GETTING the balance right between facts, anecdote and opinion can be a difficult juggling act when writing a book but former Saints ‘four cups’ winning stand-off Peter Harvey has pulled that off perfectly with his fascinating autobiography, Mike Critchley writes.

Redhead with Fire in his Boots informs, educates, provokes and comforts the reader with a life story punctuated by series of punchy and thought provoking anecdotes.

Many a book can become dry with statistics and facts, Harvey adds plenty of colour in this 222 page volume to give the reader entertainment as well as food for thought.

Although the core of the book is rugby, – with Harvey’s ground-breaking career in both codes described in great depth – the scene is set wonderfully with the briefest of first chapters.

Those wonderfully crafted opening lines pour off the page like a good novel to the extent that you taste the coal dust, hear the bombs and see the expressions etched upon the faces on the crowded wartime train as Harvey describes how he came to be born in Renfrewshire, Scotland in 1940.

The book takes the reader through various of aspects of the region’s social history – and is almost a coalface to chalk face account.

Well known names and places will provide a memory trigger for many a reader – teachers and nurses among them.

But if those bits add an interesting backdrop, Harvey’s rugby story is the centrepiece.

The starting point of that is the trials and tribulations of schoolboy rugby union.

But after clearing the hurdles Harvey went on to skipper England schools at Twickenham, and then represent Lancashire.

Alas a hunch that Harvey may consider a trial in league was sufficient to deny him a place on the England senior squad’s 1963 tour to New Zealand.

League beckoned – and he arrived at his hometown Saints backed with legends – so much that he quite literally filled the boots of Tom van Vollenhoven, inheriting the Flying Springbok’s discarded footwear.

Those halcyon sixties days at Knowsley Road are meticulously chronicled in great detail, and illustrated marvellously with photographs and Barton cartoons.

Redhead with Fire in his Boots is a really good read and book should be digested by anyone who wants a taste of social history or an understanding of rugby before the barriers were broken down.

Priced at £14.99, the book is available from Wardleworths.