Are you safe?
Who’s at your window?
… at your door?
On The Pier
I did the test that morning, it was positive. I should have been pleased, but all I could think about was last night’s Crimewatch. Of course I had no proof, just a gut feeling, so instead of phoning I went for a walk down to the sea front to clear my head. I wandered onto the pier and that’s when I had the idea.
I stood beside the gypsy caravan and read the sign.
LET ROSA TELL YOUR FORTUNE… AND GIVE ADVICE
Nervously I climbed the two wooden steps and opened the creaky door. It was pretty and cosy inside, not scary at all. A grandmotherly figure beckoned me to sit down; her cheeks were rosy and her dark eyes sympathetic. She took my hands but did not look at them.
‘Er… do I have to pay?’
‘No dear, I would never take money from one so deeply troubled.’
My mouth was dry, I didn’t speak.
‘You will have your wish, a beautiful son; but if you want to see him grow up you know what you must do today. Go now.’
‘But I don’t understand…’ I mumbled, as she motioned me out.
But I did understand. I climbed down the steps, closing the door behind me and reached into my bag for my mobile. I tapped in the number that was etched on my brain, the Crimewatch number.
Catching up with family and friends is always very pleasant, especially if it involves eating out. It is even more enjoyable for a writer if some of those present are reading or have finished one’s latest novel. But if someone says they have read the second in your trilogy, but could not find the third volume on Amazon, it is embarrassing to admit you haven’t finished writing it.
Often the reading experience is out of our hands. A friend has finished your novel after at last finding her Kindle charger. It was lost during the process of moving; she thought that may have been why the middle part of the book seemed to move slowly.
Whether your readers have a real paper book or are dependent upon electricity, they bring their own experience to the novel, it is out of the author’s hands. Sadly we can’t expect every reader to take a week off work and live undisturbed in isolation, so they can give our novel the attention we think it deserves. Those who devour a book in a week and get ‘lost’ in it are the writer’s dream. In reality people drop their paperbacks in the bath, can’t read their Kindle on the bus to work because it makes them feel sick, or lose their book down the back of the sofa. They read at bedtime and fall asleep after one page, or they wake up in the middle of the night with raging toothache and read their Kindle to try and take their mind off the pain, so that your novel is forever associated with misery.
Outside factors may encroach; family dramas involving lots of form filling take over just as they reach chapter three of your novel.
Even if reading is proceeding well, each reader has memories and moods; they read your words through a prism of their own.
An author whose novel is turned into a film may see his book as others see it. We have all seen a film and thought it unlike the book. I saw a film after enjoying a well known novel and thought the film was rubbish, felt indignant on behalf of the author. I was later surprised to hear him talking on the radio about how pleased he was with the film adaptation.
Despite your readers’ experiences and the impossibility of seeing into their minds, if they say they loved your novel and were left stunned by the ending you know they’ve read it ‘properly’.
If you are feeling strong enough, visit my Amazon author pages for a glimpse at my novels.
https://www.amazon.com/Janet-Gogerty/e/B00A8FWDMU/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Janet-Gogerty/e/B00A8FWDMU
Easter Eggs; I wonder if I would still remember how to foil wrap them? A skill I learnt one winter many years ago. I had joined a job agency in desperation; a bit of a come down after the Christmas season in Harrods toy department, but then that was the point of a working holiday, different experiences.
Croydon, South London, early on a grey winter’s morning, a disparate group of people get into the agency mini bus. We are being taken to a sweet factory to do the Easter Egg run. ‘Paynes’ it certainly isn’t, Paynes stands large, bold and gleaming white on the main road; we pass it on the way to our factory, shabby and forlorn down a side road. We are going to help produce anonymous eggs, for cheap mugs in unknown shops.
My heart sinks as we walk in, staying on at school and going to college was not meant to lead here; but everyone should experience real life, preferably straight after leaving school. My ex schoolmates, probably all successfully teaching, nursing or doing post graduate studies, would have been astonished to see me on the factory floor, earning sixteen pounds a week.
The first and only skill we have to learn is how to wrap the egg in foil. There is a knack, you either get it or you don’t; if you think about it you don’t. We take it in turns to wrap or put them in packing boxes. If an egg breaks we are allowed to eat it, the only perk of the job. Everyone says it will put me off chocolate for life, it doesn’t.
The regulars operate the machinery, centrifugal force turning liquid chocolate into eggs. They clean the machinery with the managers torn up old vests.
Now I cannot remember any names.
The West Indian woman is the most articulate, in contrast to the homely local woman who says all she knows is work; after a full day she goes home to cook separate meals for all her family. I vow never to do that and I don’t.
A tiny coloured woman has tears in her eyes as she tells us her brother is in prison on Robben Island, I have no idea where that is or what it is. A young woman from Ghana has immaculate, copper tinted, strangely straight hair; after several weeks I notice with surprise there is a join, a glimpse of natural Afro hair; why did she want to wear a wig? Her husband is studying in London and they have left their two young children behind in Ghana with their grandparents. I am shocked.
A young local girl wears tight trousers, only West Indian woman has cottoned on that she is four months pregnant and tries to persuade her to tell her parents and wear more comfortable clothes.
Two young French women, friends who love English pop music and giggle a lot, are probably the people I have most in common with.
Lunch is only half an hour, but we don’t want to spend any longer in the so called canteen. I take sandwiches and there is an awful drinks machine, from which unrecognisable hot and cold liquids pour into flimsy plastic cups. A world away from Harrods Staff Restaurant, but we get to meet the regular staff; one lady has spent twenty years dipping bars of nougat into coconut.
Above the basins in the dreadful toilets are notices such as ‘Don’t spit in the Basins’. Who would do that I wonder?
It took two or three buses to get to and from Croydon, most of my journeys were in winter semi darkness. Now I can’t remember where the factory was or what the area looked like. Maybe the new tramline has ploughed through the site. But every Easter I wonder what happened to those people I only knew for a few weeks.
My environmental hero of the month is artist Daniel Webb, his art is rubbish – literally. Read about his amazing project.
In Jerusalem Tonight
…and welcome back to In Jerusalem Tonight. We are talking to the youngest brother of a man arrested just hours ago by the authorities. He claims his older brother is completely innocent, but what about his political involvement?
No, he is interested in people not politics; that is why the crowds are drawn to him.
But what is he really like, do the public see the real man?
Yes and no. We’re just an ordinary family and I guess you’d say my brother is a chip off the old block. A real carpenter; like our father he has a feel for the wood, for the rest of us it’s just a labour. He is most like our father; strange that some gossips still say our mother tricked him into marriage, when she was carrying another man’s child. Maybe it’s because he is the eldest, but he does have the same wisdom and compassion our father had; qualities that not many people possess.
You paint a picture of a warm, loving family, why do you think your brother never married?
That’s a personal question only he could answer, but I think he knew he was never going to stay in the village. Travelling around, leaving a wife and family behind, he knew that would be wrong.
But he gets on well with women.
Yes he knows how to talk to them, as if they were equals, they appreciate that.
And yet in some ways he’s a loner.
I wouldn’t say that; he is a thinker, very deep. Most of us couldn’t take the solitary life, but he has the inner strength.
Would you describe him as highly intelligent?
Oh yes, it has always been a joke in our family that he held forth on theological matters when he was a child. But he never forgot how to talk to ordinary people. He was the perfect big brother; playing with us, making toys and of course he worships our mother.
So surely this is a man who will be able to talk his way out of this current little difficulty.
Yes, I’m sure he will see this is not the time to be humble.
One holiday not long ago we were on Bodmin Moor, Cornwall; a dog walker, a few sheep and a man tending a crackling bonfire in the garden of the solitary house. A strange noise made us look up into the evening sky. We zoomed in with our cameras, not a UFO, but the first drone we had ever seen. Not the sort that drops bombs luckily, but what was it doing? Watching us? Is there anywhere you can go without being seen?
The next day we returned and drove up a road to investigate the tall mast on Caradon Hill we had seen from afar. Warning signs said Private road, access only. We walked the rest of the way up the grassy hill, veering away from the unmade road, past the gigantic guy ropes, steel cables holding up the metal tower. There was a complex of buildings, entry by security pass only, CCTV in operation. Obviously a secret facility, we were being filmed and I expected armed troops to emerge at any moment to take us in for interrogation. The signs were headed by the word Arqiva – a sinister secret organisation for sure.
The truth was more prosaic when I looked the place up on Wickepedia.
The Caradon Hill transmitting station is a broadcasting and telecommunications facility. Built in 1961, the station includes a 237.7 metres (780 ft) guyed steel lattice mast. The mean height for the television antennas is 603 metres (1,978 ft) above sea level. It is owned and operated by Arqiva, a British telecommunications company which provides infrastructure and broadcast transmission facilities in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
But perhaps that information was a cover up; we only escaped arrest because they had identified us as civilian ramblers.
We are all being watched, all the time. CCTV cameras we know about, on buses, station platforms, in shops. We don’t know if we are being filmed or watched live. Above us are police, military and coastguard helicopters.
It is not only people who are being watched, so is your vehicle. Drive down many main roads and your journey has been recorded by ANPR – Automatic Number Plate Recognition; if the car is stolen or of interest for any reason it will be spotted. Police cars can now carry similar equipment. Writers of thrillers or crime novels have a harder time than ever helping their characters hide or escape, though in fiction and real life criminals are often one step ahead of new technology.
But writers can find new inspiration for plot ideas.
Pity the chap whose neighbour offers to give him a lift to Heathrow Airport in his mate’s car. By the time they are driving through the tunnel they have already been spotted on the spur road. Unbeknown to the occupants of the car, the neighbour’s friend is a criminal or terrorist. When the car is stopped they will have a hard time explaining who they are, by which time the flight will have been missed.
We have all seen pleas on television for missing persons or witnesses to the movements of a murder suspect. There on the screen is a CCTV picture taken inside a bus with the exact time and date. A wife spots her husband, who never uses buses and should have been at work on the other side of the city. A good starting point for a mystery.
In Brief Encounters of the Third Kind the main characters fear they are not only being observed, but controlled. There is no rational explanation for inexplicable events and when they finally reach a glimpse of the truth it is not what they expected.
https://www.seanhenry.com/sculpture/
Terminal State
‘No one will ever know,’ said my friend that day in 1959 ‘and it was an accident.’
I expect that is what lots of murderers plead, but we were only ten years old. To this day I have no idea who he was, but I’ll never forget the look of surprise on his face, then the look of terror.
‘Be careful girls’ said my mother as we set off that sunny day.
We liked to watch the aeroplanes, then we would go exploring; Stanwell Moor, Colnbrook village, farms, fields and streams. We were free to wander the western edges of London Airport as long as we didn’t go near Perry Oaks.
My aunt and uncle had lived in Heathrow Village, till they were evicted during the war, but my parents lived out their years on the farm under the flight path, wedged between the runways. Up until the last it was like living in the country except for the ranks of landing lights.
‘Stay together, don’t talk to any strangers and be back at teatime.’
He must have been a stranger, because no one noticed he had gone. For weeks we expected the police to turn up, looking for someone’s husband or father… or an escaped convict, after all he did act strangely.
‘You two girls out on your own? Have you ever seen a water vole?’
I nudged my friend, we turned to walk away, but he followed and what he showed us wasn’t a water vole. We wanted to run, but we were trapped on the edge of a bank that descended steeply. He was blocking the footpath that led back the way we had come.
‘Count to three then rush past him’ she said.
What happened next happened so quickly; it could have been any one of the three of us that went in; did we push him or did he slip? We had strayed into the forbidden territory, Perry Oaks sludge works and as he slipped under we knew why our parents feared it.
Looking back as a teenager, an adult, I realised he was a flasher, a harmless loner perhaps. But had he followed us? Would he have murdered us? Two missing girls and every stretch of water would have been dragged, but his body was never found. We never told a soul, we didn’t want to get into trouble for being out of bounds; or that’s what we told ourselves.
My friend’s family took her off to Australia, we lost touch. I wondered if she ever told anyone, for years I half expected a policeman to knock on the door.
Then came the planning enquiry, five long years. We prayed the development would be turned down, no one wanted the upheaval and destruction, the removal of the last farm. But that is not what I dreaded.
Digging, draining, what would they find; a body preserved like peat bog man? When Terminal Five Heathrow opened, I knew at last that no one would ever know.
Times and Tides of a Beachwriter 