The Foxtrot's Easy

A visionary story, largely true.

1936: After twelve-year-old Graeme Moodie recovers from polio, he’s left with a pronounced limp. Unable to handle a ‘normal’ boarding school with its beatings and bullying, he goes to Maiden Erlegh School for Boys which, Moodie later claimed, changed his life. The story is largely true. Whispered by locals to take all sorts of misfits and oddballs, the school is the brainchild of Captain TS Waterlow Fox, an ex-Army captain who rules with an iron fist in a velvet glove. ‘We’re all different, we’re all the same,’ is his message. Graeme’s intelligence shines. His roommates are Paul Caspari, a Jewish refugee from Germany, and Charlie Marshall, a stutterer, badly damaged by his parents’ nasty divorce. Graeme feels at home, and for the first time in years, happy. Now if only he could find a girlfriend – that would be heaven. But by 1939, as storm clouds of war grow ever closer, a German student joins the Nazi party, which threatens to shatter Maiden Erlegh’s bubble of sanity.

Early reviews

Lesley Hawker:

The Foxtrot’s Easy is a compelling and compassionate first novel by Andrea Russell. The characters come to life through Andrea’s skillful storytelling and her ability to portray the world through the eyes of a young boy growing up in a privileged family in the 1930s at a time of great political unrest in Europe, whilst also dealing with his own significant physical disabilities as a result of contracting polio. This is a beautifully written book which is keenly observed, sometimes quite shocking but utterly absorbing, and I loved it from beginning to end!

Eleanor Dodson:

Andrea Russell has created an amazing picture of childhood moving toward maturity.

I needed to turn the light out but kept thinking - just one more chapter. Brilliant.