Readers Write #30   May 2013

 April was a good month. Maybe newspaper editors have a soft spot for authors who hit eighty with the pen still in their hands.  Anyway. The Times book section gave Goshawk Squadron (plus all my flying novels) a half-page review, with a photograph that also shows, hanging on the wall, a soft-focus picture of one of the Spitfires used in filming Piece of Cake.  (To read the review, click on the link in the panel above.)  

 

Meanwhile, a message arrived by cleft stick from Matthew, who lives not a thousand miles from me.  Having read Goshawk Squadron years ago, he took the plunge and read War Story and Hornet's Sting.  (All my RFC/RAF books are now available as MacLehose Press paperbacks.) 'Great stuff,' Matthew writes. 'Best novels I've read for years. I gave a copy of Hornet's Sting

to a chum who used to command 2/2 squadron of the SAS and he called me to say he'd finished it quicker than he had a book for years, and praised in particular the pre/post fighting atmosphere.'

 

Then Matthew raised a question that gets to the very heart of Hornet's Sting.  'Who shagged Dash?' he asked.  Most queries from readers are about the horsepower of the Sopwith Pup, or the whereabouts of St Oscar's, an alleged public school where Woolley claimed to have been educated.  (He lied. Saint Oscar never existed.) Now Matthew went straight to the nub of chapter 3. Charles Dash was a young RFC pilot who, on horseback, got lost in a snowstorm as night fell.  He found himself at a nunnery, empty of nuns but occupied by six stunningly beautiful members of F.A.N.Y., the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry.  They gave him a hot bath and a delicious supper and a bed for the night, during which some kind lady entered his room and relieved him of his virginity. Perhaps two kind ladies, hard to tell when everything was totally black. All he knew for certain was that she was, or they were, either Chloe Legge-Barrington, Edith Reynolds, Laura da Silva, Nancy Hicks-Potter, Jane Brackenden, or Lucy Knight. Later, he returned to the nunnery and was similarly rewarded;  but by whom?  And when he planned a third visit, they'd all gone. Moved on. War is hell. 

 

Now you know as much as I do. Chloe, Edith, Laura, Nancy, Jane, or Lucy?   You decide.  I just tell the story. Nobody said the author had to know everything.

 

From Washington DC, Paraag wrote to wish me a happy birthday.  He's read most of my stuff, reckons that 'a teenager reading

one of your RFC or RAF novels would learn as much (if not more!) about the experience of the past than from reading just a dry history textbook'   -   a point that some teenagers (and even their teachers) have made in the past.  Paraag is working on an RFC novel, avoiding my style and seeking his own: a wise choice.  I wish him well.  Another longtime fan, Jan in Johannesburg, writes: 'You are one of the few novelists one tends to read over and over again   -   and that is no mean compliment. I thoroughly enjoyed your latest in the RFC trilogy' (that must be A Splendid Little War, strictly speaking part of a quartet) 'and I dare say that I am looking for more to come...'    All my titles are available as ebooks,  and Jan has bought some   -   'Convenient,'  he reports, 'but I have a recurring nightmare of my dream library with bay window, full-height bookshelves and rail ladder all-round, empty but for  one iPad lying on its side on a dusty shelf.'  On weekends, he 'potters about the sky in my favourite transport',  which is a Tiger Moth in excellent condition, as you can see. 

 

                                                        

 

I'd heard that the Tiger is a delight to fly but somewhat lethal if you try to roll it, and Jan confirmed this.  He gave step-by-step instructions for attempting to roll the aircraft, including the possible disastrous conclusion, but added: 'Having said that, I have been in a Tiger with a guy that did everything. Slow rolls, barrel rolls, loops, Immelmann's and even a slight tail slide and stall turn. But then there are pilots and weekend warriors.  You need to know which tribe you belong to and stick with it.' Good advice. 

 

Finally:  I came across an old letter from Ernest (I know not where) who said good things about my books and urged me to keep going,  which was rewarding since it came from a man who had flown Hurricanes, Spitfires and even the Me-109 ('an uncomfortable gadget, designed for nasty midgets,' he said, 'which changed its response from agile to impossible to handle, depending on the flight envelope. I loathed it.') He wrote that he didn't understand 'why people describe deflection shooting as aiming in front. If you do that, you miss behind; you have to swing the gun/aircraft/tennis racket/golfclub through from behind, fire when you pass the target and keep swinging, on pheasant, grouse, ME's and golfballs. You brush the target out of the air. Aiming with the gunsight means you lose the enemy.'  There you have it, from one who has been at the sharp end.

My thanks to all who wrote.  

Derek Robinson                            Previous Readers Write

  When someone at a party asks what I do, I say I write Ripping Yarns.  It's a quick answer but a very incomplete one. I'm best known for my novels about the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force in the two World Wars and some might say the books are highly readable adventure stories.  Nothing wrong with that, but there's more than combat in the high blue yonder   -   there's also memorable characters, there's unexpected twists and turns of warfare,  and there's aircrew humour.   Especially the humour.  I did my National Service in the Royal Air Force.  I was never airborne; I was in a Ground Control Interception Unit, deep underground in a concrete bunker.  But I learned a lot about the special humour of flying people,  and it emerges naturally and unavoidably in my novels. Humour is one of the essential colours in the spectrum of life. You don't make a story more serious by removing the humour; you just make it less true.

That's where I learned to write boringly. I was writing to impress, not to inform. Twelve years in advertising agencies (London and New York) kicked the crap out of my style. Every word had to work hard. I wrote ad copy and commercials for everything from Esso petrol to The Wall Street Journal.  Always I knew I wanted to move on, to be a fulltime writer  -  but I had nothing to say.  Nothing worth reading, anyway. (I was a late developer.) I wrote two bad and unpublishable novels and finally got it right with a story called Goshawk Squadron. Might have won the Booker Prize if Saul Bellow, one of the judges, had had his way. Not important. "The most readable novel of the year," Nina Bawden said of Goshawk in the Daily Telegraph. "I laughed aloud several times, and was in the end reduced to tears." That's worth more than any prize. The first novel bought me enough time to write the second, and so it goes. Lucky me.. 

                             

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