Woe is me

In Competition No. 2933 you were invited to submit a blurb for a misery memoir. Thanks to Tom Dulake for suggesting this excellent challenge. The winners would be worthy occupants of what some bookshops call the ‘Painful Lives’ section, which service the reading public’s appetite for ever more harrowing accounts of extreme suffering. Unsure whether to congratulate or commiserate with the miserabilists below, I award the bonus fiver to W.J.Webster; the rest take £25 each.

Slow Drags the Harrow is Len Sprague’s fearless account of a life survived through sheer unyielding endurance. When he was seven his mother was convicted of poisoning his brutally sadistic father. Sent to live with his widowed Aunt Myrah he often went without food as she tried to ‘starve out the Devil in him’. He left school at 15 and earned money running drugs for a paedophiliac urban gangmaster. Eventually he escaped by walking to Tilbury and stowing away on a Patagonian cargo ship.