Authors Electric

It’s the holiday season! Long summer days, schools are out or almost out, and if you're like me you’re probably thinking about a beach somewhere ... I’m lucky in that I live about ten minutes' walk from one of the best sandcastle beaches in the country (according to an experiment carried out by the BBC a few years ago). Above is Preston beach - the one with all the beach huts in the English Riviera resort of Torbay. The red colour of the sand comes from the local sandstone cliffs. You can get here by train on the intercity to Plymouth, which runs along the coast from Exeter via. the recently repaired sea wall at Dawlish. Hop on to the branch line at Newton Abbot, and you'll end up at Paignton, where you can either walk past all the bucket-and-spade shops and casinos to the beach, or board the steam train to continue at a more leisurely fashion down the line to Kingswear and from there via the passenger ferry to the Naval port of Dartmouth. Travel by steam...

     In 1990 I started writing a novel called ‘Telling the Sea’.  I’d had success with my first novel, Midnight Blue, and my publishers were on at me to write a sequel.  I’d sketched out some rough thoughts, then gone on holiday. I had a young family of five children, a weary husband and a hyperactive, far-from-weary dog.  We took ourselves down to the cottage where we always went on holiday, in Pembrokeshire. Only a three-hour drive from home, it was the easiest thing to do. We knew the place. We knew where to find the best baker, butcher and fish & chips.  We’d been going down there for years, which meant the unwinding process didn’t begin on Day Three – it began on the journey.  We only had to get over those Cambrian Mountains, heading in the direction of Aberystwyth and the long road down the Welsh coast, and the unwinding would begin at our first glimpse of the sea.  I was there in the same cottage last week, working on ...