Authors Electric

Personally, I love the snow, but I know not everyone feels like that. Something that can transform the world overnight into a fairyland (as long as you’re not in the middle of a city) is just simply magical. But I think part of it is a childhood memory of my first time ever trip abroad. It was with my father in 1964, when I was fifteen. We went for a month, over Christmas and New Year, and the Cold War was in full swing. I stared open-mouthed at soldiers with submachine guns, at bullet holes in windows, at streets filled with trams and lorries and horses and carts, and hardly a car in sight other than those driven by party officials. It was my father’s first visit back to the Poland he’d left during the war, and it was a dramatic experience. I was lucky in that my relatives lived in Krakow, a beautiful historic city – but better still, for me, was that it was within reach of Zakopane, in the Tatra mountains. We took the train, which zig-zagged uphill for four hours (it’s two hours ...

My first ever visit abroad was to Poland for Christmas 1964, in the middle of the Cold War. I went with my much-loved Polish father, and it was his first trip back there for twenty-five years. It was highly emotional reunion between him and his elderly brothers and sisters, and an education for a British schoolgirl who had never seen a gun in real life, let alone the submachine guns slung over the shoulders of soldiers on every platform and street corner. It was a country full of contrasts; the snow and the horses and sleighs were magical, the shortages and the overcrowded apartments bewildering. I could only speak a few words of Polish, but the whole experience created a love of travel that has never since left me.             I’ve been back many times, but never for Christmas, so this winter was rather special. There is something wonderful about revisiting places with powerful memories, and Wawel Castle hasn’t changed much. The...

Are you proud to be a writer? Is it something you readily admit to, or do you hide behind other things you do, or have done? And do you expect your children, and (the modern term) ‘loved ones’ to be proud of you – or even a bit boastful by proxy? Let me tell you about one sunny afternoon when I was sitting on the upstairs lav, reading the paper. (Hard life, being a writer, we all know that!) In the yard below my son Hughie was talking to a friend. The conversation was desultory, in between bouts of kicking a ball about. I hear Ben, the friend, say – ‘Your dad’s a writer, isn’t he?’ Did a small, fond, smile of pleasure lick around my chops, I wonder? If it did, it was damn short-lived. For Hugh replied, without the smallest hesitation – ‘No, he’s not.’ Good God, I’ve bred up a literary critic! Damn and blast that bloody school! Ben was not for turning. ‘Yes he is,’ he said. ‘One of his books is in the shop down the road. In the window’ A short pause....

A student who'll take anyone for a drink - my son Wilf Writers block – choose your own position for the apostrophe – is a condition I’ve never suffered from. I started scrawling words on bits of paper almost before I could hold a pencil, and was speedy from the word go. When I went to Church Street Primary School, in Portsmouth (now called Charles Dickens, because he was born just down the road, not because he went there), it was quickly discovered that I could write things with my eyes closed, so to speak. I couldn’t do much else, admittedly. I couldn’t even pee very high up the wall in the lavatory, which was outside, of course, and in fact was the back wall of the rope-walk. I certainly couldn’t do sums or hold a cricket bat, or anything hard like that. But if you wanted words, I was your man. It didn’t exactly get me into grammar school, which my parents knew was pretty damned important for a Portsmouth slum kid, but it helped. ...