Authors Electric

Having been recently forced into close proximity with the section of society that keeps the rest of us from going under, I’ve been pushed to wonder, not for the first time, what writing is actually for. Without going into too much detail, I have been meeting carers, cleaners, bum wipers and suchlike unregarded, ill-rewarded members of our Big Society. All but one of them, so far, has been black, all of them have been on the minimum wage, all of them have got degrees. I have been, ridiculously, too polite to ask them how much they might earn, or if indeed they are on zero hours contracts. I do know however, that they are not paid for their driving time, have to provide their own cars, and pay for their own petrol. This, incidentally, in a rural area far from town, in a village that does not even have a shop, let alone a bus service. It does not even have a public telephone. The oldest of these people is perhaps twenty-eight, from Zimbabwe, and highly qualified in compute...

I once read a book by Gwyn Thomas called The World Cannot Hear You. I can’t f o r the life of me remember much about it (except that I loved it), but the title has always lurked in my mind. I t seemed to me to epitomise the writer’s (or writers’) tragedy. You write, or read, these wonderful books, somebody reads them, or maybe not, and then they are gone. I used to drone on about Gerald Kersh, whom I thought was fantastic. Nobody else had ever heard of him, which I bitterly resented, more on his behalf than my own. Before and during World WarII he was enormous. And now…? But sometimes, out of the blue, things get jogged. My phone rang not so long ago , and I was asked to take part in a Radio 4 programme about the writers considered to be in the van of the “new realism” in children’s books. My Mate Shofiq was mentioned, and Albes on and the Germans. Good God, I thought - I wrote them! And suddenly remembered being rung up by the headmaster of a school in Peckham to cancel my invitatio...