Dimensions
144 x 222 x 25mm
In 1964, the year Will Cohu was born, his grandparents moved to Bramble Carr, a remote house in a deep valley below the Yorkshire moors. To a child spending his summers and winters there, the moors were freedom and romance: its adult themes of frustration and isolation only emerging some time later, when he discovered that the move was an attempt to curtail his grandfather's destructive love affair with another woman. The relocation to the moors didn't stop the couple's poisoned relationship infecting the whole family. Exquisitely written, with the tender perspective of a child -- but flecked with a wonderfully sharp wit -- we meet the eccentrics in and outside the family: from the landlady of the Fox and Hounds who danced nude on the tables, to the two wild rovers, Uncle Bob and Uncle Bill, who joined the merchant navy and 'escaped' to the New World u sailed together, fought each other, and disastrously, adored the same woman. Here is the dark underbelly of James Herriott's Yorkshire: a Britain of forty years ago that is compelling, dangerous, funny and frightening; a place where the rural idyll is riddled with drink, drugs, and the black dog of self-destruction. From the head-high snowdrifts and sledging adventures at Bramble Carr to the heat of the Australian outback, where Uncle Bob, a bear of a man but frail as a moth, dies the loneliest death a man can have. The Wolf Pit is a dark comedy about how we attempt to hold together and struggle against the elements without and within u and how laughter is always the great lifeline.
