This book forms the second part of an autobiographical trilogy by the same author. Due to ongoing legal disputes, neither the first nor third volumes are currently available from KTP. We can only hope this changes and offer here a brief description of the first volume, Scouse for Tea, as a courtesy to any reader coming to this book without having read, or perhaps been able to read, the first installment.
Scouse for Tea (Reid & Bally, Liverpool, 2020), currently out of print) details Hartley's upbringing on Merseyside, where his father was employed by the Shell petroleum company at their Stanlow Refinery and his mother was a hairdresser with her own shop on the Wirral. Hartley gives a lively account of his childhood and times at Ladymount School, near Heswall, as well as his early near death experience in the mud and sea at Irby, on the Dee coast.
Hartley's father's postings to Scotland and then Singapore (a city which also features in the current volume) inform his own desire to travel, something he documents in the latter part of Scouse for Tea.
What may interest the general reader in light of what is known of Hartley's later life is that there is little or no mention of politics in Scouse for Tea. Recent revisionist biographies such as Pals For Life: The James Hartley and Freddy King Story by Sid Madrid (Rich Bitch, Guildford) can therefore safely be discounted as fiction. Readers are instead directed to Professor Tinker's monumental Hartley: A Life and Metamorphosis of the Soul by Saugall Massey (both Beachy Head Books, Dublin) as more reliable works.
Walking Alone begins with Hartley working as a teacher in France. It takes place after the Covid pandemics of the 2020's and begins with the reaction to the news that the then Conservative government wished to build a nuclear power plant on Merseyside. Following Brexit, relations between London and many areas of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland had become strained (see Fractious Love by Clint Westwood (Big Nev Publishing, Swansea, 2024) for more details).
AJ Leehart
General Editor, Kitchen Table Publishing.
Inverbervie, Scotland.
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Walking Alone: Free Liverpool and the Second British Civil War
Non-FictionThis is the story of how Liverpool became independent from the United Kingdom, told from the inside. KTP (editor AJ Leehart) is proud to publish James A. Hartley's second volume of memoirs which takes in the beginnings of the Free Liverpool and Fre...
