Forces of nature

by Nicholas Salaman

'Tampering with the springs of life', was the Headmaster's way of putting it, but adolescent tumescence was only one of the problems confronting Freddie Pemberton at the guesthouse on the shores of Lake Ettenwater. Others were Bertrand, the French boy his mother had foisted on him for two weeks of his precious holidays while she and his stepfather revelled in Scotland; the endless Lakeland rain; a warring yet insidiously fascinating couple, old friends of the Pemberton family, who lived in a country house nearby; a rumoured water monster in the lake itself; encounters in a secret passage with a sexually precocious Diana; a distantly looming Wordsworth exam; goatsmilk; and love and deception in the bittersweet land of lost discontent of the 1950's. The novel draws to its conclusion with a magnificently comic climax in which Nicholas Salaman once again shows his special fascination with the perils of growing up.