My Bones and My Flute by Edgar Mittelholzer

Having read your Biblio-Curiosa piece, I now understand this is very much Mittelholzer. The father rabbits on about society’s failings at every opportunity, “Human Vermin” and “Would-rotters” (liberals for the most part) so that the book reads a lot like a manifesto. They end up going on holiday together, but this hardly seems to be Mittelholzer’s point, and at times I felt he had ‘forgotten’ this dimension of the plot entirely. I don’t know if you have read it but - spoiler alert - the story on the surface is a lot like Lolita, in that a paedophile living in a London suburb inveigles his way into the family next door to be near their young daughter. “ The Piling of Clouds is certainly odd, perhaps one of the most curious novels I have read. Perhaps its dreary mood and remote Guyana plantation setting was off-putting to holiday readers in Douglas. I recall more than one copy of My Bones and My Flute on the rack, many copies in fact, all at cut-price. But there was no place for books on an Isle of Man expedition and it was much too hot for it anyway. I had read the supernatural tale only recently, a library hardback and had enjoyed it, and so toyed with the idea of buying a copy for myself. In a newsagent shop in Douglas, the Isle of Man capital, was a book stand filled with cheap paperback novels, among them My Bones and My Flute by Edgar Mittelholzer. There is something else I remember about that holiday. Ultimately my hat failed me, and I suffered a red nose for two weeks. We looked daft but at 16 that’s often the point.

This was the summer of 1976, the second hottest summer on British record, and we wore matching floppy denim hats to combat the likelihood of sunburn. Free of the confines of school there didn’t seem much point anymore and I sensed we had a lot less in common without it. We couldn’t know at the time, but it would also be a sort of farewell salute to childhood and our friendship. It was our first holiday without adult supervision, and I remember it as a long list of daft antics and adventure from one end of the small island to the other.

The Isle of Man was a celebration of the fact that school was now over. We had met years ago in the Infants he called me Dave, I called him Potty and that was all it took to cement a friendship. At age 16 I took the ferry with my schoolfriend Paul to the Isle of Man for a holiday.