A Load of Old Tripe

Gervase Phinn

2009 aza. · Penguin UK

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For eleven-year old James Joseph Johnson (or Jimmy for short) life is not always straightforward. In fact, things can be quite complicated, and don't always turn out as he'd planned . . .

Born in 1946, Jimmy lives with his Mum and Dad in a shiny red brick terraced house in South Yorkshire near the steel works. Sometimes the air is thick and metallic tasting, with bits of soot floating around like little black snowflakes. Despite all this, Jimmy wouldn't want to live anywhere else.

His very best friend, Ignatius Plunkett, is a scrawny boy with a sharp beak of a nose, ears like jug handles and a mop of jet black hair. Micky is his rather 'posh' friend from the big houses down the road. The boys get into a few scrapes in the year leading up to the eleven-plus exams, but will they come out on top in the end?

Will Jimmy survive a week looking after Butch, the temperamental, barrel-bodied bull terrier? Will the truth about the trip to buy Dad's tripe ever come out? What really happens to Jimmy's Mum's coffee and walnut cake, and will the mystery of the missing locket ever get solved?

Egileari buruz

Gervase Phinn is a teacher, freelance lecturer, author, poet, school inspector, educational consultant, and visiting professor of education. For fourteen years he taught in a range of schools, then acted as General Adviser for Language Development in Rotherham before moving on to North Yorkshire, where he spent ten years as a school inspector - time that has provided much source material for his books. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an Honorary Fellow of St John's College, York. He lives with his family near Doncaster.