Robert Forster
Ben Robson is a self-reliant, socially mobile, boomer. He began life when food was rationed and advanced to Grammar School where bullying was common, his sister had to be protected from assault, and the headteacher punished male pupils with a tawse.Work on a family farm makes him familiar with birth, blood, sex, and death. Always contrary he watches 1968’s anti-Vietnam war demonstration from inside the American Embassy, hunts foxes, plays cards to earn money, then, eager for a clean sheet, casts aside his education to herd cattle on Pagamba in the South Pacific, where he is loved by Hilda and launches Hilbenkunpit. Back in Britain he works as a campaigning photo-journalist, is confidential adviser to an agricultural administrator in Whitehall, and lives with Judy in his home town’s lofty Crown Lane. His Pagamban links resurface when his eldest son, Kit Kunjin, knocks on the family’s door.The story ends with grass skirt dancing outside the patrician fortress his sister’s sons will inherit. Crown Lane underlines the gifts offered to, and difficulties faced by, the maligned post-war bulge, the many assaults, including BSE then Foot and Mouth Disease, on livestock farming, and Britain’s destructive addiction to super-cheap food. It is hard edged
