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boats, Environment, flowers, Grove Ferry, Kent, memories, nostalgia, river, River Stour, story, writing
What can I do? In these difficult times when many of us are confined to our homes, it’s the sense of helplessness that gets to you. Well, there are things we can do, both locally and in the wider world. We are finding ways to keep my local writing group going, for instance, both by email and perhaps by online meetings, too. It’s great for easing the feeling of isolation. I’ll never complain about modern technology again, I promise! As a writer I can do something else – I can make a book available free of charge so at least you will have something new to read. A small thing, I know, but it’s my contribution.
If you would like to read A Time, a Place and a River, it’s available now as a free book in pdf format. If you’d like one, leave me a message on the Contact Me page of this site and I’ll email a copy to you.
About the book…
Writing about the distant past, even when you were there, can feel like a trip to never-never land… so begins my 2020 foreword to A Time, a Place and a River. I wrote this book – my first – back in the early 1980s, when the events I describe had happened no more than fifteen years or so earlier, and some were very recent indeed. This is just as well, since much of it has long ago slipped my mind. It just goes to show how much of your daily life at any given point in time is forgotten if you don’t record it. And yet it is those same small details that are so evocative of the past.
The late 1960s, where most of this book is set, were turbulent times of course, and historic events – the Cold War, the space race, the rise of youth culture – were taking place in the background, but for me and my family, many of those days were lived out in a much gentler setting, in a boat on a river. The outside world, although it had its effects, doesn’t get too much of a mention.
So, sitting down to edit this book, now in 2020, nearly forty years after it was written (on a manual typewriter!), and more than fifty since some of the events took place, was always going to be tricky. I have to rely heavily on my younger self for the accuracy of the things I researched and recalled at the time, and resist the temptation to let my current experience, and writer’s voice, colour it too much. There are a few explanatory comments from the 2020 perspective, just to put things in context, but not many. I suppose you could regard this book as a rite-of-passage story, of the growing-up process, but at heart it’s simply the story of me, my family and a much-loved river. I don’t mind admitting I shed a few tears over it!