Family history only makes sense looking backwards. Yet hindsight creates illusions that defy contradiction. With a few peeks in the rear-view mirror, this story must go onward and forward...

Bob and Richard were two lower-class provincials who went out and made a name for themselves. Grammar school boys from Lancashire, they’d shared in the great flowering of working-class culture from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, before rising with the meritocracy in business and industry. By their own admission, they’d taken far more out than they would ever put in.

Now in their sixties, they spend time soul-searching, but in different ways; Richard looks for meaning and Bob purpose. Richard sees events as fickle fate, presently working in his favour; Bob as a catalogue of decisions he’d enjoyed making, with some bad ones currently coming home to roost.

As they look for someone or something to believe in before the last trumpet sounds, both men are to be tested over the next year in life, love and death. Just one thing is for sure: they will both be changed.

Where’s Sailor Jack? is a family saga that takes in three generations of two families with all the struggles, tribulations and fireworks that you would expect – as well as plenty you wouldn’t.

JOHN UTTLEY was born in Lancashire just as the war was ending. He read Physics at Oxford before embarking on a long career with the Central Electricity Generating Board and the National Grid Group. He was Finance Director at the time of the miners’ strike, the Sizewell Inquiry and privatisation, receiving an OBE in 1991. More recently, he has taken a degree in Divinity while acting as chairman of numerous smaller companies, both UK and US-based. He is married to Janet and lives just north of London, with three grown-up children and a dog.