Last week was an exciting one for me, since I have taken two of the biggest steps towards achieving an ambition which has been part of my life for almost 50 years.
It was towards the end of 1968. I had just turned seventeen. I went to the local library in Crystal Palace which I had visited regularly since the age of seven or eight – first the children’s section and latterly the bit for grown ups.
One of the books I chose that week was called Lord Dismiss Us, by a man called Michael Campbell (younger brother of Patrick, famous newspaper columnist and panelist on Call My Bluff). It had been published a year or so earlier and was set in a minor public school. At its core was a love affair between two of the boys, Terry Carleton and Nicky Allen. Terry, the older one, in his last term at the school, was also the subject of an unrequited passion by a young teacher, Eric Ashley, not that much older than the boys themselves (the gap might have seemed huge to them, but seems tiny from the perspective of a man in his late sixties!).
I won’t spoil the story in case you ever want to read it, but suffice it to say that the book did not end well. And it devastated me. As a gay teenager who would have given his eye teeth for somebody to fall in love with, I identified so strongly with the two boys, and feared so much the fate that overtook Eric Ashley at the end of the book.
I have to confess that rereading the book today, I can see the narrative power of the author, though in other ways the book is not really to my taste: it is written in a florid, impressionistic style that owes quite a lot to James Joyce. The other characters are eccentric and in many ways unappealing. It is difficult now for me to identify with – or even like – many of the main protagonists.
Anyway, the point is that reading the book plunged the seventeen year old me into a deep depression – that Christmas was probably the most miserable I had ever spent. It was certainly the deepest depression I have experienced in my life, and I can remember it causing my parents a good deal of concern, though I couldn’t – or wouldn’t – tell them about its underlying cause. They would have to wait another nine and a half years for the coming out conversation.
My route out of the state I had got into was to carry on living with the two central characters of the book, by writing about them. I envisaged a scenario where, two years later, the two boys met again at University and imagined what might then happen.
That hesitant start, writing for my own pleasure about two characters I loved, was the genesis of the novel I spent the next few years writing. The book was my escape – writing bits here and there, thinking about how the plot might develop, inventing new characters. It became a little private world into which I could retreat during lonely evenings or weekends.
The novel was largely complete by around 1977, and had been read by a few friends who had been quite kind about it. By then, the characters and the plot had evolved well away from Michael Campbell’s.
The following year, I had a period of enforced inactivity, so determined to do something with the book. I paid a fee to have it professionally assessed by a member of staff at the London School of Journalism, and again the news was good. Reading between the lines of the assessment (especially now) it’s possible to see that the assessor was not particularly keen on the plot (effectively that the theme of growing up and coping with being a young gay man was not a new one, and that there was little new to be said about it).
Having said that, he praised certain aspects and suggested how to go about rewriting it. He added that he was sure that the book would one day make its mark. I spent the next few months on the rewrite, and by the beginning of 1979 had a revised draft with which I was much happier. This duly went off to a couple of agents and publishers, only to come back with the standard rejection letters. I was back in employment and had found my life partner by then, so the whole project seemed less important, and was put on the back burner. Being an author was not really compatible with being Traffic Manager of a big London coach company, running a new relationship and coping with the demands of becoming property owners.
The next chapter came in 1983. I was made redundant had a short window of opportunity before starting a new job. By then, the world of publishing was changing with new specialist publishers such as Gay Mens Press springing up. A section of the manuscript was duly submitted, but GMP were not interested at that point – but suggested that another small firm, Brilliance Books, might be interested.
Miracle of miracles, they were. That was the really exciting good news. The bad news was that it needed to be rewritten again. Well, we made arrangements domestically for this to be done, giving me a couple of hours every evening to complete the task. The revised manuscript was duly submitted, and the process of preparing for publication began – editing, proof correcting and so forth. And then stopped. Brilliance seemed to lose interest, so the manuscript was put into a file and left.
Career demands once again took over, so that the work has lain around in its 1984 form, apart from the occasional dust and polish, ever since - now some 34 years. This time, when the files were got out for a dust, I determined to do something about it.
As with most things, the arrival of computer technology and the internet has revolutionised the world of book publishing and production, so that the use of print on demand services and promotional tools enables authors like me to publish their own work.
Thus, last December, the process began: the old typescript was scanned in and a new version prepared in Microsoft Word. With the help of an old friend in our village, Karen Holmes, who is a professional editor and award-winning writer, this latest version has been subjected to a critical read and a comprehensive edit. It has now been professionally typeset.
The two critical decisions made this week were to approve a cover design and to set a date for publication. The book, called The Stamp of Nature, will be published on 1 June. And the cover? Ah, all will be revealed soon.
The next challenge is to promote and market the book, for which plans are now being laid. And then there’s the small issue of proving that I can do it all again… and again... Well I am pleased to report that my second and third books are making good progress, and the ‘book ideas’ folder is full of new ideas.
Meanwhile, my lifelong ambition of being a published novelist will be fulfilled on 1 June this year. Exciting times – and a new beginning indeed.