Authors Electric

This week has seen the 75th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) on 8 May and also the annual Europe Day on the 9th,  a celebration of all the years of peace in the heart of the continent. As part of the commemoration of those six years of World War II that came to an end in May of 1945, I was delighted to interview the authors of  six novels brought together in a collection titled   The Road to Liberation . The authors - Marion Kummerow, Marina Osipova, Rachel Wesson, J.J. Toner, Ellie Midwood and Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger -  offer a fascinating range of perspectives on that global conflict. They hail from various countries – Germany, Russia, Ireland, the USA – and their books (in the words of its blurb) ‘will transport you across countries and continents during the final days’ of the Second World War, ‘revealing the high price of freedom—and why it is still so necessary to “never forget”’. While my own writing has focused on a far earlier era, a...

Angela Wyndham Lewis  with Francis Wheen & Frank Thorogood February 1994 It was late 1960s, a railway station in Austria, perhaps nine or ten o’clock at night. Beyond the lights of the station it was dark, only gleams of light reflected from tramped down snow. I was perhaps 13 and was waiting with my parents and my brothers for the snow-sports-special to take us back to England.The holiday was over, all that remained was a long night in hard bunks as the mighty train carried us back across Europe. Then my brothers and I would go back to our boarding schools and my parents would continue living semi-separately in a marriage that had lost its joy. We were joined by a small lady in a thick fur coat. Her name was Angela and it transpired that she would be travelling with us. We had seen her and her daughter in the resort. They both had fur coats, neat boots and hennaed hair. They wore eye make-up, soft cream polo neck jerseys, stretchy black trousers and looked unachieva...

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...

Twenty years ago the tragic death of a baby in the USA by what was thought to be ‘shaken baby syndrome’ made headlines all over the world.   On trial for the little boy’s murder, the British nanny unwittingly sealed her fate by describing how she’d ‘popped the baby on the bed to change his nappy.’   What Louise Woodward didn’t realise was that an expression used in the UK to describe an action taken with lightness and dexterity doesn’t translate at all that way in the USA; there, ‘pop’ can only mean something explosive.   No amount of explanation could erase the image in the jury’s mind that she had hurled the 8 month-old on to the bed with all the force of a rocket launcher. *Quip by Oscar Wilde... probably Misunderstandings between our ‘two nations divided by a common language’* aren’t usually so dangerous.   Nor should any English people loftily assume our words are the ‘original’ ones; in many cases it’s the other way round.   ‘Garbage’, ‘trash’ an...