Authors Electric

  Peter Duck  in early morning sun, Aldeburgh, October 2023 (Jane Russell)  Every year Classic Boat magazine puts forward its selection of yacht restorations and newly built boats in traditional style for public vote. The prize last year was a tasteful trophy and a bottle of gin for the owner. The shortlisted boatyards get an opportunity to display a Classic Boat logo, if they wish. It’s good for their business and local community awareness. I'm hoping that the public votes make the boatyard workers feel good too.  In 2023, traditional wooden boatbuilding was officially put on the endangered list of British crafts . Perhaps this is a little like removing the word ‘acorn’ from the Oxford Junior Dictionary : arguably it's recognising a truth – young people today don’t need to name ‘acorns’ -- or adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pastur...

  An odd quirk in the human brain allows us to feel that the things we love are living, even when they are manufactured objects – like boats, for instance. Things that live can also die. I’ve just been reading the writer and sailor, Peter Nichols, mourning the death of his yacht, Toad . Toad is gone. I know this absolutely as I sit here in the cockpit on what is now becoming rather a nice day. The sun is out, the sea is going down. Knowing this I look at the boat around me, the teak vent boxes I built on the cabin roof. The stainless-steel guard rail stanchions I installed. The winches, the rigging. The new compass Martin and I hooked up. The slight imperfection beneath the paint on the cabin side that I know is my plug of a hole made by Harry’s useless depth gauge. I look up and down the boat and I cannot see an inch of it that I haven’t remade according to my idea of what would make Toad the best it could be. Now I know that the leak will not get better but worse, that I mus...

  The River Deben from Kyson Point by John Roberts I edit a small, local, bi-annual magazine for the River Deben Association in Suffolk. It’s the river’s parish magazine so (in the manner of parish mag editors) I take as much time and trouble as if it were Country Life or the National Geographic .  My son Bertie manages the layout and we publish articles about birds and boats, people and paintings, saltmarshes and seawalls. I realise now that I was destined for the Deben from the day that my father (to be) returned from his RNVR service in World War 2 declaring that he never wanted to go anywhere else. So he set up a yacht agency. Less than two years later, my mother (to be) found her way to the river wanting to buy a boat… Skip along a few more years and a larger boat was purchased as my brother and I were demanding more space. Enter Peter Duck. In 1960 a young artist named John Roberts arrived in Woodbridge on the River Deben, planning to buy a boat and sail away. He was ...

In the latter part of this strange summer my son Bertie and I have been working on a history of Waldringfield. A k a ‘Wunnerf’l’ as the Suffolk pronunciation has it – which the locals are quick to point out is almost indistinguishable from the correct way to say ‘wonderful’. ‘Wunnerf’l Wunnerf’l’ runs to 314 large and glossy pages with somewhere in the region of 618 photographs and is a tremendous achievement by the Waldringfield History Group -- and also by Bertie who was responsible for design and typesetting. At the outset, however, I wondered where we would ever reach our collective goal of publication by Michaelmas (Sept 29th).  The two pages of foreword entitled 'Wonderful Waldringfield' went through a larger number of politely argued re-writes than any other section of the book. Everyone had their view on what precisely constitutes the particular wonderfulness of this Suffolk village. The answer, of course, is the Deben. 'The River Deben means many things to many p...

Peter Duck approaching Bawdsey early 1960s I was trying to reach the Bawdsey Radar Museum. A long planned visit – part of my background research for  Pebble  (volume six in the ‘Strong Winds’ series). I was impatient to arrive. Too impatient? I took a wrong turning. A gate was open that should have been closed. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I was inside some chain-link fencing and driving up a poorly maintained road. The brick-built bungalow to my left showed broken windows and missing slates. There were brambles. Unexplained structures in different stages of decay and dereliction. The grass was ragged. There were no signs. I knew this wasn’t where I was meant to be. However modest the newly re-opened museum they would surely have put up a notice for visitors. I should stop and turn back. perimeter fence I went on.  Driving uphill towards the empty sky. As I neared the farthest edge of this wide space, I stopped my car beside a patch of concrete. If I wer...