‘Becoming Alfie’ by Neil Patterson is a historical fiction story that takes us back to a time of extreme poverty and hard times. The first in a planned series we meet Alfie Norrington as a baby. Born into the tough East End life in the first minute of the twentieth century.
We see the Norringtons, an East End family: a mother who runs the whole show, the father who is the useless one and his brother a ‘wheeler-dealer’ of the time. The one who is always on the edge of gaining a beating from his rivals or the Old Bill coming after him. Neil Patterson has written this story in such a way you are immersed in the old East End immediately. I envisioned the characters talking to each other in their cockney dialect and using all the slang. Alfie’s narration is very individual and I pictured him as a cheeky chappie from the word go.
Alfie is not just a cheeky chappie, that would be underestimating this lad. He gets through his life overcoming more than just poverty he is a resilient one. His ups and downs are told in his own plucky way. His truly horrific experiences of Flanders and the First World War and the aftermath of such things are recounted with the psychological impact for him of which he had no help as this wasn’t recognised at all back then. On a funnier note, we also get his love life, which had plenty of up and downs…in more than one way!
The book ends on Alfie embarking upon fulfilling a promise with the idea if he had no particular plans beyond that. We shall have to wait for the next instalment to see where life takes our Alfie Norrington.
I really got carried away with Alfie and his life. Enjoyed every turn of the page and was quite sad to finish this book as I got quite attached to him and his ‘adventures’ in life!
Thank you to Rachel’s Random Resources and Neil Patterson for my copy of Becoming Alfie for my review today.
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