In My Father’s House

In My Father’s House offers a memoir of the eight remarkable months Christine Cohen Park spent in Brighton with a father she barely remembered in 1953.

Christine, who lives in Lewes, had been sent to Sussex, aged ten, from South Africa to live.

In My Father’s House is published by Caburn Press at £10.75. Christine is giving a reading from it in Lewes Library on October 31 at 2pm.

“Lewis Cohen was a radical thinker, a maverick town councillor, Brighton’s first Jewish socialist Mayor and later a Labour life peer.

“I have published novels, short stories and articles; this is my first attempt at memoir. They say you have to reach a certain age… Memories of those extraordinary months have lived on with me, and perhaps I always thought I might try to recreate them on the page one day.

“The prompt came after I had spent seven years writing an even-handed novel about the Israel–Palestine conflict, told from both sides. Our Stubborn Past had been a difficult book to write and get right. A week after I completed it came the Hamas attack of October 2023. “News of the atrocities put a temporary stop to publishers’ interest in a fictional rendering of the conflict. While waiting for responses, and after years spent on such a sombre, troubling subject, I decided to turn to something more immediate, nearer to home and shorter in scope: eight months of childhood, which I thought of as a treasure trove of happy memories.

“There was certainly more to discover when I got going. For all the pain that accompanied them, those months had, overall, been sunlit — a pleasure to write about. Of all my books so far, this one came most easily.

“In My Father’s House brings a now fast-vanishing Brighton and a remarkable man back to life. It is also the story of a love affair between father and daughter, which, when punctuated, leaves a legacy it takes seventy years to unravel.

“I began with the intention of recreating those eight months in the voice of the feisty ten-year-old, recalling the glamorous world into which she had been dropped, a world ripe with contradictions. From the grandly furnished home in Dyke Road Avenue, to wrestling with the eleven-year-old boy cousin with whom she is expected to share a bedroom, to eating faggots and mash in Kemptown’s mean streets, no detail escapes her gimlet eye.

“It was a good story to tell, full of vivid characters and details I was amazed to find I could recall so completely.

“As each episode was completed, I posted it on Substack, taking a leaf from Dickens and discovering that his method of serial publication works remarkably well in its modern digital incarnation. Readers became involved. For a usually solitary writer, the immediacy of their responses was a heartening and rewarding experience.

“In the final instalment, I wrote that when my mother and siblings returned from South Africa and I went back to live with them, I never knew my father again in the same intimate way. Some readers wrote to ask: why not? It was a question I had not asked myself until that moment.

“That question led to the final twenty-five pages of the book: an extended afterword. Perhaps I needed seventy years’ distance to explore what had happened in the years that followed, from the points of view of the key players. In the process, I came to understand why the memories of those eight months had remained so vivid. The jagged break seemed to have left them barely touched, stored more or less intact.”