For twenty years almost to the day, I was a children's author. In those two decades I wrote a quantity of stories and 'educational texts', and around 45 books of various kinds, from picture books for the very young to novels for teenagers. Books of mine were translated into over 20 languages. One (Young Dracula) was the inspiration for five BBC-TV series that I didn't watch.
But that was then. More recently I've been completing several adult books worked on for years in the background while writing children's books to contract or for money. Two of these new books are shown below. If you, reading this, would like to see one or both of these, email me at: wordybug@me.com.
In the first half of the 1960s I was a young photographer in London. I photographed politicians and pop groups, took cover pictures for publishers, various things for advertising agencies, made hundreds of prints of young women without any clothes on for Bob Guccioni, limbering up to launch Penthouse Magazine, and while taking some pictures of a visiting American singer at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club, had a quaint little encounter with Judy Garland. By the end of 1964, however, I was bored with the so-called Swinging Sixties, and when an American friend (a Beatles press officer) announced that she was going to Paris to set up a press agency, I decided to go there too. And in Paris, in spite of holding hands with Coco Chanel on a fashion catwalk, sleeping in Marianne Faithfull's bath, and receiving a commission from a picture agency to photograph a naked model in a questionable suburban chateau, I soon fell on hard times. And after that? Well, malnourished and wading back to England with bleeding gums, I went to work for Billy Butlin as a photographer in his North Wales camp, where I shared a chalet with Christine Keeler's biological father, and... well, you have to read the book.
Photographs taken at the time will be included in the book.
Just before Christmas 1943, Winston Churchill's War Office requisitioned a Dorset valley for troop training and weapons testing, evicting all of its residents, about 225 men, women and children whose families had lived there for generations. A promise was made to the evicted that they would be able to return to their homes when the war was over but the promise was never kept, and that valley, and the village at its heart, has been the property of the MOD ever since, with the buildings in ruins, landmines in the woods, tanks on the hillsides.
'This Ruined Place' is set in that valley - the Rouklye Valley - and the desolate remains of that village.
It's 1999 - 'the last August of the old century' - and Juby Bench, in his seventies now, returns to Rouklye where, in his teens, he knew freedom and was happy after his London home was bombed by the Luftwaffe, his parents killed while he crouched beneath the dining room table. During this visit he tells Midge Miller, a young American reluctantly staying nearby with her grandparents, about his life there - a not entirely accurate series of memories but a tale which, by its conclusion, utterly changes Midge's perception of the world and her place in it.