Library of Wales: Jampot Smith

Foreword by Mervin Jones
Jampot Smith is story of a group of friends as they edge towards adulthood in the sunshine and shadow of Llandudno during the years of the Second World War. It is a time which will shape their lives against a war which will define it.
For Bernard, the eponoymous Jampot Smith, Kathy, Epsom and Dewi it is all held in an exquisite balance of emotion and restraint that promises both love and danger.
"His fiction aspired to, and often achieved, a Chekhovian mixture of comic concision and pathos. Jampot Smith is a small classic about the delight and pain of sexual awakening; it will outlast its period and provincial setting." Michael Kustow
"Brooks explores ephemeral relationships with delicacy and charm." The New York Times
"A novel to be savoured…it is hard to suggest the originality, the illumination of this novel about adolescent emotions in years of World War II in simmering Llandudno." The Times
"Jeremy Brooks has come to considerable stature in Jampot Smith." Anthony Burgess
*************************************** Tim Baker, Clwyd Theatr Cymru's Associate Director, has announced that Eleanor Brooks has given the theatre the rights to adapt her late husband's novel Jampot Smith for a stage production in Mold.
Professor Dai Smith has been particularly pleased by the reception of the series, with several books reaching the bestseller lists in Wales. He hopes Jampot Smith will similarly become a reborn classic.
He commented, “Jeremy Brooks was a fine writer who deserves to be more widely read. In his comic but touching tale of young love in wartime Llandudno he really captures a moment of time and place in a captivating way. I'm sure people will enjoy this book which is why we are adding it to the Library of Wales.”
Jeremy Brooks worked at Clwyd Theatr Cymru as a dramaturg and translator on a number of prestigious productions, including translations of Maxim Gorky and an adaptation of Medea. He was also Literary Manager of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1962-69 and his Stratford contemporary, Clwyd Theatr Cymru director Terry Hands, who joined the RSC in the mid ‘60s, welcomed Eleanor Brooks and the re-issue of the novel, which has become the first in the Library of Wales series to be adapted for the theatre. -- Publisher: Parthian Books
The Library of Wales series continues to delight with its selection of classics, and Jeremy Brooks’s Jampot Smith, first published in 1960, has a fine introduction by Merfyn Jones, who paints a warm picture of the author and sets the novel in its social, geographical and historical context. It is the early 1940s and, like many civil servants, Bernard Smith’s father has been evacuated to Llandudno from London with his family. Bernard is fourteen, not an easy age to be uprooted and to have to integrate in a new school and community, particularly when you are an only child and your parents’ marriage is close to breakdown. But Bernard is both self-contained and likeable and slowly gathers friends, who are melded into a distinct group when his mother miraculously musters the resources to throw a small party for his fifteenth birthday – complete with jelly and trifle (during a period of wartime rationing) and a game of murder in the dark. The story is told in the first person by Bernard, but the narrative voice often reflects the wisdom and compassion of adult hindsight, with a touch of wistful nostalgia. Although this is a coming-of-age novel, it is of the gentlest kind: ‘And so, while through the gritty sands of Africa Rommel was pushed back, step by step, across the desert he had lately won, we, on our softer dunes, lay waiting for our unwanted youth to wear away.’ With the smoke above bomb-shattered Liverpool visible in the distance, Bernard and his friends stroll in the sand dunes and cycle for miles to pick wild strawberries in Dwygyfylchi or blue scabious in the water meadows of Glan Conwy. They find a bothy and stock it ready for their very own Resistance movement. They form a Club, where they go to drink tea and listen to LPs and practise their ballroom-dancing, and are appalled when it is taken over by a slightly younger set who smoke, drink and jive. Softly, the reader watches as each of these teenagers grows up and changes, and the world changes around them. This is a wonderful book, to be savoured and read slowly and, with its portrayal of teenagers as thoughtful, caring, loyal human beings, it is also a welcome antidote to the modern myth of the ‘hoodie’. -- Suzy Ceulan Hughes @ www.gwales.com