How can you hate a man you can't keep your hands off?
When lead guitarist Danny Cassidy married ballet dancer Beth Regan in the seventies, no one thought it would last. Yet theirs was one of the happiest and most enduring of all the show-biz marriages. But a marriage, as someone once said is like an onion, you never know how many layers are beneath its skin. So how did she cope when his drinking got out of control, when his drug habits made them both paranoid, and when all his other women were twenty five years younger than her?
Excerpt
She passed the Floral Pavilion, the small seafront theatre where at the age of twelve she had given her first solo performance as Noel Cowards Parisian Pierrot. Dee had been so jealous she hadn’t spoken to her for a week. She used to love this place, New Brighton in the fifties was vibrant; a small seaside town that could easily out -do Blackpool. Well, probably not, but when you’re a child and your Grandparents live across the road from a large open-air funfair, and only a mile away from an indoor one, a boating lake, and a large outdoor swimming pool, you have no need for Blackpool.
Summers, in New Brighton meant tourists, gaggles of them. Some would come over on the ferry from Liverpool, the ‘day-trippers’ forever immortalized in the Beatles song. Others, from further a-field would arrive in armadas of gaily-painted charabancs, and stay for a week’s bed and breakfast. Lying in wait for them, and eager for their money, were the countless numbers of candyfloss, rock, and doughnut shops, hot –dog stands, fish and chip vans, and public houses, each and every one of them releasing their sweetly pungent aromas into the hot summer air. High summer, when hyperactive young men dressed themselves in jewel coloured drainpipe trousers, long drape jackets and thick sole shoes, spent their days swaggering, up and down the promenade in a predatory search for girls, who high on a mixture of sugar and Babycham, who wouldn’t say no.
Professional Reviews
Highly readable, and exceptional
In Where the Cricket Sings, Lynn Morrison combines narrative, and character, to comment upon many real situations. Her deep examination of Beth, her main character, is treated with sensitivity and consideration. The backgrounds are effectively drawn, and convincing, and the whole book has a feeling of freshness and vitality. Where the Cricket Sings is highly readable, and a rather exceptional.
Shirine McVey discovers that twenty years of her life have elapsed since she went to sleep in a hotel room in El Paso, Texas. And worse, she is married to a man she doesn't know.
