Land of lost content

Tom Frayn, says his son Michael in this admirable memoir, trod lightly upon the earth. He belonged to a class and a generation who didn’t think their story mattered. Even his profession — he was an asbestos salesman — has ceased to exist. At the request of his own children, who felt that they had ‘risen from an unknown place’, Michael Frayn has collected the few scraps of evidence and pieced together this unobtrusive life.

His father was a ‘smart lad’, youngest of a family of seven housed in two rooms off the Holloway Road, and the only one not born deaf. (He suffered hearing loss later, but, characteristically, used it to enhance his comic timing.) Tom’s wit and charm found plenty of customers for his toxic wares. He moved his family to a detached house with a big garden and an Austin saloon in the garage. Respectable interwar Sutton was a far cry from the grime and grind of Edwardian Holloway.