An Unlikely Story

Once upon a time, an English lad named John Holman was sojourning in Australia some 10,000 miles away from his home village of West Grinstead in the U.K. Searching for himself, really, John had incautiously entered a passageway provided by his family’s wartime past. 

At Tecolote Book Shop this coming Saturday, November 8, from 3 to 4 pm, Holman introduces A Runaway Life, in which he explains an emergence from chaos, and the newfound love of his life. The signing and talk are sponsored by Aussie winery Kalyra, who will be providing wine and sausage rolls for the Tecolote event.

Eighty-one years ago (at this writing), Holman’s namesake uncle – a WWII tail gunner in a Royal Air Force Stirling Bomber – was killed in a daylight attack 11,000 feet over the French countryside. The two German Focke-Wulf 190s that appeared seemingly out of nowhere shot the bomber to pieces, the RAF crew scrambling out of the falling fireball and deploying their chutes. The salvo immediately killed 19-year-old tail-gunner Johnny Grantham, Holman’s uncle, where he sat in his gunner’s turret. The pilot of the airplane was Australian Noel Eliot.

Life is an abstract painting whose “meaning” can become fleetingly decipherable, to our blinking surprise. As detailed early in Holman’s memoir series Pom’s Odyssey, young Johnny Grantham’s death in the Stirling Bomber that day would open a previously hidden door to far-off Australia, where Holman’s path would cross that of another expat Down Under – a young woman from Santa Barbara named Martha Coony. When Santa Barbaran free spirit Martha knocks on John’s boardinghouse door near Bondi Beach (about four miles outside of Sydney) she is asking to borrow the proverbial cup of sugar. And so do wanderers find a way through the woods and into sunlight; sometimes having forged through an unexpected and lacerating thicket of thorns. 

Bondi Beach to Hendry’s

Holman’s memoir A Runaway Life details – in edible prose that seamlessly shifts from spit-your-coffee funny to tear-inducing – a sequential array of unlikely events with one thing in common: John’s love for Martha. The gauntlet would turn a perplexed and stammering village lad into a lovestruck bottle rocket. John Holman’s memoir details his and Martha’s sometimes harrowing love story, a collision of cultures, among other speed bumps. Equus figures tangentially.

Holman’s granddad on his mother’s side had been a well-known W. Sussex horse trader back in the day, his uncle Tony later making a name for himself as the Royal Jump Jockey astride young Princess Elizabeth’s steed, a horse called Monaveen. Elizabeth and the Queen Mother had jointly purchased the steeplechaser, who with Holman’s Uncle Tony astride rather famously won the Chichester Handicap Chase at Fontwell Park on October 10, 1949. The family’s equine legacy would inform both Holman’s early life and his new volume’s title.   

“I really opened myself up in A Runaway Life,” Holman says. And the title? “Horses and ponies tearing for the horizon with me hanging on for dear life, this was a regular occurrence when I was young. And the story takes place in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, a particularly fraught time. Martha and I sometimes felt trapped on a chaotic, runaway ride.”

Holman’s magnetic and emotionally genuine memoir lays bare the story of a spirited Californian and a daydream-inclined English villager as they bring their familial and cultural worlds into frequently uneasy collision. How will Martha, a sunny West Coast ambassador in all the best ways, be accepted by John’s conservative English family? How will the charming, initially prospect-free Holman fare with Martha’s politely skeptical American clan? In the midst of the romance, Holman will employ the lucky “Holman bounce” (with which his grumbling golf mates have long since made their peace), landing happily on his feet in a new – and lifelong – vocation as a computer programmer.

John and Martha’s shared search for home will take them to a 1970s U.K. on its knees from labor disputes and an embattled energy sector whose failings darken whole cities and bind the economy. In that historic downturn, the British gov would oblige companies to move to a three-day work week. John and Martha were strapped.

Survivalist Island Hopping

“We simply could not survive on the salaries we were making,” Holman says. “Two years of struggle and we had little choice but to leave family and friends and move back to Australia.” On the way (as it were) from the U.K. to their variously adventuresome and emotionally trying Australia chapter, John and Martha would marry at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, in a wooded California village called Montecito.

John Holman’s memoir A Runaway Life is a sequel to his 2nd volume, Pom’s Odyssey (John’s utterly bewildered introduction to sunny Australia), and necessarily follows the first in the sequence, the equine A Horse in My Suitcase, whose narrative lovingly, cozily, and hilariously describes John’s childhood on his Grampy’s farm.  

A Runaway Life, though, can be read as a standalone account of two souls finding and burnishing love through a series of subtly hilarious set pieces, and a lesser share of frankly described episodes of heartache. Holman’s writing style flows and seduces and is as radiant with life as the runaway true story it invites you to share. This a book you live. Holman almost didn’t write its rollercoaster narrative. 

“A Runaway Life digs up a lot of painful memories, and was at times difficult to work on,” Holman says. “But I kept hearing that readers of the first two books were curious about what happened next.” He smiles. “Here it is.”  

John Holman talks about his memoir A Runaway Life at 3 pm on Saturday, November 8 at Tecolote Book Shop – 1470 East Valley Road, Montecito.

Wine provided by Aussie winery Kalyra, and sausage rolls by the author.