Authors Electric

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...

When U-711x returned to Harstad on Feb 24 1945 she carried an unexpected load in her starboard torpedo tube. It was the body of an Englishman but this man wasn’t dead as they’d expected when they’d picked him from the freezing Barents Sea, he was, miraculously, alive. They should never have taken him on board. They’d surfaced, briefly, as the wind had begun whipping the sea into a foam-flecked gale. They had wanted to see the wreckage of their victim. A British corvette. They knew they’d hit her. Everyone in the boat had felt the detonation. They had cheered. It was their first real success. No one liked to think too much about the fishing vessel they’d stopped late in the previous summer. It had had eight civilians on board – Norwegians, heading for Shetland – though they refused to admit their destination. Five men, a woman and two children. They’d sunk the boat and landed the people in Lodingen. They didn’t need to take them all the way back to Hammerfest. They hadn’t come from...

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...

This morning, sensation seekers, I’m going to talk about love and loneliness. I’ve just finished reading The Lion of Sole Bay – another lost night – and I realized afterwards that that is what Julia Jones’s books ‘for children’ are about. This is the fourth one I’ve read, of a project that started as a trilogy, and the subtext is getting ever clearer. (Which is not to say, naturally, that I’m right. Anybody, up to and including the author herself, is entitled to disagree. All I’d really like to insist on is that you read them.) Julia’s child characters, let’s say, sprang originally from her reading of Arthur Ransome. Like me, she must have been sucked, inveigled, seduced into a world that I (although not necessarily she) certainly didn’t fully understand and certainly had no cultural part in. Without wishing to sound in any way threatened by it, it was a world of unthinking wealth and privilege that I could clearly never enter. A little later I went to grammar school, wher...