Leo's mother, Madam Sara Bresson, wasn't good with babies. She never claimed to be. She had her Gift, her charisma, her successful career as a Spiritualist medium, and there simply wasn't room in her life for sleepless nights or soggy nappies. Therefore, with her husband (Leo's father Maurice Moon, a music hall conjuror and xylophone player) out of the picture having recently decamped, she donated Leo as soon as was decent to her widowed mother Clare.
An agreeably wealthy woman, Clare had conveniently just returned from India following the alcohol-related death of her husband, a senior officer in the British army there. Clare welcomed a grandchild. It was good to be needed.
Now, today, eighty-odd years later, Leo is living again in the house in Cheltenham that his grandmother Clare bought all those years ago. And D. G. Compton, previously better known perhaps as a science fiction writer, has set himself a biographical task here, charting at least a few of the more significant vicissitudes, big and little, that have shaped Leo's nature and life, and have left us with this slightly wise (he hopes) old gent.
