Authors Electric

As a writer, when things get too difficult, I can escape into another world. Recently I have spent a good deal of time with Letty Parker, in an alternative Victorian Bristol. Like its nineteenth century model this is a place of stark contrasts between rich and poor. The Downs are lined with the mansions of the rich, while the threat of the workhouse looms over those who can barely scrape a living to feed themselves and their families. Letty starts off making a living selling pies. She is twelve years old and prides herself on being an independent business woman. Her friends are the street children. They are the pickpockets, the burglars, the runners for the criminal gangs that are operated by Miss Liddy and The Bear. Having divided the city between them, the gangs keep to their own territory. To stray over the boundary is to risk a stabbing, or to be thrown into the river for the eels to devour. The eels that slide up from the river to coil in dark corners awaiting th...

I took this photo a few years ago on holiday in Wales. It's a view towards the sea from Harlech Castle - a place I had many adventures as a young teenager (my friend's parents had a holiday cottage in Harlech). We'd invent whole new backgrounds for ourselves - gypsies, run-aways-from-the-circus, princesses-in-hiding, undercover secret agents - and we'd rope in any poor unsuspecting children we could find to see how far we could stretch our lies. I do wonder what the other kids went back to tell their parents. But this is a photo into another world. If you ignore the tiny spec of 21st century Britain at the bottom, then this could be a portal, The Door Into Summer , or gateway to another dimension altogether. In the photo, the arrangement of the trees, hedges and shadows looks almost like a path zig-zagging to the ocean where there'd be a ship sailing to the land on the far horizon - the Lleyn Peninsula in this case. Who knows what adventures you could have in a wo...