Jon Haylett

Starting Out

Behind the boy, crouching darkly in the gathering dusk, lay a continent, before him, and far below, a harbour low-lit by the sun's last rays in which a cargo ship turned sharply, its wake toothpaste white as it worked towards the entrance and the open ocean.

They hadn't given him the shilling he'd been contracted to receive for a supernumary's six-week passage. The previous evening the Chief had cracked his daily ration of twenty-four cans and half of whisky without which the engines didn't run, the cadets had shaken his hand, the ship's master hadn't bothered to say goodbye: all somewhere within the brightly lit machine which heeled across the green waters far below.

He sat on the wall's warm concrete coping kicking his heels against its bricks, his stomach tight against a pang of loneliness, against the knowledge that no-one in the city sprawled below him knew, or cared about him, against the keen anticipation that, come the morning, he would turn his face again to the old continent and begin a journey in the footsteps of Livingstone and Rhodes, Kruger, Moffat, Selous, Jamieson and de Beers, crossing the realms of Tchaka and Mzilikaze, the diamondlands of Kimberley, the goldfields of the Witwatersrand, and the sluggish Limpopo, to a land he didn't know locked deep in its heart. All he had for his journey was the name of the man who would meet him two thousand miles to the north and the bright confidence of youth.

Saida

Ten days previously the soles of the the hitch-hiker's feet, hardened by weeks on the road, had cracked, and one of the raw wounds had turned septic. That he was nearing the end of the road - not the end of the journey, because he still had a thousand miles to drive before he was home, but the end of the hitch-hiker road - made no difference: he was too sore, too low to be buoyed up by the prospect of an end. So when he limped into Saida as the evening rolled in across the Sahara he had only the energy to struggle out of his rucksack and collapse into a chair of a small sidewalk cafe. The waiter brought coffee, a miniscule cup half filled with grounds, and a glass of water.

The hitch-hiker didn't want it when a young Algerian pulled up a chair to his table, yet they talked, the Algerian curious about his journey, the places he had been, the people he had met, the, to him, enormous distances he had travelled. When he asked the hitch-hiker where he would sleep that night he explained that he would sleep as he always slept, some distance out of town rolled up in his sleeping bag at the side of the road.

The Algerian sat for a few moments considering this answer, then excused himself, returning ten minutes later with an older man who introduced himself as the organiser of the Saida Jeunesse de Sport. Everything is arranged, the man announced as the youth looked on. A room is booked at the hotel next door. The cafe will serve supper, and petit dejeuner tomorrow morning, early, so you may be on your road again before the camions start out.

I have no money, the hitch-hiker explained. It is kind of you, but....

It is paid, all paid. You are our guest.

Happy New Year!

When it comes to the change of a year, there seem to be two attitudes. In one, the main impulse is to look back over the year passed, to analyse the successes and the failures. The other looks forward, either with the intention of setting targets - they used to be called 'New Year's Resolutions' - or with less precise hopes for a different, perhaps better year.

The young, I suspect, are more of the latter persuasion. Certainly, I can remember as a sixteen-year old welcoming in the New Year in Trafalgar Square with my heart full of hope and excitement for the year ahead. The older are perhaps more interested in looking back, in judging themselves on what use they have made of the late time given to them. I confess that that is what I do, and, the older I get, the more stern my judgement.

In a way, looking back in order to learn is one of the main justifications for the study of history. In schools in the UK, judging from experience and the figures of GCSEs and A Levels taken, it is probably one of the most disliked subjects. I don't think there are many young people in this country who have left school who would confess to an interest in the subject, and fewer still who would have bought a 'history' book in the past year. This is, in my view, a sad reflection on the way history has been taught, but also a symptom of the modern world, where immediate gratification is far more important than any careful consideration of consequence, and 'wisdom' is something for fuddy-duddies and, incidentally, certainly not a talent one looks for in a politician.

In the last few weeks I have read two novels and a history book. I don't know why I bothered with the former, but at least I go out of 2007 with another first class history book under my belt. Trafalgar: the Men, the Battle, the Storm by Tim Clayton and Phil Craig, is history at its very best, carefully researched, strongly supported with good primary evidence, vividly described, and a damn good read. Perhaps the greatest accolade one can give to a book which was, after all, written about one of the pivotal moments in British history, an event all of us British have heard of and should, if we have any education, know something about, is that my frequent reaction was, "Blimey, I never knew that!"

Search for it on Amazon. Is there any significance in the fact that they don't stock it themselves, so their price is the full £12.95 RRP, plus a £1.99 sourcing fee, but that you can buy it through Amazon from 'other sellers', the advertised prices starting at £0.01?

Perhaps it is appropriate that I plan to see in the New Year in the company of my nearest and dearest and a bottle of good, French red wine, though I might also take a dram or two of Tobermory malt whisky.

A very happy, prosperous, healthy and fulfilling New Year to you all.

Jon

African Genesis

In 1968 I was given African Genesis by Robert Ardrey. It was, without doubt, the most illuminating yet frightening book I had ever read, for its thesis was that the evolutionary innovation which created the big-brained human animal Homo was its ability to kill using tools. Ardrey went further by suggesting that humans were unique in that they used their technology to kill their own kind either individually or en masse, that they ate them, and that they enjoyed doing it.

Ardrey derived much of his evidence from the fossil remains of our early ancestors, animals like Australopithecus africanus, then being found and interpreted by experts like Raymond Broome in South Africa. One of the most vivid descriptions was of the Taungs infant which appeared to have been killed by a single blow to the left side of the head, the damage to the skull being a deep, double depression. Ardrey and Broome saw this as proof that man used the distal end of a large antelope's leg bone as a weapon, and that the hunter who had killed this child was right-handed.

Ardrey saw Homo sapiens as a calculated killer. As he put it in the first line of African Genesis, 'Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was man born'.

What was so terrifying about his book was that my generation had listened on our transistor radios as Soviet freighters carrying ballistic missiles to Cuba steamed across the Atlantic while John Kennedy made it quite clear that, if they didn't turn back, he'd sink them - and we all knew what would happen then. What we inferred - and this may sound melodramatic - was that, if we humans were, as Ardrey suggested, programed to develop more and more sophisticated weapons of mass-destruction, then, one day, we were going to use them.

Some of Ardrey's arguments were subsequently, if not discredited, at least modified by later discoveries. For example, closer evaluation of the Taungs infant shows it was probably killed by a large, predatory bird, and we are not alone in the enjoyment of hunting, killing and eating our own kind, for chimpanzees in the wild have been observed doing it.

I never forgot Robert Ardrey's argument but, like so many things that shock, I learned to live with it, learned to hope that the goodness that is also inherent would prevail - until, the other day, I read The Most Dangerous Animal by David Livingstone Smith, published this year. If anything, as a read, it's even more terrifying than African Genesis.

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.

Snake Man

There's nothing better than a good biography. Short of a book to read, I found an old hardback, still in its tattered dust cover, buried on a shelf in the office. 'Snake Man' is the story of CP Ionides, a sixth-generation Briton whose family came from Greece in 1840. 'Iodine', as he was called by those few who managed to get close to him, went to Rugby and then, towards the end of the First World War, into the army, the latter only to enable him to find his way to East Africa. There he earned a living, first in the colonial administration, briefly as a poacher, and then, I suppose appropriately enough, as a game warden.

A tall, thin, hook-nosed individualist, he was a man any administration must have hated. A maverick at school, he believed that the waste paper basket was the place to file administrative paperwork. His work had one purpose: to enable him to hunt. Long expeditions took him across eastern Africa and north into Ethiopia and the Sudan, and westwards into the French colonies of the Sahara, always after rare animals and on foot. His collection went to the Coryndon Museum in Nairobi.

In 1945 the focus of his interests changed completely. Sitting in the dark on an earth privvy, he suddenly realised he was not alone in the small room. For the next few minutes he endured as a snake slid across his lap. It was the start of a fascination with herpetology.

Since snake serum depends on the farming of venom, he found a ready market for the reptiles he caught. The book describes him, with the help of two Africans, hauling nine foot black mambas out of trees, catching deadly water snakes from an unstable boat and gaboon vipers from the corners of dark huts. An irascible man, his greatest fury was reserved for himself when an ambiguous instruction resulted in one of his men being bitten. When he was bitten, he studied himself like some laboratory mouse.

In the years I spent in Africa I came across many snakes. At the school in Rhodesia I was in charge of the .22, and was summoned when a snake was found on the campus. Most had been cornered by the boys who had a frightened fascination for the beasts, and all that was required was to remove the shouting schoolboys and allow the animal on its way. Only rarely, and sadly, was it necessary to kill them, and then a .22 was far from an ideal weapon.

Surprisingly, I find that the book is available from Amazon. Perhaps there are others who will enjoy Ionides for his rugged independence, his aesthetic lifestyle, his contentment with his own company, his ability to drive his body to the limits of endurance, and, amongst all his bluster, for the - albeit paternal - care he gave his African charges. Britain must still produce his likes today but I do wonder where they find their outlet.

Jon

Our Fathers' Children

For the first time I have been provoked into writing a blog. A super young man whom I met in Edmonton when my son married a lovely Canadian girl, with whom I now correspond on Facebook and who is about to become a father for the first time, asked me for advice on 'fatherhod'. Now I know this was a mis-spelling - probably brought about by nerves - but, to me, it summed up the position perfectly, bearing in mind that a hod is something very heavy that is used to carry bricks up steep ladders and is therefore, unless you are very careful, exceedingly hard work. My advice was, of course, to leave the upbringing of children to his wife, and to have as little to do with them as possible until they showed some interest in him - like buying him a beer down at The Red Lion.

I am an avid reader of New Scientist and, almost every week, I come across more examples of the innate differences between the roles of the sexes. For example, a couple of weeks ago there was a fascinating article which set out to prove that women were much better at working the supermarket shelves than men. Apparently, they are quicker to spot things. Well, thought I, of course they are! In the hundreds of millennia of pre-history, during which men and women evolved to take on the world together, women were the gatherers. Look at Bushman society, a leftover of our long past, and that is what they do with fearsome efficiency: they can spot a ripe watermelon at a hundred yards range and the tiny mounding of earth that indicates than an edible grub lies just under the surface. Men, on the other hand, run fast. They're designed to because they have to - in their hunting role, such a talent helps if they stumble across an irate rhinoceras.

Further evidence is all around us. Some weeks ago I joined a group which calls itself Bloggers with Book Deals which, if you're interested, you'll find at BWBD. It's a clever idea, a site with two layers, with the outer layer available to any writer who wants to read about the trials and tribulations of published writers, and an inner layer which is, in effect, a chat room, where the members exchange ideas and air their woes. The membership is almost entirely women, and it shows in the manner in which they network. The few men make an occasional contribution, but it's pretty puny, and, I fear, mine have probably been amongst the worst. Women are very supportive of each other, very understanding. Men are much more individualistic, less tolerant, and selfish.

All this comes out in the sort of books we read and the novels we write. I don't think a woman would have contemplated writing a novel like Justice Bird, nor would I attempt to write chicklit even if Keirsten begged me. I think this applies in all walks of life. I am very happy for women to compete in everything on an equal level with men. As I've said before, many women carry out what have always been perceived as men's jobs far better than they - teaching in British comprehensives is a good example. But I don't think it's society's role to lower barriers artificially so women benefit from positive discrimination, and I hate things like national prizes which are only open to one sex or the other, particularly literary prizes where women are long past needing that sort of discrimination.

So I think that my Canadian friend should stick firmly to what he is best at - bringing home the bacon so his rapidly-growing family thrives. Mind you, there was an article in last week's New Scientist which he should note. It was reported that a scientist had proved that men are turned on by the scent of a mother's milk, something which he proved by asking a bunch of men to sniff pads impregnated with a volunteer's milk and monitoring their reactions. Now I would love to know how people get funded to carry out such bizarre research, and why it is considered to be sufficiently important to feature in a scientific journal, but I suppose we men should take note. Perhaps fatherhood should include sending an extra bunch of flowers or two to the new mother.

Jon

A Short Story

The attached won the Scottish section of the 2002 Real Writers short story competition, a competition which, sadly, is no more. Real Writers continues, offering critiques of writers' work. I used them a number of times, both for short stories and novels, and very good they were. If anyone is interested, you'll find them at Real Writers

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