In His Day by John Francis O’Neill
What if the only way to save yourself was to die for yourself? John Francis O’Neill’s In His Day (Killrithmere Publishing, 2025) wrestles with this paradox through a time-travel story that carries the unmistakable weight of lived experience – both its greatest strength and, at times, its creative limitation.
Shay, a 52-year-old documentary maker, opens the novel planning his suicide in 2017. Instead, after collapsing on his childhood estate in Putney, he wakes in March 1976, encountering his eleven-year-old self as a separate person. Using falsified credentials, he infiltrates St. Michael’s Primary as a teacher. His realisation: being trapped in the past might offer its own solutions. When you know what’s coming: sporting results, property values, the trajectory of lives. Perhaps intervention becomes possible. The displacement he’s trying to prevent? The move from pleasant Kersfield Estate to the brutal World’s End high-rise in Chelsea, the moment he believes fractured everything.
A love letter to 1976
O’Neill’s recreation of 1976 is rendered with the specificity of someone who was there: slam-door trains, paper bus tickets, vintage cars with metal bumpers, pubs closing at 3pm, the word “racialist” instead of “racist.” When adult Shay shows a hotel receptionist his polymer £10 note featuring Jane Austen, her delight captures both the era’s technological innocence and O’Neill’s observational gifts.
The novel is set in Putney and landmarks – still here and long gone – as well as streets, characters, sounds, memories and all else that makes up a place are rendered in detail.
The challenge is that this richness sometimes overwhelms the narrative. Pages pass in detailed cataloging: how milk floats had unshielded crates, how people smelled, the rhythm of television commercials, where story might be. It reads, at times, like someone determined to record every remembered detail before memory fades, with the novel shifting from scene to pure description and back again.
Yet the social observation carries authentic weight. The distinction between Kersfield Estate and World’s End isn’t about one being “posh”, both are council housing. It’s about the subtle gradations that could make or break a childhood: community versus isolation, dignity versus menace. When Young Shay pockets a sausage from a school trip meal because poverty has trained him to hoard food, the unglamorous specificity devastates.
The classroom sequences capture genuine teaching life. Adult Shay reading The Goalkeeper’s Revenge to ten and eleven-year-olds, watching them react to his “Data Bank” (smartphone) full of impossibilities, bullies Yarde and Baker tormenting Young Shay with “Trampus”. O’Neill knows this world intimately.
The prose operates in straightforward, declarative mode, often telling rather than showing. The structure follows memory’s episodic rhythm more than dramatic tension. Yet there’s power in this plainspoken honesty. O’Neill isn’t performing poverty; he’s reporting it, and that authenticity carries weight even when the sentences themselves don’t soar.
Time to travel
The contemplative pacing asks patience. Philosophical questions about fate and paradox (Will I cease to exist? What if Young Shay becomes someone else?) circle back repeatedly. The time-travel mechanics stay wisely vague, but some conveniences strain belief: infiltrating a 1976 school with falsified references, carrying a smartphone without causing pandemonium, placing massive bets without scrutiny.
The relationship with Nicola, a young colleague, presents thornier territory. O’Neill seems aware of the problematic age gap (there’s awkwardness, hesitation) but she never quite becomes more than evidence of Shay’s improved state. It’s a limitation O’Neill seems conscious of but can’t quite resolve.
The final act carries genuine emotional weight. O’Neill resolves his protagonist’s journey with quiet inevitability. The logic of what must happen becomes clear even as the means remain stark. The epilogue reveals the altered timeline with restraint: a life lived differently, trauma erased, a teaching career. When sacrifice proves successful, O’Neill achieves something genuinely moving. It’s sentimental, yes, but earned.
The verdict
In His Day carries the weight of something that demanded to be written. O’Neill’s understanding of working-class displacement runs deep, his period detail is extraordinary, and his ending delivers genuine emotional impact. The craft hasn’t quite caught up to the vision: the prose leans functional, the structure follows memory more than dramatic necessity, the pacing asks considerable patience. But there’s value in stories told with this kind of unvarnished honesty.
For Putney residents, this offers invaluable social history wrapped in fiction. For everyone else, it’s an imperfect but authentic meditation on regret, class, and the persistent fantasy that we might save our younger selves. What it lacks in polish, it compensates for in heart. And sometimes that matters most.
