I know you’re saying, what’s with this Alex Y Ferguson and Alex Ferguson? What’s with this Invisible Writer? Alex became the Invisible Writer because no one can find his books because of a retired football manager. Type in Alex Ferguson and you see the smiling face of the retired football manager. But now everything will change & pigs will fly.
Let’s learn a little more about our writer himself. He was born in Jarrow in 1930, nearly spoiling his Mam’s Christmas. His Granny was a child refugee from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. She told the future from the tea leaves gifting Alex with a bizarre sense of reality. At five he wrote his first book; Aesop’s Fables by Alex Ferguson.
He endured school, becoming accustomed to the solitude of the corridor, reading his cigarette cards. He asked too many questions. Adolf Hitler nearly killed the Fergies when a bomb fell across the lane and the brick shelter fell on the family. Later he became the BBC’s Young Poet of the Year.
Through it all he had the companionship of his Uncle Freddie who further confused his sense of reality. The High School was somewhat better although he knew Mr. Hopkins, the German teacher, was a German spy. When his hormones awoke he would bike with classmates to the Girls’ High to watch the girls coming out of school.
He began to follow one particular girl the short distance to her home. One day she turned and asked, “Why’re you following me?” His ready tongue failed him. She said, “Wouldn’t it be better if we walked together?” So, they walked together, holding hands, for the next seventy years and created a remarkable family.
His wife had a Yemeni heritage, a quick mind and a stubborn will. There were four children, two boys and two girls. The youngest girl, a baby, ‘invented’ fructicaemia, a toxic allergy to sugar and survived a year in Ormond Street Hospital to come home. Father & mother were so grateful they adopted an unwanted baby of African heritage. Now the family is Caribbean, Asian, Jewish-Anglo-American and English. That stubborn woman changed his world and created a tribe.