Authors Electric

The Watchtower from the Saltings  (Photo Tom Barr)  How to connect a 1940s naval watchtower on the Tollesbury marshes, a brilliant Scottish knitwear designer and my all-time favourite novelist?   The investigation led me along the single-track lanes south-east from Tollesbury, heading towards the end of the old railway line to Tollesbury Pier. I began to get goosebumps as I remembered coming here before. Once on a long walk with my dog, when I was never quite sure where we were trespassing but was determined to explore anyway.  That was when I first saw the six-sided building, stark and guarded against the weather. Then I saw it again in my imagination: ‘It’s a t-tower,’ said David. Xanthe loved the way he said it with a shiver of excitement in his voice. ‘It’s in the m-middle of a f-field and it looks right down the r-river.’ ‘And when it was wartime the Navy built it so they could keep a lookout against invaders,’ added Kieran. ‘Then p-zow they’d press...

The stepmother in Pebble is not a bad person. Her name is Lottie Livesey.  She’s sensitive and caring (if occasionally a little too determined to do what she believes to be right) and there is never any doubt that she loves her stepsons (Luke and Liam) just as much as she loves her daughters (Anna and Vicky). She’s also far too principled and clear-thinking to allow her deteriorating relationship with their father to lessen her concern for his boys. So, how to get her off the stage and allow them the freedom to get into jeopardy? The solution seemed delightfully simple…put her on it.  Lottie is a folk-singer whose career is beginning to take wings. In The Lion of Sole Bay I dispatched her to a recording studio in Italy to make her breakthrough album. I thought she’d earned a holiday after her grim time as an invisible, illegal, worker in the early volumes, living  in a shipping container somewhere half-finished in the Ipswich docklands. Three of the four chil...

"The mouth of the River Blackwater stretched wide and blue ahead her. Meresig shone glassily to port and to starboard the long flat line of the St Peters peninsula curved away into haze." Peter Duck in Tollesbury Fleet We were trudging through the RYA Yachtmaster syllabus in a Harlow adult education building. Two and a half hours every Wednesday evening through the long dark winter. Our instructor was short and paunchy with a beard that would have qualified him for chief of all the dwarfs of Narnia. He was garrulous and eccentric, self-deprecating, knowledgeable, experienced and kind. If any of us had a problem with our boats George would be down in his van to help or he'd ship along on a tricky passage keeping crew morale high with his vast stock of Flanders and Swan songs. As soon as the RYA course had ended George would be setting off single-handed for the Azores in some converted cockleshell that he’d knocked up on the local canal. This was the evening of th...

Peter Duck and me in Felixstowe I was passing a traffic lights where there were two primary school girls waiting. My car window was open and I heard what they said. "Oh, it's the orfer!" I waved like crazy and they waved back. You can keep your red carpet and your paparazzi, popping flash-bulbs and I really can't be bothered with a paving slab in the Hollywood Walk of Fame. To be identified as an author by a couple of Felixstowe primary school kids (who almost certainly won't have read my books) made me deeply, deeply happy. It happened last year as well. I was walking to Felixstowe Library to help give out the medals for the summer reading challenge and there were three or four children playing in a street nearby. No chance they were going to be getting a certificate for reading their six books over the summer holiday but still I heard them say, “That's Julia Jones. She's an Orfer. She came to our school.” That was what had mattered, nothing...