`Cockney Savage` is an autobiographical fiction, comedy-history, and it is co-written with the author`s father who recollects, as a background, his own childhood during the First World War. Following the evacuation experience, with its ups and downs, and his run-in with the bullying billeting officer to whom he owes the title of the novel, an eccentric youth-club leader, whose motives are never quite clear, enters the story to educate and entertain and to a large extent confuse the adolescent hero with invites to the opera, would you believe, and serious theatre and museum visits, and the occasional private photo-shoot, and there is a growing tension as he tries to extricate himself from the relationship, forward his football and cricket career and his beyond-hope love affair with a beautiful German girl who tells him to forget about the war; all this and the `fifties` and a sudden addiction to jazz and the prospect of National Service!