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Guest author Jay Lewis Taylor
May. 8th, 2018 10:05 amA delight to feature my old mucker JLT, as part of the shenanigans for his new book, Where Angels Fear, which features a Lancaster Bomber. Be calm, my racing heart.
Charlie: Which is your favourite fictional ship - and which is your favourite real one? Ditto, which is your favourite plane?
JLT: Real ship would have to be the one on which I first went tall-ship sailing, which is the Jubilee Sailing Trust's STS Lord Nelson. She's specially designed to be accessible; as well as 10 permanent crew there is a visiting crew of 40, of whom half are disabled and half aren't. Here's more about her.
It's very difficult to choose a favourite fictional ship, but the one that has stuck in my mind when trying to answer this question is HMS Ulysses, from the book by Alistair MacLean. The book isn't a thriller, it's a war novel from his time serving on the Arctic convoys, and the point of view character, come to think of it, is a junior naval medical officer. I first read the book in my teens, so some of my character interests obviously come from a long way back.
Planes? I'm not half so interested in planes – but Les Brown in Where Angels Fear exists because a certain author not a million miles from here wanted Lancasters, and a Lancaster has to have a pilot – which makes Les's Lanc my favourite fictional plane because I created it, and if authors can't love their own creations I'm not playing ;-)
As for real planes, I have a soft spot for the Fairey Swordfish, partly because it was used by the Royal Naval Air Service, and partly because how can you not love a plane that ends up nicknamed the Stringbag?
Charlie: You've not been in the forces yet you capture the atmosphere really well. How do you work the trick?
JLT: That I read HMS Ulysses very early in life should give you a clue: I've read it time and time again, though not for a while. I grew up with my grandfather's books on my parents' shelves, the Companion Book Club ones (mostly without their jackets) which were pale blue for wartime stories or green for natural history. Reach for the Sky and The Sea Shall Not Have Them and The Dam Busters and Cheshire VC – though oddly enough those are more about the RAF, I now realise. For some inexplicable reason I have never actually read Nicholas Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea, but my father had HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour. That too I read time after time.
Immersion sounds a stupidly punny word to use in the context of the Navy and the sea, but that's about it. Monsarrat and MacLean had both been there, they knew what they were doing. So I already had this way of writing about it ingrained, you might say. And, thinking about getting into a part, I recall this quotation from John Buchan, in which Richard Hannay is musing about his friend Peter Pienaar's ability to hide in full sight: "if you are playing a part, you will never keep it up unless you convince yourself that you are it." I may not be it in the outer world, but inside my head I am.
Finally, having been at sea on a ship, although a tall ship and not one of battleship grey, does help. I've been out in a Force 8 wind, I've been below decks with the ship pitching and rolling, and had to have the lee-cloths up on the bunk to stop me rolling out when the ship changes course ... it all transfers, until when I write, inside my head it's not a trick, but real. How I do that ... puzzles even me. I don't notice myself trying to do it; I'm just glad it happens.
Charlie: When films get made now about WWII there is a risk they get full of anachronistic 21st century sensibilities. What's your view on this?
JLT: It depends: I've got no time at all for the "PC gone mad" brigade who insist that nobody on the successful side of history can possibly be black or gay, for example. You only had to watch the Second World War episode of David Olusoga's excellent series Black and British to see how many black people came to help us from the Caribbean and other countries. To put that right, to show it happening, is proper reconstruction, not anachronism.
At the same time that's not to say that everything was rosy in the garden, just because someone was there. I hate to think about the official line on "spastics" (good thing you haven't seen how often I deleted that and put it in again) and what life was like in long-stay hospitals.
An author, especially an author aiming to tell the truth, can't ignore the fact that sometimes the fight of "good against evil" turns into the fight between "us and them" as soon as evil is conquered. Soldiers are made use of when they can fight, and discarded when peace comes. It's been the same for anyone in the military, from Kipling's time onwards: For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an` "Chuck him out, the brute!" But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot.
In the United States, for example, a report, Standards of Physical Examination during Mobilization, was published by the War Department in Washington on March 15, 1942. The psychiatrists who co-authored it were fully in favour of including gay men in the armed forces, saying that "race, colour, or sexual preference" should be no bar to enlistment. Indeed one of the authors, Harry Stack Sullivan, was himself gay, and lived with his long-term boyfriend Jimmy Inscoe. The results should have been effective – many gay men did indeed serve in the US Armed Forces – but the original recommendations were sabotaged as they went up the ladder of military rank, until it was safer to deny being homosexual at all.
All very well to be allowed to join in the fight, but the "land fit for heroes to live in" may suddenly decide that you're no hero at all, if the colour of your skin is wrong or you like the wrong sort of body in your bed.
Charlie: Were you able to go back and witness a key event in WWII what would it be and why?
JLT: I would like to have been on one of the little ships that came back from Dunkirk, or on the quayside at Ramsgate to welcome them. Why? Because Dunkirk sums up, perhaps, what we most hope for when reading about war: on the brink of disaster, it's still possible for humans working together to achieve something epic, even though individual stories may have come to tragic ends. Dylan Thomas wrote them years before the war, but these lines say it for me: Though lovers be lost love shall not; And death shall have no dominion.
Charlie: Which is your favourite fictional ship - and which is your favourite real one? Ditto, which is your favourite plane?
JLT: Real ship would have to be the one on which I first went tall-ship sailing, which is the Jubilee Sailing Trust's STS Lord Nelson. She's specially designed to be accessible; as well as 10 permanent crew there is a visiting crew of 40, of whom half are disabled and half aren't. Here's more about her.
It's very difficult to choose a favourite fictional ship, but the one that has stuck in my mind when trying to answer this question is HMS Ulysses, from the book by Alistair MacLean. The book isn't a thriller, it's a war novel from his time serving on the Arctic convoys, and the point of view character, come to think of it, is a junior naval medical officer. I first read the book in my teens, so some of my character interests obviously come from a long way back.
Planes? I'm not half so interested in planes – but Les Brown in Where Angels Fear exists because a certain author not a million miles from here wanted Lancasters, and a Lancaster has to have a pilot – which makes Les's Lanc my favourite fictional plane because I created it, and if authors can't love their own creations I'm not playing ;-)
As for real planes, I have a soft spot for the Fairey Swordfish, partly because it was used by the Royal Naval Air Service, and partly because how can you not love a plane that ends up nicknamed the Stringbag?
Charlie: You've not been in the forces yet you capture the atmosphere really well. How do you work the trick?
JLT: That I read HMS Ulysses very early in life should give you a clue: I've read it time and time again, though not for a while. I grew up with my grandfather's books on my parents' shelves, the Companion Book Club ones (mostly without their jackets) which were pale blue for wartime stories or green for natural history. Reach for the Sky and The Sea Shall Not Have Them and The Dam Busters and Cheshire VC – though oddly enough those are more about the RAF, I now realise. For some inexplicable reason I have never actually read Nicholas Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea, but my father had HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour. That too I read time after time.
Immersion sounds a stupidly punny word to use in the context of the Navy and the sea, but that's about it. Monsarrat and MacLean had both been there, they knew what they were doing. So I already had this way of writing about it ingrained, you might say. And, thinking about getting into a part, I recall this quotation from John Buchan, in which Richard Hannay is musing about his friend Peter Pienaar's ability to hide in full sight: "if you are playing a part, you will never keep it up unless you convince yourself that you are it." I may not be it in the outer world, but inside my head I am.
Finally, having been at sea on a ship, although a tall ship and not one of battleship grey, does help. I've been out in a Force 8 wind, I've been below decks with the ship pitching and rolling, and had to have the lee-cloths up on the bunk to stop me rolling out when the ship changes course ... it all transfers, until when I write, inside my head it's not a trick, but real. How I do that ... puzzles even me. I don't notice myself trying to do it; I'm just glad it happens.
Charlie: When films get made now about WWII there is a risk they get full of anachronistic 21st century sensibilities. What's your view on this?
JLT: It depends: I've got no time at all for the "PC gone mad" brigade who insist that nobody on the successful side of history can possibly be black or gay, for example. You only had to watch the Second World War episode of David Olusoga's excellent series Black and British to see how many black people came to help us from the Caribbean and other countries. To put that right, to show it happening, is proper reconstruction, not anachronism.
At the same time that's not to say that everything was rosy in the garden, just because someone was there. I hate to think about the official line on "spastics" (good thing you haven't seen how often I deleted that and put it in again) and what life was like in long-stay hospitals.
An author, especially an author aiming to tell the truth, can't ignore the fact that sometimes the fight of "good against evil" turns into the fight between "us and them" as soon as evil is conquered. Soldiers are made use of when they can fight, and discarded when peace comes. It's been the same for anyone in the military, from Kipling's time onwards: For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an` "Chuck him out, the brute!" But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot.
In the United States, for example, a report, Standards of Physical Examination during Mobilization, was published by the War Department in Washington on March 15, 1942. The psychiatrists who co-authored it were fully in favour of including gay men in the armed forces, saying that "race, colour, or sexual preference" should be no bar to enlistment. Indeed one of the authors, Harry Stack Sullivan, was himself gay, and lived with his long-term boyfriend Jimmy Inscoe. The results should have been effective – many gay men did indeed serve in the US Armed Forces – but the original recommendations were sabotaged as they went up the ladder of military rank, until it was safer to deny being homosexual at all.
All very well to be allowed to join in the fight, but the "land fit for heroes to live in" may suddenly decide that you're no hero at all, if the colour of your skin is wrong or you like the wrong sort of body in your bed.
Charlie: Were you able to go back and witness a key event in WWII what would it be and why?
JLT: I would like to have been on one of the little ships that came back from Dunkirk, or on the quayside at Ramsgate to welcome them. Why? Because Dunkirk sums up, perhaps, what we most hope for when reading about war: on the brink of disaster, it's still possible for humans working together to achieve something epic, even though individual stories may have come to tragic ends. Dylan Thomas wrote them years before the war, but these lines say it for me: Though lovers be lost love shall not; And death shall have no dominion.
