by Brindley Hallam Dennis

When I was clearing out my mother’s house, prior to her going into care, I found a Penny Spitfire. It must have been made by my father early in the Second World War.

I took it and, like Derek Fitton in the novella, pinned it to my jacket. That was one of the starting points for what became the novella, A Penny Spitfire.

The little badge became for me a symbol of all that I did not know, or understand, of my parents’ generation. In particular it drew me to confront, to imagine what it might have been like to experience not the war that had shaped it but the return played out so drearily, as it seemed to me, during my fifties childhood.

One of my cousins, half a generation older than me, in answer to my questions about why my parents had been so much more active in their pre-war lives (we were looking at old photographs), replied ‘it was the war’. ‘Your dad wasn’t the same when he came back’, she went on to say.

I knew, from the little he had told me, that it was not combat stress, or battle fatigue, or shellshock that had afflicted him, but I did not know what instead. Writing A Penny Spitfire was an imaginative quest to imagine what, and what it imagines is that it was the dislocation and destruction of everything that they had been brought up to believe in, that so affected my parents’ generation.

Education had not equipped that generation, in my parents’ class at least, to cope with change. It had equipped them to know their places, and to remain content within them. The war had swept those places away.

In the eighties and nineties large numbers of the wartime generation passed away, and as they did so, typically husbands pre-deceasing wives, a glimmer of a truth about the consequences of the war glowed briefly. Before they too died, many wives finally revealed the hidden stories of how their seemingly unwounded menfolk had returned, brutalised, prematurely aged, and emotionally crippled. They revealed too how, with British sang froid and stiff upper lips, they had lived out their post-war lives in denial of that ongoing disaster.

This was the background to my project in imagining and telling the story of Derek Fitton.

My father told me very little about his war, but whenever he spoke of the people of the Indian sub-continent, he did so with a mixture of incomprehension and admiration. Yet, his wartime photo-album persistently uses the ‘W’ word. He never gave me the slightest hint that he thought of them as in anyway inferior, and I suspect that he must have used the word without derogatory intent, much as the term ‘anglo-saxon’ is used nowadays. That anomaly is one of the threads I have explored in the story.

Another thread is that of the men who, in my childhood, needed to tell to young boys improbable stories of their military service. Those stories I have passed on in the mouth of Clive Dandridge, though they came to me from various sources, none I think, as dangerous to me as he to Paul and Jack. Burma Sammy was conflated of several characters I ran into over the years. One gave me the name, and the others two disparate accounts that I welded together. In fact, they did not even come from the same wars!

The soft, and hard porn of the novel, was highly visible and prevalent throughout my childhood, and indeed seemed almost like a currency, stacks of magazines being traded between various groups of working men that I encountered. Later there was the famous Pirelli Calendar, the wallpaper of choice in the motor trade, it sometimes seemed.

My childhood of course, was of the mid and late fifties, through to the Swinging Sixties, and a ‘trick’ if you like of the novella, has been to project that backwards by a decade to create the ambience of Fitton’s world, a literary sleight of hand that I hope has proved effective!

Tags: Second World War

That’s the question, isn’t it? What constitutes quality writing as we see it? Obviously a precise answer is not possible, but here are some pointers you might like to consider.

Firstly: creativity. It has been said that all stories have already been told, and there is some justification for this dictum. So the pursuit of complete novelty may well be pointless. But that probably misses the point of the creative process in any case. Even if all the grand themes of human existence have been described before, they still need applying at the level of the individual. And that is what changes over time. That is why stories need to be told and re-told. It is because our life experience changes.

We find the human condition endlessly fascinating but it is the particular rather than sweeping generalisation that holds us spellbound. Individually, we only have one life, but via the art of the storyteller, by allowing her to weave strands of imagination around us, we can live countless lives, experience a myriad of hopes, fears, elations. It is the storyteller who binds us together as humans, who enables us to communicate over centuries, who makes us immortal.

Secondly: craft. There is a technical side to writing that adds enormously to the reader’s enjoyment. Let’s take two stories from a couple of our books to illustrate this. The plot of Hilary Spiers Dancing the Midnight Polka is straightforward enough in essence. Without spoiling it for the new reader, it is boy meets girl, boy loses girl and then …. What makes it compelling is how the story is unfolded. We are introduced to the story by the protagonist’s daughter who acts as our eyes and ears as something deep within her father’s past is unearthed. A secret love, a cataclysmic event, a tragic loss and then, half a century later … a letter. It is a story within a story within a story, but the author’s skill is such that you are hardly aware of the complexity. Read it and you’ll see.

A contrasting, but equally skilled example is Bryan Walpert’s Ephraim’s Eyes, the title story of his collection. Here too we have multiple layers of narrative, only in this case we watch the author explicitly peel them back one at a time, seemingly endlessly, like the skins of an onion until we are left with the ending … and the reason for the layers.

Thirdly: style. Some stories are event-driven, picking up the reader right from the first few lines, and whisking her along at ever-increasing speed until the final denouement. In contrast are the stories where on the surface hardly anything happens. These can be more reflective, perhaps detached introspective studies of attitudes and prejudices. Many writer’s develop a style of their own. It might reflect aspects of their personality, or their reasons for wanting to write, or it might just be a manner of writing with which they feel comfortable.

Fourthly: entertainment. Does the reader want to carry on reading?

Tags: Writing

Back in Brazil to visit family and friends – in rural spa towns, chic urban maisonettes, in nursing homes and a forest field station. En route I’m gaily filling up notebooks with choice quotes, random observations, brand names and anecdotes.
Six hours walking in the Atlantic Forest today brought aching legs, a whole lot of sweat and swarms of the pestiferous mutuca (deerfly). It’s not always something you can factor into the logistics of planning a transatlantic trip — the lifecycle of a particular insect group, but I am convinced I should try harder. Deerfly season lasts a month or so and the molestation is worse in open areas – under the dense canopy they seem to lose their bloodlust a little. If there are prizes in the insect world for sheer persistence and enthusiasm, the mutuca will be a shoo-in.
Other animal kingdom clans were not so well-represented — an endangered Pigeon Eagle observed us from a bough over the river, a huge toad stood its ground in the middle of the trail, a scarlet Brazilian Tanager swooping across our sightlines into the scrub, offered a teasing glimpse of scandalous beauty. And a couple of trogons boldly disputed territory within arms reach, displaying Van Gogh colours. As diverse, more so, maybe, than the Amazon, the Atlantic rainforest’s Achilles heel was to be growing exactly where colonisers most wanted to settle: along the Brazilian seaboard. Less than 5% remains of the forest today. The Amazon, has, to some extent, been protected by its inaccessibility, its broiling Equatorial climate and its remote frontiers with Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela. This is less and less a defence in the face of roads, legal and illegal, the ubiquitous motor car, heavy extraction machinery and light aircraft – high powered kit that penetrates almost everywhere. And while the Federal environment agency, IBAMA, has equally high tech satellite monitoring kit in the shape of SIVAN, and many excellent employees, the area under supervision is on a continental scale, and there is enough rot in the Federal law-enforcement machinery to ensure determined miners and loggers (often European) can get on with the business of extraction unperturbed.
Which brings me almost neatly to the messy subject of corruption and ‘Elite Squad II’. Now in its 6th week on release in Brazilian cinemas, it broke Brazil’s record for the most watched film ever (previously held by a 1970’s production of Jorge Amado’s ‘Dona Flor and her Two Husbands’) when the 10 millionth ticket was sold this weekend. If you saw the first Elite Squad you’ll know the territory — Captain Roberto Nascimento of Rio de Janeiro’s Special Police Operations Battalion (BOPE) continues his mission to rid the city of traffickers and the corrupt politicians who feed off their bloody trade like engorged ticks. The methods employed by BOPE’s elite troops are often violent but Nascimento contends that they need to be to confront those who are capable of endless brutality. It can’t be long until it’s released internationally. You should watch it to feel sick to the stomach at corruption everywhere, and especially the corruption that still corrodes the very heart of Brazil, a nation on the rise – an emerging global economy. In Sao Paulo, the cost of living has rocketed – the richest commute by helicopter and TV commercial breaks are dominated by car ads as makers vie for the newly disposable income of every strata of society — even the maids who once went to work on foot, bicycle or overcrowded buses. In a land where the wealth gap is still a dizzying chasm, where people still go hungry and die from preventable diseases, the corruption that percolates from the power elite through Military Police battalions to militia and drug cartels that dominate the favelas is nauseating. The scene where Captain Nascimento takes his fists to the crooked Head of Security has been applauded by cinema-goers in spontaneous expressions of disgust at impunity, embezzlement, greed, barefaced lying and brutality. The irony for one columnist in Veja magazine, is that the average Brazilian participates in law-evasion and small acts of corruption every day — whether by offering a few reais for ‘beers’ to a policeman to avoid a traffic fine, to asking a planning official to ‘find a way around’ a barrier to approval for a home improvement. This misses the point of Captain Nascimento’s zero tolerance approach. In the closing scenes, the incumbent governor is re-elected; his Head of Security retains his post amid hand-shaking and back-slapping. We wonder, despite our hero’s valour and the brave stand made by a lone senator, has anything changed in the corridors of Brasilia?

Tags: Brazil

When Apple launched its iTunes store in 2001 few at the time would have predicted the magnitude of its impact on the music industry. Since then the CD market has crumbled and digital downloads now dominate, leaving Apple almost the only player in the game. With the iPad and its new e-book store due to hit the US market in a matter of weeks the big question is: could the same thing happen for electronic books?

Amazon certainly seem to think so.

And as their Kindle has nearly half of the existing electronic book market they have a lot to lose.

Their first shot in the battle was to announce that they would reduce their cut from 70% to 30% to match Apple’s. But there was a catch. A big one. The deal forced publishers to undercut their own physical copies, allowed Amazon to set the prices and prevented them from doing a better deal with anyone else. In other words publishers would allow Amazon to choose how much to pay them with no fear of being undercut themselves.

The business model Apple is pushing is one where they act as a fixed-price distributor, leaving author and publisher with the bulk of any profits. In contrast, Amazon want to act as a publisher / distributor, effectively using author and publisher as mere content providers for their Kindle platform. In short, Apple want to provide a service for a percentage; Amazon want control as well.

Unsurprisingly, not all publishers are happy with Amazon’s vision and Macmillan began negotiating proposals of their own. To everyone’s amazement Amazon responded by removing all of Macmillan’s titles from their stores without prior warning.

Macmillan countered diplomatically, praising Amazon as “a valuable customer” and proposing an alternative scenario.

Amazon followed up their salvo with a curiously worded statement on a Kindle forum that they were ultimately going to have to give in to Macmillan because they have “a monopoly over their own titles” – whatever that means. So they appear to have blinked first.

A victory for Apple? It seems so. Steve Jobs apparently pitched to publishers earlier in the year and it has obviously gone down well. Macmillan have come out of it with their reputation enhanced as well. Amazon, on the other hand, have shot themselves in the foot and gratuitously alienated a lot of Macmillan authors. Not to mention the book-buying public.

But does any of this matter?

Well yes and no. The spat will soon be forgotten, I imagine. But if Apple’s entry into the music business is anything to go by, then the market will be shaken up, consumers should see lower prices, and authors and publishers should get a better deal.

Time will tell.

Tags: Amazon | Apple | e-books