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| Photos courtesy of the publisher |
Ever since I was a boy of ten years old I wanted to write: at that age, in between wanting to explore the Hadramaut in the desert of the Yemen and to become a Jesuit monk, I wrote short stories and poetry. All I can remember from those efforts was using and re-using an image of the winter branches of a tree combing the winds. In my Grammar school in Wales this interest was channeled into essays for History and English. These efforts that were so 'literary' that on one occasion they earned zero out ten, with the schoolmaster announcing to the class that he could not make head not tail of what I was on about. A couple of incidents like that were enough to persuade me to use my imagination to create fiction, not history essays. This passion for words, for the beauty of communication, of sharing has grown with me through three score years and ten.
In my business life, words were also a crucial tool. After three years at Oxford and two at Cambridge I began working in Botswana, in southern Africa, for what was by then the rump of the former British Colonial Office, first as a District Officer in Ngamiland around the Okavango Swamp and then as District Commissioner for the Kalahari desert. A lot of my time was spent preparing remote tribes for Independence from the UK. I did not last long in the Kalahari where the people were Bushmen and Hottentots, who were, to my batchelor eyes, not a fair exchange for the Swinging Sixties girls of Kensington.
I then became an early IBM computer salesman when the first computers were being installed. Four or five years later I told my closest friend that I would one day write a novel; it took another twenty years to arrive. In the interim years I became CEO of a series of high-technology companies, coming to specialise in turning around failing companies to re-launch them, often into new markets. The fascinating part of this was the combination of building new teams and constructing a focusing mission - a blend of listening to understand and communicating to lead - words, words, words.
When I look at the structure of the stories I write, I can see that the communication is very visual, almost 'filmic' to use an ugly word, a series of interconnected images of the characters interacting with the physical world around them. Perhaps for that reason the first book, CROFT, was twice optioned by Hollywood producers, but nothing came of this.
Passion - for life, love
THE MUSIC IN HER MIND is fiction based on a real event. Many years ago I came across 'The Minister and the Massacres' by Nikolai Tolstoy. It is the history of a shameful event at the end of the second World War when tens of thousands of Cossack soldiers, their families and children surrendered to the British Army and camped by the River Drau. Acting under orders that were said to come indirectly from Harold Macmillan, the British brutally dispatched them in railway cattle trucks (just as the Nazis did with the Jews) to Stalin's KGB. Hundreds were immediately executed by the KGB and the rest sent on a forced march, thousands of miles to Siberian labour camps.
Unlike most modern novels where there is often a clear-cut positive or negative resolution, I see love as part of a living journey of emotion which evolves much as landscape changes through the window of a moving train. What is past is not lost; it remains forever in your experience, but out of sight. Anya, the cellist in THE MUSIC IN HER MIND, has the remarkable gift of remembering in her mind every piece of music she has ever played.
The MUSIC IN HER MIND is in part the story of how a beautiful young cellist lives through this tragedy. Yet it is not a sad story. A theme in both CROFT and in this new novel is how love can become a power for great good, enabling the lover to face and survive terrible evil and the threat of death. For some, love is the hint that some form of god may exist.
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