Jon Haylett

A Thousand Laughing Hyenas

It seems a long time since I wrote a page of this blog about the compulsion of storytelling, how it might be some sort of inheritance from our African ancestors 130,000 years ago. Well, one of things I wrote then has come starkly home to me.

Ever since I opened the package Keirsten sent me containing the first copy of Justice Bird it's stood proudly on the desk in front of me. I should explain that if I were to lift my eyes beyond it I have a view 25 miles down the Sound of Mull to Tobermory and Ben Talla in the distance - but, for the last few days, my eyes haven't been bothering with Scottish scenery, however stunningly beautiful it may be.

When the next twenty copies arrived, the books I get free as part of the contract, I was careful to keep that first copy separate while I packaged the others up and sent them out. It worried me that I needed to do something special with it. This morning I suddenly picked it up, grabbed a pen and scrawled across the title page, "Done it!!!". Then, with a considerable flourish, I signed and dated it.

For a few moments I felt really good. No I didn't: I felt ecstatic. I'd achieved an eighteen-year ambition, something to which I'd dedicated a mighty chunk of my life. Wow!

Gradually, all the euphoria drained away because I remembered the hyenas. I recalled the picture I'd drawn of that ancient storyteller spinning his tale surrounded by the faces of hyenas lit by the firelight. And the hyenas were slavering as they cackled with laughter.

Suddenly writing the book seemed incredibly easy. The sensation I felt at that moment was exactly what I feel so often when we set out to climb one of these hills on Ardnamurchan. As we approach each brow and think, 'There's the summit! Nearly there!', another appears ahead. And, as we approach that one, there's another, and another. It's life, in'it? There's never an end.

I don't want hyenas laughing at my book. I want people reading it. I don't mind if they think is a steaming pile of elephant turd, I just want them to read it. It's not that I particularly care whether they buy it or borrow it from a mate or the County library or pick it out of a trash can, I just want them, please, to READ IT!

Keirsten, as you would expect, is miles ahead of me, though I think she might be rather more driven by commercial imperatives. We can't just sit and admire the team's handiwork. We have to sell it. It seems fairly obvious but it's never been something I've particularly concerned myself about.

I'm concerning myself about it now and, believe me, writing a book is a piece of cake.

Jon

Craftsmen

One of the sites we visited on our two-week grand gallop around classical Europe was Mycenae. It's compact, relatively easy to understand, with beautifully built beehive tombs and massive walls. I thought it a great site - this profound opinion coming from someone who took one look at the Parthenon and retreated to the nearest taverna.

For those very few of you who are as ignorant of Mycenae as I was, it was Agamemnon's city. Three and a half thousand years after Agamemnon was murdered in his bath by his wife for sacrificing their daughter to Zeus, a German called Schliemann, in his search for evidence about Troy, excavated a fabulous hoard of gold just inside Mycenae's great Lion Gate. It wasn't Agamemnon's gold - it was even older.

I hate museums but I was easily persuaded to see that gold in the big Archaeological museum in Athens. It was quite interesting. The workmanship was impressive, and the necklaces, rings, goblets and face masks were bright and clean and very pretty, but I'm afraid it didn't do much for me. I'd have quite happily left and gone back to the taverna where, by that stage, the owner was so enjoying my custom that, every time I began to make an unsteady departure, he insisted on drinking a shot of ouzo with me. But I didn't leave, not for another two hours, because I found something which amazed me.

In some of the tombs, Schliemann and his colleagues discovered rounded semi-precious stones - rock quartz, amythyst, carnelian - most the size and shape of a well-sucked boiled sweet, each with a small hole drilled along the axis from one side to the other. Into the curved faces of these had been carved minute pictures, mostly of warriors, animals and women. Apparently, these stones were worn on a string round the wrists of the important men of Mycenae who used them like signet rings, perhaps for marking wax on seals. They were beautifully worked, tiny yet incredibly detailed, and sharp as fresh-cut ice.

So how did those ancient craftsmen carve these pictures? Working gold is relatively easy, it's soft, easily formed, and capable of being shaped with bronze instruments. If you make a mistake you re-melt it and start again. By comparison, those stones were hard, very hard, and horribly brittle. Bronze wouldn't touch them. Even if Mycenae's craftsmen had known how to make the finest Sheffield steel, it wouldn't even have scratched them. I know of only one natural material that would have enabled them to create such intricate carving. Did some of those ancient craftsmen know its secret?

The nearest deposits of this wonder material are in Russia, India and Africa. Personally, I want the Mycenaeans to have sourced it from Africa, perhaps from the dried out river beds of the Tanganyika savanna or the high tributaries of the mighty Congo. I want to believe that it was bartered from African to African into the headwaters of the Nile, and brought down via the Sudd and Thebes to Alexandria, then traded across the Mediterranean through Cyprus or Crete to Mycenae. Tiny stones, stones smaller than a match-head. Dark, frost-faced crystals with magical properties. Gems themselves, that are so hard they cut anything, even quartz, as easily as a knife cuts butter. Diamonds.

The cumulative efforts of the explorers, traders, merchants and craftsmen that went into one of those small masterpieces might make the production of a 21st century paperback book seem pretty puny. But when I took my first copy of Cry of the Justice Bird out of the envelope that awaited my return, after I'd given it to my wife, to whom I have dedicated it, I went and sat in my study and cried.

Thank you, thank you, you modern craftsmen and women who helped create it, you who, to me, tread tall in the footsteps of Mycenaeans.

Jon

Holidays

When I was small we didn't have holidays. The family lived on the coast of East Africa where the beaches were white, coralline sands, the water warm thoughout the year, the Trade winds fingered the coconut fronds, and we had five servants and a chauffeur. Who needed a holiday? Instead we had leave. Leave consisted of a trip 'home'. By 'home' my parents meant England, a place of dismal weather, grey people with their umbrellas inside out, rationing, and living squashed into relatives' spare rooms. The journeys to and fro weren't too bad: a four week trip by Union Castle liner to Southampton; and home - the real home - by BOAC flying boat, a three-day journey where I ate all the ice cream because the turbulence was so terrible that everyone else was throwing up.

I discovered a new sort of holiday when I turned five. These were the times when you could stay at home and do what you liked as opposed to being at school avoiding doing what you'd been told to do. By choosing to become a teacher I continued with this regime for the next half century while yet another sort of holiday began to emerge, something which happened during the school holidays but involved the family going somewhere. While we were teaching abroad these could be quite exciting - the Victoria Falls, Caribbean beaches - less so when we returned to England when we rarely got much further than Hastings.

When we finally gave up the classroom to run a shop on a remote peninsula in the Northwest Highlands we didn't have time for holidays. Their only influence was in our turnover - five times as high in August, the height of the holiday season, as in a wet week in January. Towards the end of our time running the business our son took a holiday backpacking in Australia where he met a lovely French Canadian girl. When he married her last October, in Edmonton, Alberta, we took the opportunity to travel right across Canada, by train and hire car, across the Rockies and down to Seattle, where my brother lives. It wasn't a holiday, it was an experience, three weeks of open-mouthed wonder. The place was so vast, so empty, so rich, so bursting with opportunity, and the people so warm.

We're off on another experience today, two weeks travelling with our youngest daughter by rail and ferry, to Italy and Greece, places like Florence, Olympia, Epidavros, Athens. It's educational. A bit like being at school, really. We'll come home for our holiday.

Jon

Author, author?

When Keirsten floated the idea of PaperBooks' authors contributing a blog to her website, she promised her readers that it would describe, "What our authors really think". Despite some severe reservations I agreed to have a go but I have to say that I've found it very daunting. The problem hasn't been the writing - give me a topic and I'll write about it quite happily all day, same as, give me a good pub and I'll drink in it 'til they throw me out. Nor has it been the reaction to my blog: I didn't expect any - as far as I'm concerned, when I post a blog it's a careful arrangement of electrons which disappear into a void filled with dark matter - so to have had a number of comments, particularly from the lovely editor of Justice Bird and from the artist who produced such an inspired cover, has been both surprising and gratifying. Nor was my reserve caused by the idea that Keirsten actually considered me a sentient being. No - it was that she grouped me into the collective category of 'Authors'.

I have never considered myself an 'Author'. An 'Author', it always seems to me, is someone who is rather important. He or she does something with 'authority' - the words have the same Latin/French derivation. To 'authorise' is to sanction, to give status to something by dint of your position. 'Author'? Me? How can I be when I haven't a clue what I'm doing? The other day I had to outline the plot of Justice Bird. Since I had no idea what a plot was I tried looking it up in a book I bought years ago describing how to write. After reading the relevant section I didn't feel any wiser. On another occasion someone asked me how I plan a book. I don't. I taught for thirty years, dammit, and never went into either a lesson or an assembly with a plan. A book, to me, is just like a lesson - it's something that emerges. The difference is that a book happens when I sit in front of a computer with a blank Word page open in front of me, whereas a lesson happens when I walk into a room and there are thirty variegated humans looking at me with a common attitude: either this idiot entertains us or we'll stage a riot.

'Author'? Oh dear. Next thing, someone will be asking what I think of Salman Rushdie's latest book. What will I say? You see, I don't read fiction, not if I can help it, and certainly nothing so heavy the author's likely to be butchered for it. And if I do it's old stuff: some weeks ago I re-read Hammond Innes' Campbell's Kingdom, and I've recently been skipping through a few early Wilbur Smith just to remind myself how a real author writes. What I'm enjoying at the moment is a fantastic book called The State of Africa. Fantastic: I use the word advisedly. Talk about fact being far stranger than fiction.

So, no, sorry, I can't think of myself as an author. I don't want to be an author. If that disqualifies me from PaperBooks' Authors' blog, I'm sure Keirsten will tell me soon enough.

On the other hand there is a category in which I would be honoured to find myself. Storyteller.

Jon