Authors Electric

The German naval memorial Laboe, Kieler Fjord On the morning of August 18 th 1939 my father, George Jones, walked up into Kiel to buy milk and bread. He and his companions on the small motor yacht Naromis knew they were no longer welcome in German waters.  Their original plan for the day had been to head down the Kieler Fjord then turn east for Warnemunde, where they would pick up the skipper’s daughter who had been staying in Berlin. After that they had intended to press on to Danzig, their purpose unspecified. However they had been told on the previous evening that there would be no more fuel for them in Germany. Perhaps someone had noticed George and his fellow RNVSR officer Bill photographing the Kriegsmarine's latest warships. Their only possible destination now was Denmark. The battleship Gneisenau at anchor. As soon as he returned home,  George sent this photo to Naval Intelligence As George headed for the shops  at seven o’clock in the morning  he...

On September 3 rd 2019 I had the perfect invitation – I was asked to talk about my father, George Jones’s book, The Cruise of Naromis , to members of the Little Ship Club in London. The Cruise of Naromis , you may remember, is the slim volume I was able to make from my father’s 1939 diary, a suitcase of somewhat random photographs and papers from his wartime RNVR service and the account he wrote of his trip to the Baltic in August 1939. He had returned home on Sept 2 nd to find that his call up papers had been waiting for a week. On September 3 rd 1939 therefore he was hurrying north to join the submarine depot ship HMS Forth at Rosyth. The Forth was a floating workshop, a hotel, an operational centre. She had a crew of over 1,100 men, displacement 8,999 tons and was armed with 16 AA guns. Quite a contrast with the trim little pleasure yacht he had just left .   HMS Forth  Both vessels had been launched during 1938 but whereas HMS Forth had been built by ...

The film of The Cruel Sea -- more straightforwardly heroic,  less bitter that the book? The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat was one of the books that was shelved above my father’s desk – but which, after 65 years, I’d still not read. Do you sometimes feel a resistance to a book, a fear that it’s going be too much for you, tell you things you don’t want to hear? It’s time to get over all that, I've decided. My father, George Jones,  died aged 65. I read his final Peter Duck log book, I feel for myself how tired he was as he faced the 1982-83 fit-out. I remember the shock of that phone call, June 16 th 1983, when pfft we were told he was gone. He’d a heart attack and died in the Woodbridge branch of Barclays Bank. He’d been staying with me a few days previously. We’d had a row (about something important) but we hadn't stayed angry. He’d written a last letter -- but he couldn’t have known it was his last. I might live another thirty years but, now that I'm aged 6...

Mum's Arden Shakespeare, coveted since I was a child. Out of their box and onto my shelf To be left someone’s books is a wonderful thing. It's possible that as we emerge from Christmas holiday excesses and make earnest NY resolutions about de-toxing, de-cluttering, de-fragmenting (or waddever) some readers may already be clutching their frontal lobes and wailing  "No Space… !"  "No Time… !" I don't care. This is a statement. Not a assertion or a thesis. The only qualification I'll allow is that the books may need to have belonged to someone you love... Our house is Cluttersville Central. My daughter found me sitting on the back kitchen floor a year or two ago, weeping helplessly “Why, oh why do we have 38 pairs of Wellington boots?” Her immediate solution was to order a skip. Yet we still possess 13* guitars, 92 tea towels and a quantity of yellowing sheet music which stretches back to the collection that had been abandoned in the stool...

I don’t think I’m very good at knowing when to stop. When I wrote the first version of Margery Allingham's biography back in 1991 and had to leave the unsolved mystery of what went wrong in her marriage in the early 1950s it irked me. Discovering the existence of her husband’s unknown child, Tom, conceived in 1951 with lesbian icon Nancy Spain it didn’t answer every question – in fact it posed a few more – but there was a feeling of yes! as puzzle pieces slipped into place. It was enough to persuade me to re-publish the biography in 2009 as The Adventures of Margery Allingham , the title I’d always wanted but which the original publishers didn’t quite get. And that was the first volume under the Golden Duck  imprint. One thing led to another and more pieces of unfinished business pushed their way insistently to the front of the publication queue until GD volume 13, The Cruise of Naromis: August in the Baltic 1939 by my father, George Jones, caught me unawares in a c...

So there I was, rummaging in the attic, looking for something else entirely, when I discovered … (insert mystery item here).   My  trouvaille  in the autumn of 2016 was a faded blue hardback folder holding thirty sheets of densely-typed paper with photographs every facing page and handwritten amendments.  THE CRUISE OF NAROMIS: AUGUST IN THE BALTIC 1939 G.A. JONES Oh gulp, I remembered what this must be... Years ago my father, George Jones, had begun telling my brothers and me about his trip through the Kiel Canal, aged 21, in the weeks immediately before the Second World War. I also remembered my total failure to feel interested and felt ashamed.  I was probably reading Leon Uris’s  Exodus  at that time or watching  The Great Escape.  When I realised there were no heroics or atrocities in Dad’s story I simply stopped listening. I assume he stopped telling us. Naromis  was a 37’ motor yacht built on the Norfolk Broads...