In 1954 William Golding was 43 years old and a nobody. He had been demobbed from the navy at the end of World War Two and returned to his prewar job teaching English at Bishop Wordsworths School in Salisbury. Always hard up he lived in what he called a lousy council flat with his wife Ann and their two young children. In 1952 he finished the novel that was to become Lord of the Flies and sent it to five publishers and a literary agency. They all rejected it. The sixth publisher he tried was Fab