To Win Against the Odds

The life and experiences of Thomas Jones. This novel follows the exploits of Thomas Jones from south Wales who is brought up by his grandmother due to his mother's death and an absentee father. After a dangerous introduction to working life in a colliery, Jones joins the army and serves in WWII. He is wounded and is among those evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940.

Review :
Thomas Jones is only three months old when his mother dies of pneumonia. His father is away in the army, so Thomas is brought up by his warm and kindly grandmother, Helen. When Philip Jones remarries and comes to take his seven-year-old son to live with him in Dagenham, Helen stands firm and Thomas stays with her in the small coal-mining community in south Wales that has always been his home. Its a tough beginning to a tough life: Thomas starts working down the pit at the age of fourteen and, when he is seventeen, his grandmother dies, the mine closes, and Thomas joins the army . . . in 1937. To Win Against the Odds reads as very lightly disguised autobiography and is, indeed, a tale of battling against the odds, not just as a child down the pit but as little more than a child on the British Expeditionary Force to France and in the nightmare of Dunkirk. Again and again, Thomas survives and pulls through. He is a man and a boy who stands up for himself, as well as for and against others. He overcomes bullying at school and successfully challenges a tyrannical schoolmaster; he saves his workmate and many other miners from flooding down the pit; and he saves his army mate Des from old crones and cowardly blackguards in a seedy Soho club. When his injuries put an end to his life in the army, he retrains as a teacher, returning to the education and the valleys he had been reluctant to leave. Thomass story is a straightforward accounting of facts that eschews the psychological depth some readers might expect. The language is sometimes clichd and the tone occasionally tends towards the heroic, but Thomas is a fighter, and a survivor, with considerable cause to salute himself and his indomitable grandmother. Suzy Ceulan Hughes It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgment should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council. Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.