Authors Electric

Psychologist and author Alan Kennedy was researching wartime conditions in Vichy France for his fourth novel   Lucy   when he remembered that there was something he wanted to know about the bombing of Coventry in November 1940. Did Winston Churchill have advance warning of the raid? Could he have saved the city at the cost of alerting the enemy that their Enigma code had been broken? Coventry, November 1940 All of us, I’m sure, will have had the experience being led astray from our main path of research along some elusive but compelling byway which, startlingly often, turns out to be relevant in some way we could not possibly have anticipated. Alan Kennedy was born in the West Midlands, about thirty miles from Coventry. He was a baby in his cot at the time of the bombing: his father left for work every day - often at night- but what did he do? Why wasn't he in uniform? His mother was terrified for the rest of her life by the sound of the air raid siren. Why? Anyone a...

Knock knock … can I come in?             I’ve been invited, so I think you are expecting me. What an erudite lot these electric authors are. I Bombs and Butterflies by Jo Carroll feel a bit of an interloper beside writers of such experience.             Shall I tell you a bit about myself? Well, I didn’t set out to be a writer. I spent years working in Child Protection, which is important, and I’m proud of all I achieved. I wrote numerous articles, and a book, and did some Serious Research; and then – on a bit of a whim – gave it all up to go travelling, on my own. Well, thirty years protecting children is a long time. I came home from trotting round the world (in my mid-50s, just to make it more difficult) with boxes of notebooks and more stories than I had people to listen to them. Write a book, someone said. Well, there were worse ways to fill my time, n...