Jon Haylett

Of Pride and a Fall

I get a tremendous kick out of my membership of the local Coastguard. It's partly the adrenalin rush when my pager suddenly emits its 'whooosh' for a callout which, fortunately, happens very rarely. It's partly feeling that, although I'm still an incomer to the village after over ten years here, it's one small way in which I can made a contribution to this tiny community. It's partly a perverse pride that I'm still in the team: in the 'good old days' of age discrimination they'd have retired me long before now. But mostly it's the pleasure of working with a team of very likable individuals.

It's a general misconception that the Coastguard operate on water: we don't. Mostly, we walk. Our most common operation is a coast search for anything from an item of flotsam to a missing person. Sadly, we've had too many of the latter, the most common cause of their loss over the years being a diving accident - though recently kayakers are fast catching up. The other night we were out after a lady suffering from dementia. The callout came just after midnight, and she was finally found some eleven hours later.

We have a truck, a Nissan Hilux Crewcab with chequered stripe down the side and a fearsome collection of blue, red and white lights on top. It carries our cliff rescue gear, a stretcher, first aid equipment and body bags. It's used so rarely that we've been told by our Sector Officer that we're to take it out for regular runs to put some mileage on it, otherwise we'll lose it, so the other day Nan and I went to collect an emergency beacon which had come ashore just south of Ardnamurchan Point Lighthouse. And here's another joy of the job - I get to see places which I would otherwise never discover, all at Her Majesty's expense because they do pay us, albeit the national minimum wage. The beacon had been washed up in a small cove with a wonderful white sand beach at the back. The stiff walk to reach it was worth the effort.

We meet monthly for training but, a few weeks back, we were summoned for a special training session. One of our members, a lass whose life as a modern crofter is being followed in a mini-series by the BBC, was to have her Coastguard role filmed. We put on a cliff rescue, lowering her down a cliff and hauling her up again, twice. Miraculously it all went very well - even the winch, which can be a bugger when it wants to be, fired first try. When the young lady who was doing the filming had finished we collected our gear and set off briskly down the hill to the station; and, as we approached the point where she was standing, I slipped and went arse over tit down the slope. She swore she'd not been filming at the time but I don't believe her.

If you want to check the episode it's on 'Landward' on BBC Scotland, 7pm Friday 30th November.

Jon

The Hypocrite

I detest reading about how to write. I don't particularly enjoy other people's fiction, and it is very rare that I find a short story to enjoy. There are exceptions. The winning story in the Bridport Competition of 2002, the year before The Crossing won, called Amore, is the finest short story I have read. Written by Lynsey White, it had all the key features of that difficult medium - a sense of atmosphere, wonderful characterisation, an ending with a punch and, most important of all, it was about a turning point in someone's life.

When Justice Bird was published and I realised that, far from having reached the heady pinnacle of literary success, there remained ridge upon ridge of higher land yet to conquor because the book needed selling, Keirsten said that I should try to write some articles for magazines. It wasn't anything I had ever attempted before, but I chose two publications, Wanderlust, because I though the Bird would appeal to a youthful readership looking to travel in wild lands, and The New Writer.

Please don't be surprised at the latter, a magazine full of tips on how to write and be published. It's the only writing magazine I have ever taken, and it has paid dividends. For a start, it lists all the worthwhile short story competitions giving a outline of their requirements. Then, and perhaps more importantly, it has the occasional request from publishers looking for new work. A small Essex publisher put in just such a request, for 'GritLit', as a result of which PaperBooks published the Bird. TNW in its paper form appears six times a year, but Suzanne Ruthven and Merric Davison also mail a monthly eLetter to all subscribers, an invaluable source of information which must take them hours to produce. Find them at New Writer

I offered Wanderlust an article about my hitch-hiking days back in the sixties, when backpackers didn't take aeroplanes, didn't cheat with trains or long-distance coaches or even local buses, didn't have mobile phones or pills to sterilise the water. The article described twenty-four hours on a dusty roadside outside Tobruk in Libya, a famous but flyblown town on a scorched coastline where the Sahara reaches the sea, a stopping point on a journey which took me from the Algeria Sahara right along the North African coast and up the Nile; and back. The proposal was rejected.

The second article, for TNW, was published in this month's edition. Called The Mule in Us, it described the sense of frustration that drove me to write Justice Bird, a book which, as far as I was concerned, broke every one of my writing rules. It was written very quickly, in anger and frustration but with a heady sense of liberation, it didn't show it bloody told - yet it's the only one of my eight novels which has found a publisher.

So he who spurns advice now gives it. Oh dear, what hypocrisy!

Memory Hold the Door

One of the great fears of getting old is what will happen to our memory. When we're young, we don't worry too much about it. We're aware that we have failings, and we know that others have different failings - and different strengths - but we accept them, if unhappily. As a school teacher I was always deeply envious of colleagues who seemed to have blotting-paper recall when it came to children's names. I remember, as a probationary teacher in my first job in the English Midlands, witnessing an old harridan of the classrooms scold a small girl for some trivial offence by prefacing her tirade with the words, "Emma! I taught your dear grandmother, Grace, and your poor mother, Jemima, and I never, never had such behaviour from either of them!" How the hell did she remember their names? Or did she make them up in the certain knowledge that the poor little mite would be too terrified to correct her?

As I age I cannot rely on my brain cells to retrieve information like they used to, certainly not as quickly. The names of places and people, and our daily attack on The Times quick crossword, which we do as we were told it was a good memory exercise, are a lottery with the grey matter so selective. And yet... I was appointed to that same school as teacher in charge of a small geology department. Since the town was in one of the most geologically rich areas in the whole UK, I was like a small child placed in charge of the sweeties department. I had a keen group of students for A level, some of whom were prepared to spend weekends out in the countryside with me, mostly paddling up fast-running streams or knee deep in glutinous quarry mud, looking for rare fossils. One day one of my students found one. I hadn't a clue what it was, so we sent it to the British Museum of Natural History which, in those days, ran a wonderful service dealing with public enquiries such as ours. The next thing we knew, a professor of geology at Southampton University phoned the school in a state of great excitement to say that he was on his way up to see us: the little beastie we'd found in the Llandovery Shales was the only specimen of Osculocystis monobrachiolata in the country. The only other one, also from the Midlands, resided in a museum in New York.

So I can remember fossil names from decades ago, many without any such exciting connection - Paradoxides davidis, Reticuloceras reticulatum, Didymograptus murchisoni, to name but a few - yet I struggle to recall the name of a neighbour or the cat we had at our last house. Mostly it doesn't bother me as I now accept that most people quietly shake their heads during conversations as I scratch around for an elusive name, and if I'm by myself I find that, if I go away and do something else for a few minutes, the name will suddenly pop back. However, if my present state doesn't bother me, there is one thing of which I am absolutely terrified.

I'm in the process of writing the second book in my three-book contract with PaperBooks. It's to be similar to Justice Bird but different. Like all my books, one of my key requirements is that it should convey a vivid sense of place. Obviously, in Justice Bird this was secondary to the action, while in some of my more literary efforts the description of the environment is almost central to the story. So what I fear is the loss of memory of what it feels like to be in a place. Look at that picture at the top of this page again: you can't see the heat but I can FEEL it. It has a texture, a presence, it's enveloping, overwhelming, deadening, heavy. Am I at risk of losing memories such as that? Will I, one day soon, sit in a bath chair staring out at our lovely view and not be able to remember that beach? In other words, will I live in a past-less present, my only pleasure the spoonfuls of lemon jelly a carer shovels down my throat?

I'll remember how to swallow. I'll remember how to breath. I'll probably remember that, if I pick up a coal from the fire, it'll hurt.

Memory lifts us from the animal to the human. Memory is what we spent millions of years developing as Ardipithecus, Australopithecus and then Homo evolved on the plains of Africa. Memory doesn't hold the door, it unlocks the universe.