Mr Mac and Me, Esther Freud

I’d previously read and enjoyed Esther Freud’s Hideous Kinky and Peerless Flats so I said yes, I would like to read Mr Mac and Me. It’s very different from the others. Set, like so many novels published this year, in the period of the First World War, it tells the story of Thomas Maggs. He’s a Suffolk boy with ‘a twisted foot’, the only surviving son of a drunken publican father and a hardworking mother. His ambition is to be a sailor but his father hates the sea and his mother fears all the time for his safety, determined not to have one living son who ‘survived for nothing’.

When writing her semi-autobiographical novels, Esther Freud knew her subject. Unfortunately, she knows 0 about the First World War. Tom’s sister Mary comes rushing home to announce that they’ve heard ‘on the radio’ at the big house where she works, that war has broken out. Remarkable, since the BBC didn’t start broadcasting until 1922. Then Tom and his mother go to read the new DORA which has been posted up. This seems to have been cut and pasted from Wikipedia. To add to my difficulty in continuing with the book after these annoyances, it turns out that ‘Mr Mac’ is Charles Rennie Mackintosh and I tend not to like fiction about real people. So, how did I get on with the rest of the book?
( Here’s how. )