Lapwings, John Healy, and a lost street in Morocco
With Justin Marozzi, John Healy, and John Mitchinson
‘My father didn’t look like he would harm anyone.’ So begins The Grass Arena, John Healy’s now classic autobiography of a life distorted by abuse, violence and alcoholism yet rendered in unflinching prose. Today Boundless presents an extract from its sequel, The Glass Cage; reflecting on the book made me consider stories of patriarchy, stories of violence, and how we draw a reader into a text.
The late Dame Hilary Mantel once recounted how the opening of Wolf Hall came to her as the novel was still only ‘a slow swirling backdrop of jewelled black and gold, a dark glitter at the corner of my eye’. She heard its opening line: ‘So now get up.’ A young Thomas Cromwell, so far from any thought of power, lies on the ground in Putney, felled by his father’s fist. Brutality and narrative in four words of a single syllable.
And then there is Edmund Gosse’s astonishing memoir Father and Son, first published anonymously in 1907. If you’ve never read it, all I can say is that you really must, or at least start by listening to Backlisted episode 43, on which the great Sarah Perry joins John and Andy in discussing the text. Its opening is — well, more Edwardian, let’s say. ‘This book is the record of a struggle between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs.’ In recounting his childhood as the son of the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, the boy who would become an influential literary critic and move far from his upbringing as one of the Plymouth Brethren, depicts love and fracture with enduring power. It’s also often hilarious.
But the final line of the preface to the first edition ends with one of the simplest and most moving remarks on how narrative can function that I know: ‘There was an extraordinary mixture of comedy and tragedy in the situation which is here described, and those who are affected by the pathos of it will not need to have it explained to them that the comedy was superficial and the tragedy essential.’
After Passover, at the dawn of Easter: as good a time as any to consider fathers and sons.
Erica Wagner
Editor-at-Large
The Glass Cage
An extract from the great John Healy's long-awaited sequel to The Grass Arena with an introduction by his editor, John Mitchinson
It’s not often you get to publish the sequel to a Penguin Modern Classic but in August, Boundless releases The Glass Cage, the second volume of memoir by John Healy, a full 37 years after his first.
I remember the splash The Grass Arena made back in 1991 and often wondered what had happened to its author. John was an alcoholic vagrant saved by his unexpected and prodigious talent for chess – for a moment he was everywhere — an authentic working class outsider who could write mesmerising prose. And then he just disappeared.
The Glass Cage explains why. Damaged physically and psychologically by his years on the street, John soon realised that talent and courage will only take you so far in the hall or mirrors that is literary London.
But even as he forsook fame, he kept on writing. Now 82, he has returned, with a haunting late masterpiece that will cement his literary reputation.
John Mitchinson
“It was unwise to show too much concern
there were limits to the feelings you could express”
Chapter 1
The mattress was tattered and stained and a good two feet shorter than the iron slats it was supposed to cover, but it would do. It would have to.
It was not the first time I had witnessed the inside of a prison cell or lain on an institutionalised bed. I had many times been confined within these grey walls back in the day when prisons had begun tightening their wire. But, as I waited behind the iron door, this was the first time I’d ever been afraid. Compared to the past, though, my reason for being here was negligible. My crime? Non-payment of a £50 fine imposed thirteen years ago under the medieval vagrancy laws. They had found my door. I was arrested yesterday morning on a committal warrant, sentenced to a day, and would be released at dawn. Since I wouldn’t be walking the hard yard under a tangle of iron surrounded by barbed wire, perhaps I was taking the whole episode too seriously, because from one point of view it was rather ridiculous. Yet I was finding it hard to come to terms with it all. Quite apart from the shock of being arrested again after so long, and the slight disruption to my otherwise humdrum routine, there was the recurring déjà vu laced with a touch of paranoia.
It was like opening a wound I thought had healed, for even one hour is a long time in prison. Anything could happen. I could stare at the walls if I chose, but I could not be sure when I might be thrown into a situation where I would say the wrong thing to the wrong screw and find myself in trouble. I wanted to avoid this for I feared that, if I clashed with authority again, I would lose control of my emotions. I had lost some of my front teeth in a cell just like this to a chief officer’s boot over a petty infringement.
Yet that wasn’t quite it either. For those few hours, I should be able to bear any amount of verbal abuse, caustic comments, or even a few silent slaps. The last thing to worry about is offended dignity when confronted in an alley by a mugger with a blade. No, the real worry lay in this feeling: a feeling that I hadn’t moved on since my last stay there, coupled with the fear that I now perhaps never would. I was one of the children with longing eyes who had been locked out in back-yard isolation among a tyranny of brick walls, who grew up trying to avoid the swing and the whine of the belt my father wielded while keeping pain to an inward scream. But I was not very resilient and, when my madness got out of control, I made the mistake of shouting it out and went to prison for it, where I lay on my bunk listening to the screams of the punished echoing cruelly from the cells below.
Since the age of fifteen I had lived on the street as a vagrant alcoholic, termed a ‘wino’ by police and courts alike, the most contemptible among the contemptible; there weren’t any good winos, because good gets lost among the bad and by the time you notice it’s too late.
The Glass Cage will be published in August 2025 and is available to pre-order
The world’s most enchanting town square
Justin Marozzi on teetering down a path in Morocco, for our series There's a Street In My Neighbourhood
You’d think, after 40 years of trudging, slogging, slipping and sliding up and down it, I would know the name of my favourite street in Chefchaouen. But, hand on heart, and even after eight years of owning a riad townhouse with an old friend in this mountain city in northern Morocco, I haven’t got a clue.
I can tell you where it starts from, where it ends, and why I love it. I can describe the warm smells coming from the nearby bakery at dawn; the call to prayer slicing through the dusk from the minaret of the Rif al Andalus Mosque on its lower reaches; the medley of hole-in-a-wall shops strung along its vertiginous path beneath vine leaves feathering across chinks of sky; the steep flight of 18 steps at its bottom which disgorge you onto the cobbled square around Fontaine Sidi al Mehdi. I can recall the hobbit-hooded silhouettes of young men in jalabas, high on hashish, stumbling home late at night. But the name of this magical little zinqa (alley), which rises sharply up through the labyrinthine medieval medina remains pleasingly elusive.
Chefchaouen — literally ‘look at the horns’ in Arabic — is a preternaturally beautiful town improbably situated at an altitude of 600 metres in the Rif Mountains, 70 miles southeast of Tangier. Founded in 1471 by a distant descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, it tumbles down beneath two spiky fangs of rock, the horns from which it takes its name, in a dazzling landslide of whitewashed roofs and bright blue and white walls.
I wrote my first book here a quarter of a century ago and have been coming back ever since. Mornings I used to turn left out of the house onto Derb Stitou al Hadri and then immediately left again, teetering down the alley – some days you would regret wearing leather-soled babouches slippers on the slippery stone – for a bowl of Mustapha’s steaming bessara – a delicious split fava bean soup made with olive oil, cumin and chilli, served with half a baguette and icy spring water. Breakfast of champions.
Justin Marozzi is the author of Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World, which will be published by Allen Lane on 9 July 2025
ICYMI: why are the kids Churchgoing again?
On the latest episode of the Boundless podcast, Patrick Galbraith speaks to Lamorna Ash, the author of Don't Forget We're Here Forever which will be published shortly by Bloomsbury. They discuss the extraordinary rise of interest in religion among young people in Britain.
Available now on Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Lapwing Vanellus vanellus
Before its modern decline, the Lapwing was considered a delicacy and hunted remorselessly. The massive punt guns used on the Fens could kill sixty birds with a single shot.
Jim Moir’s More Birds was published by Unbound in 2024