This image is the cover for the book A Spoonful of Malt

A Spoonful of Malt

This collection of stories reflects three very different stages in a young life. Alan was born in 1938. After his mother died, when he was four, he went to live with his grandparents. This was one of the happiest periods of his life, when their strict but loving care helped to form his character. His wonderful life came to an end when, aged nine, he was unwillingly removed from his grandparents to live with his father and stepmother, in a home where he had no love or affection and no feeling of belonging. The later stories show Alan in the RAF, when he meets a girl called Elizabeth, and his life undergoes the best change of all.

Alan McCracken

Alan McCracken was born in Wigan, Lancashire, in 1938, and was brought up by his grandparents during the war years. After five years’ apprenticeship at Leyland Motors and four years as a skilled armament fitter in the RAF, he worked as a door-to-door salesman of brushes and then encyclopaedias, and as a postman, before becoming a secondary school teacher for twenty-two years. Later in life, he also found time to establish a successful one-man gardening business. Now widowed, he has four children, ten grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Much of his time now is spent slowly transforming a large area of wilderness into a garden, though he has also managed to write and publish a collection of poems about his adult life. After living in Norwich, Glasgow, Lichfield and Leyland, he has been settled in Bolton for over forty years.

Austin Macauley Publishers