Authors Electric

De-censoring, un-editing, dis-interring and resisting the temptation to airbrush Catherine Hichens  with a portrait of her husband by Peter Scott Rather late in the process of preparing the HMS Beehive edition of We Fought Them in Gunboats (WFTIG to its friends) I decided that it felt a little like restoring an old painting – scraping off accumulated layers of nicotine, dust or flaky varnish to reveal the freshness and accuracy of the original. I imagined seeing as if through new eyes, being transported back to the artist’s studio or the picture’s first unveiling, spotting fine detail that had been buried under the residue of time. I know nothing about picture restoration so I googled a specialist Fine Art site and was immediately taken aback by the plethora of potential problems and promised expert techniques to address them. Was my painting torn or punctured; stained or discoloured; cracked and flaking; overpainted or altered? Had it been damaged by fire, smoke, mould or wate...

On the night of 12/13 April 1943 Lieutenant-Commander Robert Peverell Hichens, Senior Officer at HMS Beehive , the Coastal Forces base in Felixstowe, Suffolk, was at sea. He was leading a unit of four motor gunboats (MGBs) protecting motor launches (MLs) of the 51st Flotilla - also based at Felixstowe -  who were mine-laying off the Dutch coast.  When their job was done, the MLs returned to Felixstowe while the MGBs went on the hunt. They stalked and attacked an enemy trawler (an armed offensive war vessel, not some innocent fisherman) and a gun coaster. The waters off the Netherlands and France were, at that time, an essential supply route for the occupying German forces, therefore a regular conflict zone for the British Coastal Forces. Peter Scott gave these fierce, small scale fights a collective title, The Battle of the Narrow Seas. On this night ‘Hitch’ and his small group had silently manoeuvred up wind of the enemy vessels, then sped at them out of the darkness, engines...

Tennessee Fields - went ahead in 2021 All set again for 2022 It’s festival time. Book festivals, music festivals, dance festivals, beer festivals, curry festivals, car festivals. There are garden festivals, BBQ festivals, happenings, experiences, shows, regattas, fetes, fairs - and fayres.  Margery Allingham makes a guest appearance  Our family summer is dominated by Georgeanna’s Tennessee Fields Country Music Festival (July 15 th – 17 th this year) and I’ve lost count of the number of years Francis and I have been participating in the Felixstowe Book Festival, always the last weekend in June and different every time. I've joined in with dementia life-stories, primary school adventure sessions, boats and books, ebooks, detective stories, children's writing competitions and have introduced novel writing friends such as Jane Thynne, Amanda Craig, Salley Vickers. This year it's Suffolk and the Sea on Saturday while Francis is interviewing Justin Webb ; then Celebrating Ma...

Looking down the River Deben towards Felixstowe Ferry It’s grey outside with the hiss of rain. Peter Duck rocks slightly. Why should she care if there are drips on my head, on the cabin table and, occasionally, the laptop? She’s had what she demanded, which was movement; release from the captivity of her mooring. She craved a voyage, however small. She insisted. A boat always on a mooring is like a songbird in a cage. At 0500 the surface of the water was a mirror for the sky above. Not a ruffle of wind. A slow throb of engine gave us steerage way as we moved down river in the early morning light. The ebb tide carried us through Methersgate, Waldringfield, Ramsholt, then continued without us to Felixstowe Ferry and the sea. We picked up the last of the Ramsholt moorings for peace, breakfast and time to think. The quiet was astounding. Apart from the river birds. Nothing silences them. A tern settled on top of the main mast, spreading its sickle wings and forked-fan tail, opening it...

Outside the 2 sisters arts centre Meg Reid of the Felixstowe Book Festival brought a new word into my vocabulary when she asked me to ‘curate’ a day’s events at the Two Sisters’ Arts Centre on Saturday June 25th 2022. The title of the event would be Suffolk and the Sea - the vital words, for me, were books and boats..  I soon realised that the two were already linked by a footpath running from Suffolk Yacht Harbour at Levington, where I could moor my boat  Peter Duck, to Trimley St Mary, location of the arts centre where we would talk about books. The event began to take a yet more appealing shape when I realised how close we were to Broke House, Levington, where Arthur Ransome lived when he was writing his masterpiece We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea . Our first festival guest should be Nancy Blackett – ‘Goblin’ from the story – who could come and join Peter Duck in the yacht harbour. Book festival attendees could come and meet the boats as well. Perhaps some of them will arriv...

This is a tale of two Matts. Nicci Gerrard and I met the first Matt -- Matt Gaw -- in the authors' room at Felixstowe Book Festival. He was talking about rivers: we were focused on dementia. The two things could have mixed -- I'll never forget the deep comfort that the Deben gave my mother in her most desperate moments, and how she continued to yearn for the river even when I'd taken her far inland. But our session and Matt's were scheduled to be separate so I contented myself with buying his book. Let me commend it to you. The Pull of the River , is an account of two friends in a home-built canoe, setting out to explore the upper (usually non-tidal) reaches of a dozen UK rivers. Their adventures are of a manageable sort -- though drowning is always an option. It's within the fine-writing, psychogeography genre that (for my taste) can too easily capsize into pretentiousness. It doesn't. Matt Gaw is interested in his own capacities (he gets cold and scared, n...