"may I - would you allow me so to trespass on this friendship of ours, as to ask for your interest in my only son, Thomas?", June 1, 2014

This review is from: Tommy Wideawake (Paperback)
I loved HH Bashford's better known 'Augustus Carp'; this starts off moderately humorously, but tends to lose the comedy towards the end where Edwardian moral and religious sentiment take over.
The story concerns five friends 'all of us middle-aged and sober-minded, four of us bachelors, one a widower' who meet together for the last-named to exact a promise from his friends. He is on the eve of going off to war and requests them to look after his 13 year old son Tommy in his absence. At first this is undertaken with reluctance:

"The poet's thoughts hovered round a small grave in his garden, wherein lay an erstwhile feline comrade of his solitude, whose soul had leaped into space at the assault of an unerring pebble."

But soon Tommy's youthful exuberance (the 'Wideawake' comes from a style of hat he favours) starts to rub off on his staid guardians:

"The poet was hatless and flushed. From one hand dangled a catapult; in the other he clutched some convenient pebbles."

As Tommy grows older, we follow him through the scrapes of growing up to his becoming a decent young man, ready to take his place in the world.

(NB Available as free download on Project Gutenberg)
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