THE INVISIBLE PIPER

A number of years ago I gave up my lecturing job to become a full-time writer. My friends told me that I was crazy and I'd most probably starve to death. I didn't; I learnt to live on little while I researched extensively for my historical novels.  I sold my house and bought a flat in St. Leonards-on Sea, E. Sussex overlooking the sea. Two years later both books were published and I was ecstatic! The Invisible Piper and its sequel Tempting The Stars are both set in WW11 and explore how relationships between people become transformed by war.

 I became so involved with my characters' lives whilst writing the novels that one of them, Charlie, my lion-hearted  eleven-year-old evacuee wouldn't go away and I had to rewrite both plots to give him a larger role! An interesting, if odd experience of a character writing himself! I discovered fascinating details about people’s lives from reading numerous war-time diaries in The Imperial War Museum library and from listening to tapes at its Sound Archives; details I had never heard about and which I have put into both books.

I hope you buy them on Amazon and write a review of them.

 The Invisible Piper opens with a dramatic question: does Rob Adams, a 20 year Spitfire pilot who is parachuting out of a burning Spitfire survive? We have to wait until the climax at the end of the book to discover the truth. In flashback, we explore Rob’s home life; his life in the RAF and the people he learns to love: Kate, his best friend’s sister and my favourite character, ten year old Charlie.

Charlie, a London evacuee, brings with him a traumatic background, a perceptive personality and a disarming ability to make people care about him deeply. He totally changes Rob's family's perception of themselves and the world.

In fact, the developing relationship between Rob and 10 year old Charlie is the pivot on which the book turns.  Rob gives Charlie the love and security which has always been missing from his life. However, as we follow their friendship, we gradually realise that it is not Rob, but Charlie, traumatised, but lionhearted, who is the stronger person; it is Charlie who forces Rob to look deep into himself after he barely survives the appalling disfigurement of burns; it is Charlie who ultimately teaches Rob about real love and courage.

Here is the first chapter. I hope you find it exciting. 

Chapter 1

‘Those who cannot remember

the past are condemned to repeat it.’

George Santayana

The Age of Reason, 1905

 Rob distantly heard the telephone ring, but it couldn’t have anything to do with him. He’d been flying for days without sleep.

He felt someone shaking him. ‘Sir. Come on – another scramble.’

It was impossible. He’d only just gone to sleep. He staggered to his feet and headed for the door, fully clothed. He hadn’t even taken off his flying boots; he’d been too exhausted after the last sortie. It was 4.30 a.m.

He saw the others running past him to their machines and suddenly, nervous energy flooded through his body. He ran towards his Spitfire, refuelled, rearmed and serviced in the short time since his last flight by the equally exhausted ground-crew.

The oscillating thunder of Merlin engines filled the air as pilots revved up. Rob could see the blue flames from the exhaust stubs, streaking through the half light.

‘Up again, Sir? Don’t them Jerries ever sleep?’ Pickles, one of the ground-crew, yawned widely. ‘Just oiled the canopy hood – bit stiff.’

Rob yawned back as he urinated on the grass: a practice which no longer embarrassed him since most of the other pilots did it to save time before sorties. He climbed into the cockpit. Shaking the sleep away from his brain, he tested the oxygen supply and R/T and then taxied out to the far end of the aerodrome and turned into the wind. He saw the thumbs up from Flight Commander ‘Sandy’ Lane and opened up. A throbbing roar filled the cockpit and cut off the outside world as he sped across the aerodrome. The bumps from the under-cart became less and less, until with a final bump, he was off the deck and a grey blur of grass slipped beneath him. His right hand dropped to the under-cart control and moved it back. Then he felt for the pump. A few seconds later, two faint thuds told him the wheels were up, only then did he reach behind him to pull the stiff hood shut. He stifled another yawn as he put the airscrew into course pitch, throttling back to cruising revs.

What the hell was he flying at 4.40 in the morning for? No sign of the bloody Hun.

A shiver ran across his body as the R/T crackled into life.

‘Seventy plus Bandits approaching south-south-west. Angels 15 to 20.’

Rob looked around wildly, thankful he wasn’t wearing a collar and tie. His neck had been rubbed raw for months until he’d taken to wearing roll neck sweaters and scarves, like most of the other pilots.

Then he saw them: thirty Dornier 17s and Ju 88 bombers at 15,000 feet, escorted by forty Me 109s at 20,000 feet.

Sandy’s voice stabbed through the headphones.

‘Go! Go! Go!’

Rob climbed steeply above one of the 109s and suddenly all he could see was hoar-frost covering his windscreen. No forward vision. His throat felt full of chalk. He watched the shaking in his hand as he rubbed a small section of screen. He had no idea where the 109 was. The oxygen was making him light-headed. It was a nightmare: trying to weave, scan his rear-view and clear the windscreen all at the same time. His breath came in short, agitated gasps as he broke away from the others and dived. At 10,000 feet the screen cleared.

Thank God. No Messerschmitt on my tail.

The air above the sea was misty so he didn’t see the olive-green camouflage on the long thin Dornier 17 until tracers streamed past his cockpit.

Jesus!

He suddenly saw large, black swastikas on the fuselage of the Dornier 200 feet away and climbed at breakneck speed, the sweat pouring from him; his eyes searing the skies until he saw the enemy beneath him. He banked violently and the Dornier’s starboard engine shot through his gun-sights. His thumb jammed down on the firing button and the Browning machine guns tore into the Dornier’s engine. The bomber erupted into flames and screamed into the sea.

For a second, Rob relaxed back into his harness. Only a second. But a second he was going to regret, forever. A Messerschmitt was above him, coming out of the sun. He was blinded by the sudden blaze in his eyes; he didn’t see the orange tracers stream towards him, just felt the violent thump thump thump of cannon shell screaming into his fuselage. He lost his elevator-control and the Spitfire went into a steep left-hand climbing turn. Rob felt the seat pressing deep into his body and momentarily blacked out. Then just as the pressure eased and the blood raced back through his brain, his oil tank burst into flames.

Terror electrified his body. He tore at the hood release. It wouldn’t move. His screams filled the small cockpit as he watched flames eating through his fingers. Ignoring the pain, he tore again and again at the hood release. At last – it slammed back. He groped for the release pin securing the Sutton harness, trying to hold his head back from the flames. And suddenly, he was out, tumbling through sky and sea. A remote part of his brain told him to pull the ripcord: burning hands moved in slow motion towards the chromium ring; exposed nerve endings touched it and pulled.

His screams exploded around the sky as the white silk canopy billowed above him. He looked down at the roasted flesh at the end of his arms and gagged at the smell. Then suddenly, the shock came. He started to shake, uncontrollably, and soon his parachute was swaying crazily from side to side.

From a long distance away, he heard someone scream.

JESUS CHRIST'S MISSING YEARS

Shakespeare disappeared for four years and people have been speculating about this Houdini act for 500 years. But someone even more important than Shakespeare disappeared at twelve and suddenly reappeared, eighteen years later, in one sentence: ‘And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature.’ What is so incredible about this long disappearance is that many of us accept this stunning omission in the New Testament without too much thought. One of the most famous people in the world disappeared for eighteen years and we don’t question it! Isn’t that amazing? What is even more amazing is how similar Christianity is to Buddhism. How is this possible when Buddhism came into life later than Christianity? So many questions and not enough answers.

A number of years ago, I was asked to write a screenplay about Jesus Christ’s missing years by a film producer who had already commissioned me to write previous scripts for him. I was, as you can imagine, completely overwhelmed by such a request. I am not an expert on religious matters so how could I write about such an icon? The film producer told me that he liked my writing and would I do it? I admit I was flattered to be offered such a prodigious commission and so I accepted. I wish I hadn’t.

My brief was that Jesus had gone to India during those missing years and I was given an enormous pile of notes. How did the producer know? I asked. He waved a hand airily in the air ‘oh there are scrolls... you’ll have to do the research’. I did. Masses of it and discovered the producer’s idea came from a book called ‘The Life of Issa.’ In 1887, Nicolas Notovitch - a Russian war correspondent - went on a journey through India. While en route to Leh, the capital of Ladakh (in Northern India along the Tibetan border), he heard a Tibetan Lama in a monastery refer to a Grand Lama named Issa (the Tibetan form of ‘Jesus’). Notovitch inquired further, and discovered that a chronicle of the life of Issa existed with other sacred scrolls at the Convent of Himis [ about 25 miles from Leh].

Notovitch visited this convent and was told by the Chief Lama that a scroll did in fact exist which provided details about the Prophet Issa. This holy man allegedly preached the same doctrines in Israel as he earlier did in India. The original scroll, the Lama said, was written in the Pali language and later translated into Tibetan. The Convent of Himis possessed the Tibetan translation, while the original was said to be in the library of Lhassa (the traditional capital of Tibet).

Notovitch eventually persuaded the Lama to read the scroll to him, [so the story goes] and had it translated from Tibetan by an interpreter. According to Notovitch, the literal translation of the scroll was disconnected and mingled with accounts of other contemporaneous events to which they bear no relation, and so he arranged ‘all the fragments concerning the life of Issa in chronological order.’ From the scroll, Notovitch learned that ‘Jesus had wandered to India and to Tibet as a young man before he began his work in Palestine.’  

“In The Lost Years of Jesus”, Elizabeth Clare Prophet documented other supporters of Notovitch's work, the most prominent of which was Nicholas Roerich. Roerich, a Theosophist, claimed that from 1924 to 1928 he travelled throughout Central Asia and discovered that legends about Issa were widespread.  Roerich allegedly recorded independently in his own travel diary the same legend of Issa that Notovitch had seen earlier.

But how on earth do we know if any of this is true? I couldn’t find any more convincing evidence in spite of all my research . And yet, I was supposed to base my script on the fact that Jesus had definitely gone to India and was called Issa.

Then I met Peter Owen-Jones, who was the religious adviser on the project. After a few minutes he said. ‘I don’t think Jesus ever went to India.’  Peter had travelled there extensively for his T.V. series called “Around The World in 80 Religions.” So how was I to write a script mainly located in India when the religious adviser thought that Jesus had never been there? The project was becoming surreal.

However, I’d signed a contract and had to write the first draft which I did by working 8 hours a day for months. By now, there were three producers on board and all of them had different ideas about Jesus and told me in copious detail. Then, after months of incredibly hard work researching and writing the first draft, I gave it to them and they said they wanted lots of changes and they gave me even more notes for the second draft. Again I worked for hours each day and wrote, what I still believe is a powerful and poignant script in spite of all the conflict surrounding the project. However, even before they had read the second draft, they said they had some new ideas and I realised, far too late, that their demands were impossible to satisfy. So after researching and writing for months and months on a project which had become very close to my heart, I  reluctantly said that it was impossible to continue working for them and backed out having fulfilled my contract. I was incredibly sad about it as I had become so involved with my research into this incredible man.

But the saddest irony of all was the knowledge that these producers were arguing about an inspirational man who simply wanted peace in the world. 

THE MILD-MANNERED MAN

I read this story a couple of years ago in a newspaper. It’s incredible, but true.
 A mild-mannered, elderly man walked into a London Police Station and confessed that he had just strangled his wife of 45 years. The police didn’t believe him. His friends and family didn’t believe him, but he insisted that he had indeed strangled her, and as no other suspect was involved, he was charged with murder and the case went to trial. At the court his courtesy and gentleness impressed the judge and jury so much they couldn’t believe it either. Surely it was impossible for such a ‘nice’ man to strangle his beloved wife? It was only when the Judge pressed him further that he explained exactly what had happened.

‘Every day was filled with the routine of tea-drinking at certain times, your Honour. Every day I sat opposite my wife and every day my wife stirred her tea thirty times.’  He stopped speaking and looked at the judge and jury as if that explained it all.  Everyone in the court looked at him in confusion.

‘I don’t understand,’ the judge murmured. ‘How does your wife’s tea-drinking routine have any bearing on her murder?’

‘I have had to watch my wife stirring her tea thirty times, ten times a day for forty five years, your Honour. I couldn’t stand it any longer.’

‘Do you mean to tell me you strangled your wife because she stirred her tea thirty times?’ The judge said incredulously.

‘Yes,’ answered the mild-mannered man quietly.

‘Why on earth didn’t you just tell her you didn’t like it instead of strangling her?’ The judge asked the question everyone in the courtroom wanted to ask.

‘I didn’t like to, your Honour.’

There was an explosion of gasps around the room.
Of course, I’ve written the scene from my imagination after reading the newspaper article. Imagine – this mild-mannered man was given a life sentence because he was too polite to tell his wife that she irritated him intensely!   Oh, the terrible courtesy of some English men!
I often wonder what might have happened if this man had been born in another country. But that’s another story, isn’t it?

TURKISH TALES

Have you ever spent most of your weekend in an airport in Turkey? Well I did in 1997. Here is what happened. It is almost unbelievable.  
I arrived at Atatürk Airport, Istanbul after losing my luggage in transit from Ankara. There had been fog in the night and subsequently all flights in and out of Istanbul had been either delayed or cancelled. Unfortunately, those of us who didn't speak Turkish (about 90% of the passengers) weren't actually told this vital piece of information, so chaos reigned supreme in the frenzy of languages which flew around the departure lounge.

In this chaos I met a laconic Frenchman who travelled extensively and had just returned from Kurdish territory where everyone carried guns which he found ‘quite stressful’.  After an hour's conversation with him about the peculiarities of life he said: ‘but losing luggage isn't that bad, you know.’ He was right of course, there are worse things than losing luggage and the next two days showed me exactly what they were.

This was the incredible scenario: the transit lounge had been taken over by 50 Muslims kneeling on mats, facing Mecca and performing intricate rituals whilst praying to Allah, they were totally oblivious to the mayhem surrounding them. A whirling dervish of 8 Nepalese children, dressed in the stark paradox of long white traditional costumes, Marks and Spensers cardigans and Nike trainers, danced expertly in and out of the prayers and passengers as they battered each other with toys. Italian Mafia bosses, flanked by Hench-men with shoulders the size of Knossos, screamed  curses at Turkish Airlines. People cried, shouted and prayed for a flight. This was only the beginning of a 72 hour wait.

My friendly Frenchman told me ‘It's important to ask the right questions in Turkey - if you don't, you won't get the right answers.’  I had been asking the wrong questions for hours. Questions like:  ‘What time is flight 981 to Heathrow taking off?’  The right question was:  ‘Has a flight arrived from Heathrow yet?’  This would have given me answer. ‘No.’    After 6 hours it dawned on me that the airport official I kept questioning must have read the same Naseddin Hoca story as me. [ Hoca was a Turkish folklore philosopher who lived in Central Anatolia in 1208.]

 ‘One day some men found Hoca pouring the remains of his yogurt into the Aksehir Lake. “Hoca, what are you doing?” they asked. “I am turning the lake into yogurt,” he replied. When they laughed at him, he said “But you never know, perhaps it might.”’

The official had obviously been told to infect passengers with Hoca's optimism as he kept telling all the stranded neurotics ‘Your flights will be taking off in the next hour. Just keep watching the flight information boards for more details.’  We actually believed him!

Then I heard magical words from some official-looking people: ‘Anyone for Heathrow?’ 6 of us jumped up screaming  ‘Yes!’  ‘You are British Airways passengers, aren't you?’ When we whispered the awful words 

 ‘No, Turkish airlines.’  They sniggered before disappearing into a big, beautiful plane. Britain had never seemed so beautiful or more remote at that moment. I knew the situation was becoming desperate when I began to long for the old British Rail sandwiches. [Those of you who can remember them will know exactly how desperate that is!]

My five newly discovered companions and I carried on watching the flight board obsessively to find out which gate we should go to. This board had shown the same information about  flight 981 for 6 hours: ‘Delayed.’ Suddenly one of our eagle-eyed group noticed the information had changed - our flight number had disappeared from the board completely! We all started running around like headless chickens trying to discover someone who spoke English who could tell us what had happened. After 10 minutes we did - our flight had just taken off without us! I sat shell-shocked with precisely 25p in my pocket, no luggage and after 12 hours of travelling was still in the same place. Things could only get worse I thought - they did. 

We discovered 400 other passengers trying to find accommodation in Istanbul at the same time. It was difficult for the six of us who were going to Heathrow to make ourselves understood at the information desk. ‘You want how many bedrooms? 6!’  The incredulous airport official's eyebrows reached the top of his head as he contemplated the peculiarities of the British. ‘We don't know each other, you see,’ someone said. But it was no good – the official couldn't understand so I ended up sharing a room with two women I'd nodded to in the airport. Have you ever tried sleeping with people you’ve just met in the middle of a dodgy area of Istanbul?

After a 15 minute taxi drive to an area that was 25 minutes away, I felt  nauseous, so the fact that when we walked into this flea-pit,  all Turkish male eyes turned towards us, didn't register until much later - I just wanted to sleep.  Our room had three barrack-type beds in it, a sheet that covered a navel, half a blanket and a door with an unpredictable lock.  What more couldn't one want, I wondered? I soon found out:  a toilet with no toilet paper or seat, a sink with no plug, a raucous Turkish party in another room , numerous rattlings on our door from the party-goers, three calls to prayer from  a loudspeaker at the nearby Mosque and two strangers snoring copiously in uneven harmony. It was a long, sleepless night.

However, every trauma finishes eventually and this was no exception. We were driven back to airport at 5 a.m. and after a  five hour wait, the few of us who’d been left stranded were allowed onto a plane.  We almost wept with relief.  

When I got home, I lay in bed for two days. When I had recovered I wrote a long letter to Turkish airlines outlining all the problems we had endured.

In reply, I received the following unforgettable words:

`We are sorry not being able to treat whole passengers properly during the long delays of our flights at the airport due to fog inducing chaos.'

From the distance of time, I can now laugh about the experience.

So much so, that earlier this year I returned to Istanbul and this time the experience was wonderful. I wonder if my letter did change Turkish airlines just a little.  I like to think so.

IDLE THOUGHTS OF A WRITER

 Have you ever wondered why some people become writers? I do constantly. It’s an occupation which offers most of those who do it no or little reward for hours and hours of work and yet, I and thousands of people like me get up every day and type long lines of words on a blank computer screen. I got up today at 5.30 am because I couldn't sleep. I write in my head most of the time and sometimes the words have to be written down before I forget them so I am forced to get up, totally exhausted, before they disappear.

Here’s how I imagine an interview with an alien reporter would go like. [ A  reporter who's been asked by the Intergalactic Council to research occupations on Planet Earth.]

Alien Reporter: So, what work do you do?

Me: I write.

A.R. Write what?

Me: Words.

A.R. That is not very helpful, is it? The Intergalactic Council is not interested in vague statements, but specific details to help us with our mission.

Me: I write stories and novels and screenplays and poems.

A.R. And how many hours a day do you spend on this futile occupation?

Me: It varies. Sometimes about 4 hours a day and sometimes-

A.R. And how much money do you earn doing this strange occupation?

Me: That’s a very personal question.

A.R. That is what I have been asked to ask by the Council. How much?

Me: Not a lot.

A.R. How much?

Me: (mumbling) about £3,000 if I’m lucky.

A.R. And that is enough for everything a human needs for a month?

Me: A year.

A.R.  That answer will surprise the Council. I have been given misinformation by another human being. He said humans needed at least £10,000 a month to live well.

Me: (very surprised) £10,000!  Was he a banker?

A.R. (very surprised) I did not know that some of you were clairvoyant.

Me: I didn’t know that bankers could live on so little.

A.R. Is that an example of a human joke?

Me: No.

And so the interview rambles on until I see what the alien sees: a person who is totally barking/off her trolley/ mad as a hatter/.   Choose which ever words please you most.  

Of do you become nuts because you write? It’s a pithy question which if solved could half the rates in psychiatric wards and save the NHS a small fortune.