Wintering, a good and concisely written first novel by Derek Johns, reads like a book you could read to children. It is simple, there are good things and there are bad things and something is always happening as it has to do to keep a child’s attention from straying. The story itself, though, is far from being one you would read to a child. Set in the Fifties after Suez when old-fashioned values still held sway before the Sixties started to dismantle them, and perhaps for this very simplicity, it is best seen as a morality tale. As his aunt bleakly says to Jim Palmer, our anti-hero, ‘There are some things that have consequences.’ As she has just disinherited him for diddling her and he’s lost his enviable job as a Jaguar salesman in Bath and been declared bankrupt and reduced to working in a rundown clothes shop in Wells under an owner who seems to loathe him he scarcely needs to be told about consequences.
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