Authors Electric

Tomorrow we meet in a pub, with no alcohol, to say goodbye to a friend. We first met Heidi when our children were at primary school together. It was a very small village school where I can remember being on first name terms with all the other parents. Some of us ran an after school club together. Heidi was part of this. She was musical, artistic, imaginative, affectionate, alternative. Sometimes her suggestions were a bit fey. Sometimes she didn’t turn up when we expected her. Heidi was a single mother with a single child, Oliver, who she loved dearly. He too was musical, artistic, affectionate, full of enthusiasms, never quite in the mainstream. Sometimes they were very late for school. Occasionally Heidi wasn’t there when it was time for the children to go home. Once or twice I went to Heidi’s house and couldn’t make her hear me. There was a day when she started to tell me how unhappy she was. People occasionally made remarks. I began to worry about her. I was also the school governo...

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....

  I watched Peter Duck being lowered those final few inches back into the Deben. I heard her sigh with relief as she settled into the water where she belongs. Her own weight, which had been supported by four rigid cradle struts  through the eighteen months she’d spent ashore, was now dispersed across her underwater surface, the river pushing her up as gravity and the weight of her own superstructure pulled her down.  Aaaah… It was like sinking into a sofa at the end of a long day, kicking off tight shoes and letting the shoulders slump. Aaaah… As the thick webbing slings from the crane were loosened, it was like undoing the top button of a too-tight waist band. Aaaah… as I stood deliberately alone on the pontoon, watching that final return to her element, I sighed too. A piece of my soul was back where it belonged. Soul is a difficult word to use here. I experimented with ‘being’, ‘pysche’ and ‘self’ but none of them quite worked. It’s difficult, anyway, to analyse how...

More than a decade ago in The Salt-Stained Book   (2011)  D onny, the hero, was by the shores of Gitchee Gumee (okay, fact checkers, it was Alton Water, a reservoir near Ipswich in Suffolk) when he felt the tang of the North Wind. It was a life-changing moment, the extent of which he has yet to experience fully. That’s a thought-in-progress. More recently I’ve been reading Paul Heiney’s Goodbye Mr Puffin which includes a wonderful page of praise for that same ‘tang’. ‘ I love anything with the word ‘north’ in it. I adore the air that blows in northern parts for its freshness and its tang. I can sup on it as if it were a glass of the finest claret. The true north wind is the tastiest of all and best when it is close to frigid.’ Heiney writes of the ‘spirituality to be found by heading in the direction of north.’   Is this something that Donny will experience? I’m not sure. In 2018, at the end of Pebble , I left him on a Russian superyacht (she was originally an Arctic s...

The Salt-Stained Book was my first published novel. When, in 2011,  I saw its words on a page, in type, I felt an unexpected rush of emotion. I'll be honest, I cried. The story itself had come easily -- with conviction and delight -- but it had been a long struggle to get it into print. I love books and once the words were there, fixed and ready to read, it felt like one of the greatest moments of my life. An electronic edition came later and was exciting but less profoundly moving. I'd got used to seeing the physical shape of the words away from my own screen. What I hadn't fully experienced was their sound. Yes, of course I'd read it aloud in my mind as I was working. For a brief couple of terms, many years ago, I had the poet, Charles Tomlinson, as my university tutor. He required every undergraduate essay, however nitpickingly abstruse (or, more likely, naively tendentious), to be read to him in his rather large room from the other side of a grand mahogany t...

Claudia Myatt's new cover for A Ravelled Flag I knew it was going to be a successful outing as soon as I got the teacher's response to the weather forecast. It was mid-October and we'd planned to take her class of ten-year olds exploring alongside the River Stour in Suffolk. I'd warned her already that they might get wet feet by the end of the day but now I needed to tell her that we were also likely to encounter rain and strong winds. Not a hurricane, you understand, but gusts that might reach 40mph and possible heavy showers.She'll cancel, I thought to myself gloomily. I was part of the way through a project for the Essex Book Festival, working with schools in the Tendring Hundred area of Essex. My job was to talk about the stories in my Strong Winds series, then encourage the children to write adventures of their own. Each school wanted something slightly different. The headteacher of this school (herself a sailing enthusiast) suggested that the Y6 ...