Anything Goes [Paperback]

Billy Hopkins latest book Anything Goes is written in the same style and with the same enthusiasm as his four other books. For me this latest offering stands with Kate's Story and Our Kid as one of the best three. Together all five books tell the one story of an inner city lad and his struggle through life to survive, to be accepted, to achieve his ambitions and his potential. The mixture of fact and fiction enables one to identify the places, the events and the emotions but not the people. A most enjoyable and relaxing read set in Manchester . If you enjoyed Our Kid then Anything Goes is a must. Well done Billy Hopkins.

`You read Our Kid?' I asked a friend of mine recently, Anything Goes, the most recent book in Billy Hopkins' best selling Manchester-based family saga having just seen the light of day.

`Read Our Kid?' said this friend of mine, a bibliophile and polymath, `of course I've read Our Kid. It's a wonderful book! Y'know, there are people who've read Our Kid who never open a book from one year's end to the next!

Praise indeed, methinks - or rather, methought. Because latterly I've begun to wonder whether some of the people who `never open a book from one year's end to the next' have maybe missed out on the rest of the Billy Hopkins canon - which now extends to five books in all: Our Kid, High Hopes, Kate's Story, Going Places and Anything Goes.

And a further thought strikes me in this regard. Could it be the case that the people who allegedly changed the habit of a lifetime in order to read Our Kid, have fallen away again when (Kate's Story apart) Billy Hopkins - schooled, scanned, socially mobile now too - took himself off to the leafy suburbs of south Manchester?

If so, I'm delighted to be able to report that Anything Goes, the latest episode in the Hopkins family saga, sees Billy Hopkins back with a vengeance - and walking
the meanest streets known to post-1960s man.

No, he's not forsaken the Tropic of Didsbury for the Collyhurst of his youth, though he does see the Land O' Cakes for a spell - not to mention Middleton's newly-built Langley Estate where his parents set up house upon their retirement. But, returned from Africa at long last, having made something of himself in his chosen
career, with a good bit of work experience under his belt, having accumulated too some of the financial rewards that hard work should bring in its train, with a wife he loves by his side and kids the same, with middle-age looming, with comfort and cosy contentment in the offing - Anything Goes sees Billy Hopkins' life take a sudden turn for the worse when his parents take ill and die, and a goodly selection of the proverbial bugbears and substances of 1960s Great Britain make specific direct hits in the vicinity of the Hopkins family's domestic fan.

There's drug taking for a start by a former A-student who promptly becomes a college dropout; and there's Billy's teenage daughter to cope with too, apostatising in her innocence and inexperience to the dubious religious tenets of an oriental Bagpuss of a man possessed of the obligatory fleet of Rolls Royces and a personal jet plane.

In short, all the tender love and care Billy Hopkins and his wife have lavished on their brood over the years now count as nought when set against the self-serving philosophies the kids find so readily available from the very first navel-defluffing screwballs they encounter on the nearest street corner and college campus. Student sit-ins and cacophonous music at Billy's place of work are a breeze by comparison.

But as ever Billy Hopkins' good humour and personal philosophy of life shine through from first to last, with some tremendous put-down lines emanating from the mouths of those same errant babes and sucklings, of which my personal favourite is: `I'm an atheist, thank God!'

If there really is (pace, Booker prize-winner Arundhati Roy) a God of Small Things, then Billy Hopkins is his Recording Angel. Because, whilst constantly bewailing the besetting modern mores (the mores of the 1960s, that is), Billy Hopkins succeeds in reeling off a veritable kaleidoscope of personalities, items and artefacts that make the reader feel positively homesick for those vanished days of yesteryear when mayhem on our city streets was so monumentally minimal . . .

A car called the Morris Oxford, Ken Dodd and Tommy Cooper in their prime, Crombie overcoats, the Christmas grotto at Lewis's on Market Street, Lego kits, midnight Mass at midnight, a pub called the Pineapple behind Granada Studios, "expensive" housing at £5,000 a throw, Dave Brubeck's `Take Five', a crate of Boddingtons' ale, a dessert called Angel Delight, a pressure cooker in the kitchen, Joan Baez singing `We Shall Overcome' . . .

Infectiously-rooted throughout in a Mancunian-based wistfulness, Anything Goes fondly beats the bounds of this vanished age which, notwithstanding the knee-jerk New Age philosophies knocking at his gate, is replete still (while Billy Hopkins has any say in the matter) with true compassion, the laughter of innocents, and down-to-earth common sense.

And personally speaking with regard to Anything Goes, I shall be forever in Billy Hopkins' debt for his analysis of the magically childish concept of BAGZZ-ING. Indeed, that Billy Hopkins has succeeded in nailing down the correct spelling of a word that has eluded me throughout six decades of unavailing orthographic research is a matter of sheer breathless amazement to me.

BAGZZ (v.t.): to claim outright, inalienable, and inviolable putative possession of any object of desire - e.g. a Matchbox model of a Mini Cooper in a toyshop window, and by the simple contrivance of ensuring that one is the first amongst one's peers to utter (bawl, more like - pointing excitedly the while!) the
word or, indeed, words: BAGZZIT! And this despite being utterly bereft of the means of purchasing said object of desire, or even the slightest prospect of obtaining said means in a month of Sundays to the tune of a Preston Guild!

Ah! 'Twas once upon a time a favourite hobby of mine, second only to swapping Marvel comics athwart a donkey-stoned doorstep! Wonder if it still works, eh?

Billy Hopkins' talent: BAGZZIT! Yeah, simple as that, it is! Except that Billy Hopkins bagzzed it first! (Sulk.)

I was given a copy of Billy Hopkins` book, "our Kid" and i was so impressed I just had to acquire all the books in the series. "Anything Goes", the last, to date (I do hope Billy writes more) is a warm, enriching read. I was, to use the old cliche, sorry when it came to an end. Like the other books in the series, it has laughter, sorrow but most of all a wonderful insight into people like you and me, and life as we have to battle it. This book is like watching a movie of the Swinging Sixties, as seen by a visitor. The characters spring to life and as I read it I could see evrything in vivid colour, not monochrome as with lesser writers.And dare I sound corny, love is implicit in every word, the love of humankind.

I have seen others compare Billy Hopkins to Charles Dickens and I can well understand this. He must surely join the ranks of those timeless masters of literature whose books can be read and read again, giving joy at each reading. My eternal thanks to the person who introduced me to this marvellous author`s work. And especially thanks to Billy Hopkins for enriching my leisure time.