Peacock on the Moon

Advisory note. The content of Peacock on the Moon reflects the language and attitudes of the decades it is describing, which some readers may find offensive. References to acts of overt discrimination run throughout for the purpose of completing the picture of life within a family where the head of the household was eventually forced to stand before a Leeds Race Tribunal in 1979. The fractional nature of boarding school life, insofar as it sets family members apart, and the role of women in the home are also considered.

Nicola Briggs grew up in a beautiful Georgian house in Huddersfield, which she loved, but she didn't realise how much until her parents sent her away to a prestigious boarding school at eleven. From then on, the idea of 'home' became a distant dream, a place she could only enjoy for sixteen weeks a year.
This coming-of-age memoir is a powerful portrait of family life, dominated by a charismatic but bigoted and self-destructive solicitor whose anti-immigration rhetoric knew no bounds.
Set in Yorkshire, England, this story exposes the suffocating middle-class existence of one family, revealing the deep-seated racism and status wars of the 1960s and 1970s that Nicola felt pressured to accept. But would she?
This is not a nostalgic look back at the past but a story of reckoning, told with humour, clarity and deep personal insight.