Authors Electric

Credit: RAF Valentines Day 1943 The plane home from Hamburg thrummed steadily through the night, down the western side of Germany to Amsterdam, then across the narrow sea to Essex. I think a returning WW2 bomber would have crossed higher, spent more time over the sea than the land. Thousands of ordinary people fly to and from Germany every day. Our countries are allied against larger aggressors to the east and west. It’s not necessary to wake these hurtful memories of things that happened before most of us were born.  Except … when I had asked my brother earlier that day whether he’d like to live in Hamburg, he thought not. ‘Too many horizontal bricks,’ he said. We laughed at him of course. ‘That’s the way bricks are laid!’ but when he pointed across the street to one of so many postwar, Lego-like, redbrick rectangular blocks we understood what he meant. The pervasive evidence of rebuilding. My brother normally lives in former East Berlin, a city hung over by its own c20th history....

The Watchtower from the Saltings  (Photo Tom Barr)  How to connect a 1940s naval watchtower on the Tollesbury marshes, a brilliant Scottish knitwear designer and my all-time favourite novelist?   The investigation led me along the single-track lanes south-east from Tollesbury, heading towards the end of the old railway line to Tollesbury Pier. I began to get goosebumps as I remembered coming here before. Once on a long walk with my dog, when I was never quite sure where we were trespassing but was determined to explore anyway.  That was when I first saw the six-sided building, stark and guarded against the weather. Then I saw it again in my imagination: ‘It’s a t-tower,’ said David. Xanthe loved the way he said it with a shiver of excitement in his voice. ‘It’s in the m-middle of a f-field and it looks right down the r-river.’ ‘And when it was wartime the Navy built it so they could keep a lookout against invaders,’ added Kieran. ‘Then p-zow they’d press...

Edward Young, pre-war design director at Penguin Books, was the first RNVR (Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve) officer to enter the submarine service. When he completed the training course and travelled to Harwich to take up his first post in October 1940 he was with two equally junior sub-lieutenants: Lionel Dearden from the RN and Jock Tait from the RNR (Royal Naval Reserve).  Dearden was sent out immediately on HMS H49 , while Tait and Young joined H28 . Both were small, elderly submarines with 26 people on board and were sharing the patrol duties off the coast of occupied Holland. In his postwar memoir, One of our Submarines (1952) Young remembered 23 year old Dearden returning that first time, tired and weather-beaten. The other two were eager to hear him talk about his experience: ‘but though we had been in the same training class there was a gulf fixed between us: he had completed a war patrol and we had not.’    On H28 Tait and Young survived a depth ch...

This week began on Monday (as they  so often do). Private Eye magazine was almost ready to go to press and Francis, who was in charge, was privately congratulating himself that everyone was likely to get away for home in good time. Then in came the Metropolitan Police, clearing the building. An unexploded WW2 bomb had been discovered in neighbouring Dean Street and the Soho area of London was being evacuated.  The Private Eye office is in Carlisle Street, one of those hit on ‘the longest night’ – that raid May 10 th -11 th 1941 when 550 bombers, dropped 700 tonnes of high explosive on the city, killing 1500 civilians and taking the death toll since September 1940 over 43,000    ‘The explosion tore through the western end of Carlisle Street, damaged Richmond Buildings – two streets south – and blocked off Dean Street. The heavy blast also completely demolished Carlisle House, an elegant eighteenth century city mansion, home to the British Board of Film Censors ...

"The mouth of the River Blackwater stretched wide and blue ahead her. Meresig shone glassily to port and to starboard the long flat line of the St Peters peninsula curved away into haze." Peter Duck in Tollesbury Fleet We were trudging through the RYA Yachtmaster syllabus in a Harlow adult education building. Two and a half hours every Wednesday evening through the long dark winter. Our instructor was short and paunchy with a beard that would have qualified him for chief of all the dwarfs of Narnia. He was garrulous and eccentric, self-deprecating, knowledgeable, experienced and kind. If any of us had a problem with our boats George would be down in his van to help or he'd ship along on a tricky passage keeping crew morale high with his vast stock of Flanders and Swan songs. As soon as the RYA course had ended George would be setting off single-handed for the Azores in some converted cockleshell that he’d knocked up on the local canal. This was the evening of th...