rat rescued by lonely, kind-hearted John Shrubb, is mentioned by the Coroner who records the fact that William Scroop had purposefully moved the rat cage so that the rat wouldn’t be gassed (p318).
- A young unnamed under-butler polishes the brass in the Fieldhouses’ swish residence; a hundred pages later we discover, just in passing, that this still unnamed and “unimpressive” young man “had won the VC and died in doing it” (p158).
The novel is powerful, vast and impressive, elegantly constructed and beautifully written. Halfway through, I was enjoying it all tremendously and wondering whether it would end up as a four- or a five-star rating.
But with just a hundred pages or so to go, I realised that my attention was wandering. Characters I’d enjoyed seemed to have faded away. Newer characters didn’t have the same attraction for me. The story seemed to have lost impetus and I felt unsighted as to where it was going and why.
I realise this is the whole point really, I suppose - to show how life isn’t a neat line from start to finish. People’s lives, and the bigger stuff that we call “ history”, are messy and sprawling. People who play a huge part in our lives, say in childhood, or as young adults, disappear when they or we settle down. People come and go. Things never turn out as expected. Life that sometimes seems to be filmed in technicolour often ends up in black and white. There are the intense moments and the days of dullness. “Time and the Hour” take their toll - and it’s unfair of me to criticise Howard Spring for simply reminding us how things inevitably are and always will be …
I have to say, the book wasn’t especially attractive to look at - and it’s by a writer who I don’t think sets modern readers’ hearts fluttering. It looks pretty daunting to read with 450 pages, dense blocks of paragraphs and a small typeface.
For the first 100-odd pages I felt anxious about remembering who all the people were who were constantly being introduced. It wasn’t immediately obvious who the principal characters were going to be, and who were the secondary cast, so I felt obliged to pay attention to everyone. And this got quite exhausting, as even apparently minor folk seemed to be given detailed back-histories and significant airtime.
Mind you, all this was surprisingly interesting, and I found myself pleasantly distracted as I meandered from Edwardian music halls to nighttime toboggan runs, from Methodist chapels to bohemian Paris of the 1890s.
By around page 100, I decided that Anthony Bromwich and Chris Hudson were probably the principal characters, although both were frequently absent from the main narrative. They’re the two boys in the school playground at the very beginning of the novel, with Anthony rescuing Chris from bullies.
Anthony’s kind and straightforward; he saves a mouse as a child. Chris is resentful, petulant and aloof; he’s mortified at being seen out with his embarrassing father. The boys don’t really change much as they grow older and the world changes around them. They’re too young to fight in World War I. Both come into wealth. Anthony becomes a gentleman restaurateur. Chris goes to Public School and Oxford, and becomes a lawyer. They don’t much like each other. They grow apart and their importance and presence diminishes as the story progresses.
Other characters whose lives weave around Anthony and Chris are provided with detailed back-stories and time in the spotlight. They include:
- Anthony’s adoptive parents, enigmatic Aunt Jessie with her theatrical past, and hypochondriac Uncle Horace with his herbal tobacco and mysterious job.
- Chris’s father, Dick Hudson, a top-of-the-bill celebrity music-hall artist who despite his fame and fortune remains a simple Bradford lad at heart.
- Edna Wayland, Aunt Jessie’s posh next-door neighbour, with a surprisingly unorthodox past and social aspirations, constantly hard at work, constantly disappointed. She provides board & lodgings and private tutoring to the young, callow Chris Hudson.
- Edna’s daughter, Lottie Wayland, fluent in French and fitting in so well, she always seems slightly invisible. It’s quite a surprise when she - in typically low-key fashion - finally marries Anthony. She helps him establish his swish London restaurant and brings up the children in leafy Pinner.
- Mrs Emily Freilinghausen (anglicised to Fieldhouse at the start of the First World War), formerly the glamorous music-hall artiste, Florrie Finch, and now a staid surgeon’s wife, who turns out to be Anthony’s mother.
- Septimus Pordage, Anthony’s pink, portly and idiosyncratic private-tutor who lives quaintly in the Yorkshire Dales and rises to the status of Colonel DSO without ever seeing active service.
- Mill-owner, Ada Halliwell, Mr Pordage’s self-made, hard-as-nails, heart-of-gold local neighbour, and her breezy, self-confident daughter Joanna.
- Dulcie Dearmer, the music-hall chanteuse famed for “smiling through” with “songs about streams and dreams and all such languorous things” (p138), born Alice Box, a vicar’s daughter, and afflicted by loneliness and cocaine-dependency.
- Joe Morrison, Anthony’s old school chum, ginger and chubby, a determined and highly-principled young journalist who becomes an important foreign correspondent trying to warn about the rise of Fascism.
- Leonard Morrison, Joe’s confident and slightly overbearing father, who marries Emily Fieldhouse, now a very wealthy widow.
- John Shrubb, a shy war invalid and architect, who’s commissioned by indomitable Ada Halliwell to restore the ballroom of the local Georgian Assembly Rooms.
- William Scroop (Sir William, Eleventh Bart), an impoverished, highly-strung young aristocrat, who’d “been through the Somme and Passchendaele” (p212) with his pal John Shrubb, and has a doomed marriage with Joanna Halliwell.
As the title suggests, the novel provides a sweeping panorama through British history, from Yorkshire in the 1890s to Europe on the verge of war (again) in 1937. We’re very seldom told the date explicitly but we’re constantly aware of the passage of time as the characters grow from childhood into adulthood. This the “Time and the Hour” which Howard Spring, like Shakespeare before him, observes passing remorselessly, running on indifferent to human passion and toil (“Our life itself is the passing, and if some of it is pretty rum, a lot of it is not to be sneezed at” p320).
The period setting is fascinating. Period vignettes that particularly intrigued me included:
- Dick Hudson’s famous music-hall act involving his impersonation of six different characters in quick succession (p57).
- The Territorial Army on exercises in the Yorkshire Dales, under the leadership of volunteer Captain Freilinghausen, singing and cooking breakfast in the morning sunshine (p72).
- A summer holiday at an elegant country-house hotel on the eve of the First World War, where Anthony Bromwich meets elegant and enigmatic Mrs Fieldhouse, unaware that she’s his mother (“He sat on the stile for a moment, looking at the immemorial scene, listening to the larks invisible in a sky whose blue was pale with heat, and he was troubled again with a pang of perfection, the more unendurable because of the grave matters that Mrs Fieldhouse had revealed to him” p119).
- The head boy at Anthony’s boarding school reading out in chapel the names of former pupils killed in the war: “There were three names, and ten, and twelve, and some of the names were of boys who had bathed with him in the river that ran through the school grounds, and walked with him in the hills, and laboured with him in class rooms and study” (p139).
- Survivors of the war - the wounded, the bereaved, the traumatised - struggling to adapt to civvy life (“I find my local pub comforting. There are plenty of men like that at the moment, you know. They’re rather at sea - looking round for something in place of lost comrades” p234).
- The Silver Star, the Soho nightclub, supposedly glamorous but quite unsavoury, where the disillusioned “Bright Young Things” of the 1920s dance and have champagne and oysters (p207).
- Enterprising new businesses - like the morally ambivalent Mr Frinton’s conglomerate - springing up in modern glass and steel structures on the site of old aristocratic town houses.
- The casual antisemitism experienced in London by Rudolph Schwann, the emigre German-Jewish lawyer, while his family in Germany was facing even more horrific racial hatred and violence.
- The rise of Fascism across Europe and the tendency of many to ignore, or appease, rather than confront the growing threats.
I was struck on many occasions by how small, apparently insignificant, details were picked up and repeated many pages later. For example:
- Dandelions first appear in the picture that Edna Wayland’s bohemian artist friend paints of her in Paris; they reappear pages later in between the cobbles of Megson Street much to Edna’s vexation; a hundred pages on, they form part of Anthony’s nostalgic memories of the street where he spent his boyhood with his Auntie Jess; and towards the end of the novel, at the baptism of Anthony and Lottie’s baby Liz, Jess remembers and mocks Edna about “keeping down the dandelions”.
- Austin Sinclair, a young curate in Dulcie Dearmer’s father’s parish, who gives Dulcie moral support in her struggles with her vicious new stepmother, reappears ten years later as her priest confessor at an East End mission.
- Valpy, Septimus Pordage’s pampered pony, who’s been loveable and quixotic on multiple occasions throughout the novel and whose death made me blub (“And nothing can be done, and you stand and watch them die … and it is death and the sadness and the revolt that death brings” p287).
- Festus, the rat rescued by lonely, kind-hearted John Shrubb, is mentioned by the Coroner who records the fact that William Scroop had purposefully moved the rat cage so that the rat wouldn’t be gassed (p318).
- A young unnamed under-butler polishes the brass in the Fieldhouses’ swish residence; a hundred pages later we discover, just in passing, that this still unnamed and “unimpressive” young man “had won the VC and died in doing it” (p158).
The novel is powerful, vast and impressive, elegantly constructed and beautifully written. Halfway through, I was enjoying it all tremendously and wondering whether it would end up as a four- or a five-star rating.
But with just a hundred pages or so to go, I realised that my attention was wandering. Characters I’d enjoyed seemed to have faded away. Newer characters didn’t have the same attraction for me. The story seemed to have lost impetus and I felt unsighted as to where it was going and why.
I realise this is the whole point really, I suppose - to show how life isn’t a neat line from start to finish. People’s lives, and the bigger stuff that we call “ history”, are messy and sprawling. People who play a huge part in our lives, say in childhood, or as young adults, disappear when they or we settle down. People come and go. Things never turn out as expected. Life that sometimes seems to be filmed in technicolour often ends up in black and white. There are the intense moments and the days of dullness. “Time and the Hour” take their toll - and it’s unfair of me to criticise Howard Spring for simply reminding us how things inevitably are and always will be …
August 15, 2018
Solid middlebrow writing from Howard Spring as always. He cares about his characters and the situations he places them in and as a reader you can't help doing the same. Veers into melodramatic soap opera territory a little too often unfortunately and the ending is frankly odd and didn't really make sense. By all accounts a committed, dedicated author as far as the task of writing was concerned you can't help but feel that he could quite easily have written another 500 pages of this family saga. I feel however that some judicious editing might have been employed. Hard Facts the 1st novel in this trilogy remains the best of the three.
June 14, 2025
A nicely written book, I like the inclusion of the letters from the characters to each other and the old slip of poetry which added a nice touch to the story.
The language was beautifully old in it's telling , with the word hoity-toity being used and I like that . It worked well considering the book was written in 1957 I felt it still carried over till present day with the language used.
The language was beautifully old in it's telling , with the word hoity-toity being used and I like that . It worked well considering the book was written in 1957 I felt it still carried over till present day with the language used.
June 3, 2022
Spring never fails
Another very good read from Howard Spring Not in the same league as Fame is the Spur or My Son My Son but what is? Just sit back and enjoy it.@
Another very good read from Howard Spring Not in the same league as Fame is the Spur or My Son My Son but what is? Just sit back and enjoy it.@
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews