Holly Ash

by Sam Youd

Holly Ash – once a straggle of rural cottages a tram’s ride from Liverpool – has been transformed, Frank Bates discovers when he returns years later as local boy made good. Now a director of Amalgamated Cables, and son-in-law of the chairman, he is shocked to see that in place of Ash Cottages, his boyhood home, rises the red and gold façade of Woolworth’s, the pride of a suburban shopping arcade. Frank’s childhood had been a solitary one until, exploring one day the abandoned lake pavilion of the Manor House, he first encountered the children of the new local doctor. The natural assurance of the Manson siblings threw into sharp relief his own reserve, his consciousness of the working-class poverty of his upbringing. John, Patrick, Patricia and Diana, however, accepted him into their tight-knit circle with open-handed generosity. Little did they suspect, as the years passed by, the resentment their quiet childhood companion secretly nursed against their effortless superiority, nor exactly how Frank’s bitterness would play out in their adult lives.

223 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1955

About the author

Sam Youd – who would go on, as John Christopher, to write The Death of Grass and The Tripods - was born in Lancashire in April 1922, during an unseasonable snowstorm.

His teenage love affair with science fiction was short-lived, and by his mid-twenties his ambition had turned to literary fiction. His first novel, The Winter Swan, came out in 1949; he brought out a total of ten non-genre titles, before turning his attention entirely to genre fiction.

As a writer of genre novels his range was extensive. Alongside John Christopher the dystopian and young adult writer, there was William Godfrey the cricket novelist, Peter Graaf the thriller writer, Hilary Ford whose stories centred on female protagonists, Stanley Winchester who chronicled the carnal tendencies of the medical profession.

But writing literary fiction meant a lot to him, and he turned his back on it reluctantly. The novels written under his own name are eclectic in their themes and outlooks: from a woman’s life told in reverse, to crises of faith amongst Jews and Catholics, to anti-heroes and deserters in World War II, to séances in post-war London. The last of the series, a bitter-sweet comedy of errors set in a large decaying country house, was published in 1963. He would continue to write, in a more popular vein, for several more decades.