For nearly fifty years Michael Wharton, under the pseudonym ‘Peter Simple’, produced one of the funniest satirical columns in Fleet Street. This memoir of what he called his ‘deformative years’ is equally irresistible, absurdly amusing, yet touched with a haunting melancholy.
The creator of such deathless characters as Julian Birdbath the unsuccessful writer, Dr Heinz Kiosk the well-known psychoanalyst, and Dr Spacely-Trellis the go-ahead Bishop of Bevindon – who all appeared regularly in the column – was born Michael Nathan in 1913 in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His father, from a prosperous German-Jewish émigré family, was in the wool trade, a compulsive gambler who spoke four languages, all with a Yorkshire accent. His mother, a barely literate Yorkshire girl whose maiden name was Wharton, was convinced she was related to the Whartons of Wharton Hall in Westmorland and spoke mysteriously of a ‘missing will’ which, when found, would restore the family fortunes.
This was not the only ‘missing will’ in the Wharton story, for Michael, though clearly intelligent, was, as he typically put it, ‘born to function on one cylinder only’. Given to paralysing bouts of gloom, he viewed his eccentric family with their outsider mentality, their irritable ‘fratching’, their strange Anglo-German mispronunciations and titanic farting competitions as if through the wrong end of a telescope. How he finally made his escape into the liberating air of Fleet Street, via a lamentable Oxford career, war service in India, and years adrift in London’s post-war bohemia, is the subject of this entirely original and darkly funny book.
