Gorbals Voices, Siren Songs

"Growing up in the Gorbals" described Ralph Glasser's poverty-stricken childhood in Glasgow as the son of impoverished Jewish immigrants, while "Gorbals Boy at Oxford" took him south to wartime Oxford and the army; and in this, the concluding volume, he ventures out into the wider world of London in the 20 years after the war. Working for the Arts Council and, later, in public relations, he straddled the worlds of business and Bohemia; unhappily married to a gentile girl, he still sought - as he had at Oxford - to put behind him the voices and the influences of the past, of his Jewishness and his Gorbals childhood. A film festival in Biarritz provides bizarre, almost surrealistic encounters with Cocteau, King Farouk and a Duke of Windsor virtually incapacitated by drink; Fitzrovia is scoured in search of a missing Oxford friend; a new life opens up after the extended torments of divorce: and yet, through all the changes and the excitment of his new life, old ties and old allegiances still, unexpectedly, make their claims, and inescapable truths intrude.