LOOKING FOR ALISON (2015)

Alison Paula Ewing was born Alison Paula May Jarvis in Chichester on April 29 1960 and died in Headingley, Leeds on April 3 2010 just a few weeks short of her fiftieth birthday. She had a promising start in life, arriving in the picturesque and affluent environs of rural West Sussex, and experienced the dying days of the British Empire as a child, courtesy of her father’s RAF excursions to imperial outposts – yet she ended that life as a penniless and friendless, isolated alcoholic living in rented accommodation without electricity, her body discovered as her home burned down around her. She had suffered a cardiac arrest courtesy of an inherited heart condition exacerbated by years of alcohol abuse and had already passed away by the time the fire brigade arrived to extinguish the inferno sparked into life by the candles she’d been forced to light her home with.

When the man she referred to as ‘My Admirer’ first encountered Alison eight years previously, he found her sedated on a street corner yards from their neighbouring homes and carried her to her doorstep; a friendship and a kinship eventually developed as two eccentric dwellers of society’s fringes made a connection that never quite blossomed into the intimacy both desired. Instead, personal problems and penury blighted their relationship as they struggled to cope with demons neither felt they could share. They gradually drifted apart and their one-time closeness diminished; they last met just days before Alison died, yet her admirer was unaware of Alison’s passing until hearing of it from a shop assistant four years after the tragedy. Shocked and shaken by the news, her admirer then embarked on a quest to discover how his former fellow outsider had met such an appalling fate, a journey that began with the restoration of her resting place and climaxed with the setting-up of a website that finally put him in contact with Alison’s youngest son. The knowledge he then acquired of the life Alison led before their paths crossed enabled him to tell her story, and in the process, he came to know and love a woman with a depth of feeling that circumstances had denied him during her all-too brief, if occasionally dramatic, lifetime.

Looking for Alison allows the spirit of the story’s heroine to retrospectively recount her highs and lows, with periodic interruptions from the voice of the author. It is both a damning indictment of a society that has few provisions for its square pegs and a poignant love-letter to a lost soul undeserving of obscurity.

‘Beautiful, heartbreaking, utterly beautiful.’

David Partington, Amazon review