Authors Electric

The recent floods in Leatherhead, where I live, brought home to me how much the vagaries of the natural world affect our lives. And because they’re dramatic events, we tend to use them in fiction, both for adults and children. Growing up in England in the nineteen-fifties it was hard to imagine anything momentous ever happening to me, and it led to a real thirst for adventure. My first opportunity came when I was eighteen, in between school and art college. I came into a small amount of money, and signed up for an overland trip to Morocco, which was not a common tourist destination in those days. It was an eventful trip. There were twenty-one of us, and we drove through France and Spain in two long wheelbase Land Rovers, camping on the way. It wasn’t a trip that health and safety would have sanctioned, and two events in particular could have had very different outcomes. The first was when we were travelling in the Atlas Mountains, and looking for a sheltered place to camp. Our tou...

I decided to start this before I went back to Morocco, so that my initial memories are untainted by new impressions. I was eighteen, in between the sixth form and art school and I have used the experiences I had in many pieces of writing since. My mother had taken out an insurance policy to send me to secretarial school if I couldn’t do anything else, and when I got into college she asked me what I wanted to do with the money instead. Travel, of course. I had been to Poland and Austria with my father, but I was hankering after something really different, and when I saw this holiday advertised in a teenage magazine I simply drooled. Three weeks, driving through France and Spain in two Land Rovers, travelling round Morocco, and then returning by train. This was 1967, and Morocco was not yet a tourist destination. Pure adventure.             I remember seeing my first group of date palms, and being slightly surprised that they r...

On my way out today I saw the aftermath of a horrific road accident. It was probably the worst I’ve ever seen on that stretch of road – two vehicles on their sides, one still burning. There were several police cars and one ambulance in attendance, and the road behind the incident was now closed. As I continued on past I realised the traffic was at a standstill for several miles. But the most distressing part was that, although it was a three lane carriageway, there was no hard shoulder. Two fire engines and another two ambulances were trying to work their way through the stationary cars, but were making no progress. It was a very upsetting scenario. And I couldn’t help myself, I mentally filed the details for future use.             We see fictionalised disasters all the time on the screen these days. But the information for the writer doesn’t come out of thin air – either it’s researched, rather than experienced, or it really ...