April's there

Cocky Cockney Zees is not yet 18 when the blitz explodes over London, but he's crammed a lifetime's experiences into his years. His mentors have been the spivs and wide boys and whores and entrepreneurs of the East End, and his home its furnished room and teeming streets. Zees is a reporter for a neighborhood newspaper, an occupation that suits his voracious curiosity. About the only experience he hasn't known is love. And then April Mappin walks into the cafe where he is sitting with a friend, and his heart turns over.April is even younger than Zees and only the topsy-turviness of London in wartime could have joined her wealthy and wellborn world to his. When they are not dissolved in the wonder of first love, she is a fascinated sharer of his work, his crazy and glorious friends, the Cockney Jewish argot they all speak and the shrewd wheeling and dealing that makes up their daily lives. The reader becomes part of this frantic world and an eager advocate of love in a time when anything can happen and happy endings are no more predictable than the toss of a coin.Robert Simpson's first novel is sometimes raucious, sometimes raffish, often touching, long remembered.