The Sinners' Bell

Helen’s expectations were far from starry-eyed, but married life with Frank in the late 1960s seemed bewilderingly joyless; from the honeymoon in a seedy Paddington hotel complete with dirty linen and a nosy landlady, her new husband drinking until all hours with a shady ‘friend’, their first home in his parents’ Irish pub, in a provincial backwater town. Frank’s father was his own best customer, his mother a shrill and censorious presence in the background, with the local priest as her onl...