Authors Electric

  cover by Claudia Myatt The Deben magazine is a modest publication. Just A5 size, 40 pages (unless it bursts its bounds to 44, potentially upsetting both the treasurer and the envelope stuffers), it appears twice a year and is supplied on subscription to members of the River Deben Association. I am its fortunate editor and sometimes like to think of it as the parish magazine of the river. Except that, unlike a parish mag, it doesn’t carry advertising and local event notices are posted by monthly email. So, almost all of those 40 pocket-sized pages are available for contributor articles and photos. As editor I find it endlessly fascinating to read about the different ways people relate to the river – whether they walk by it, sail on it, swim in it, paint it, observe the birds, beasts, plants, fish, creepy-crawlies that live in it. One of my favourite articles was when someone started identifying what might wriggle out when you pull up a mooring rope that hasn’t been used for ...

  ‘Why do you want to republish The Tuesday Boys ?’ my youngest brother asked. My immediate answer would be 'Because I love it,' and I know he agrees with me. Libby Purves and Claudia Myatt say the same. But is that sufficient reason to republish?   The Tuesday Boys is a book about a project to take eight young East London  children sailing. It began in 1975, fifty years ago. Will it make any sense to readers today? On one level, yes, belief in the potential for sail training to widen horizons and change lives has been in existence since the late c18th when the Marine Society began taking boys from London workhouses and providing initial training before they went to sea with the merchant navy. Through the c19th and early c20th, while Britain's need for seafarers remained obvious, charities continued to work to ensure that the most deprived inner city children (boys) had their chance to succeed at sea.  More general charities, such as sea scouts and sea cadets, ...

‘We’ve waited for a cargo and we’ve waited for a crew, And last we’ve waited for a tide, and now the waiting’s through. O don’t you hear the deep-sea wind and smell the deep-sea foam, Out beyond the harbour on the long road home?’ The Complete Poetry of Cicely Fox Smith edited by Charles Ipcar and James Saville I asked my friend, the artist, writer and musician, Claudia Myatt, what she knew of the poet Cicely Fox Smith (1882-1954). She was immediately able to point me to a recording of ‘Rosario’, sung by her own Quaynotes group in Suffolk. She had used this verse from ‘The Long Road’ (first published in Canada in December 1912) to preface their performance. But how many other people, outside the UK and US folk scenes, have heard of Cicely Fox-Smith today. It’s one of those questions where one hopes to be shouted down by an indignant roar; Of course I have, how can you have been so ignorant? But, with the zeal of the convert, I’m going ahead anyway. I’ve had Charles Ipcar and James Savi...

  His Own Little Ship FB Harnack for Yachting Monthly September saw the publication of Uncommon Courage: the Yachtsmen Volunteers or World War II  in a paperback edition. It’s given me the greatest pleasure particularly as the publisher’s budget -- and editorial goodwill -- was extended to cover 16 extra pages for additional material as well as the inclusion of photographs. People dug deep in their collections to assist. Kate, at the Adlard Coles office, was endlessly patient as I continually wheedled more in; publisher Liz waved ideas through. When I hold its neat pocket-friendly shape now, I feel it's stuffed full of other people's kindnesses. The new frontispiece comes courtesy of Yachting Monthly magazine (thank you YM editor, Theo Stocker). It’s a drawing by FB ‘Fid’ Harnack (b1897) who served in both the first and second world wars. The figure of the officer gazing through binoculars at the yard where his yacht has been laid up, while his ship – is it a destroyer? – ste...

  An odd quirk in the human brain allows us to feel that the things we love are living, even when they are manufactured objects – like boats, for instance. Things that live can also die. I’ve just been reading the writer and sailor, Peter Nichols, mourning the death of his yacht, Toad . Toad is gone. I know this absolutely as I sit here in the cockpit on what is now becoming rather a nice day. The sun is out, the sea is going down. Knowing this I look at the boat around me, the teak vent boxes I built on the cabin roof. The stainless-steel guard rail stanchions I installed. The winches, the rigging. The new compass Martin and I hooked up. The slight imperfection beneath the paint on the cabin side that I know is my plug of a hole made by Harry’s useless depth gauge. I look up and down the boat and I cannot see an inch of it that I haven’t remade according to my idea of what would make Toad the best it could be. Now I know that the leak will not get better but worse, that I mus...