A story for Christmas

I know it’s been two or three weeks since I posted anything here but I do have a good excuse. I have promised two or three new books for the New Year and I intend to honor that but I thought I’d surprise you and get one done for Christmas. It’s been a long task but it’s now done and ‘Hessians’, a tale of adventure in the Revolutionary War was published on Amazon, Kindle and in major bookstores today.

It’s available at: http://www.amazon.com/Hessians-Derek-Coleman/dp/1505550696/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1418867432&sr=8-1&keywords=derek+coleman&pebp=1418867447338

 but, rather than me waffling on about it, here is the prologue, I hope you enjoy it and want to read more. A very Merry Christmas to you all.

PROLOGUE

The silence was the strange thing. A line of a thousand men would normally be humming with talk but it seemed not one of them had the energy to speak as the ragged column straggled along the muddy road. They were dirty, wet, tired beyond reason, out of step and dispirited. Their heads were bowed against the wind-driven rain, their weary footsteps were slow and their clothes provided little protection against the harsh winter weather.

Some still wore semblances of what had once been uniforms, weather-faded blue serge coats with facings of red or buff. Most were dressed in homespun or linen that had long-since been worn into tatters. Some still had boots; others the remnants of shoes, one or two wrapped their feet in stained and bloody rags. For the main part they were bareheaded in the wet, the hat is the first thing to go when a soldier breaks and runs.

They came in ones and twos, in single file or small bunches. There was little sign of cohesive units. No companies or platoons. No one looked as if he were leading them. Each man just numbly followed in the footsteps of the one in front of him. Their weapons, a mixture of muskets, rifles, sporting guns or just poles with knives lashed to them, were carried a thousand different ways; anything to ease the burden on war-weary muscles.

Here and there a man led a gaunt horse but the animals were as tired as their masters and their heads drooped in exhaustion. These were the cavalry, the once proud eyes of the army, now reduced to the beaten weariness of their infantry brethren. Then came a lone gun. A six-pounder brass field piece, its muzzle still blackened with the burnt powder residue of overuse.

The gunners, as dirty and tired as the rest, led, cajoled and cursed the three underfed mules pulling the piece. Every few yards the weight of the barrel drove the wheels of the weapon deep into the glutinous mud already churned by a thousand feet. When it did so the mules shuddered to a halt, their heads down and their eyes dull. There was only one way to move on. The gunners got down into the mud and pushed at wheel spokes until slowly the animals and their load eased forward again. The men looked as bone-weary as the mules but they stubbornly stuck to their task and the column snaked on.

Lieutenant James Holte, sheltering as best he could under the winter-bared boughs of a spreading maple tree, watched the defeated army go past, his eyes narrowed and his face grim. He sensed rather than saw someone move up alongside him but did not immediately turn to see who it was.

‘A rabble, aren’t they?’ a voice said after a moment. Holte nodded slowly and glanced at the newcomer. Unlike the men passing before the two of them Captain Simon Howard still wore the blue and buff of Washington’s headquarters’ staff and the horse he held by its reins was sleeker, more alert and better fed than the others.

‘They’ve come a long way since Long Island,’ Holte said carefully. ‘They’ve seen a lot of fighting and have been beaten once too often.’

‘Can they take another beating?’

Holte looked back at the road. One of the men who were passing slipped, dropped his broken musket and fell to his knees in the mud. He was hardly more than a boy yet his sunken-cheeked face bore the experience of a lifetime. For a moment he just knelt there, mouth open and eyes closed, then two other soldiers stopped. They each took an arm and hauled the boy to his feet before slipping his arms around their shoulders. Together they half-dragged him on, leaving the broken musket lying in the mud.

Holte shook his head.

‘No,’ he said, ‘not now.’ He paused and looked at Howard again. ‘Are they going to get beaten again?’ he asked. ‘Because if they are you aren’t going to have any army left.’

Howard grimaced.

‘Who knows? If Lord Howe has any sense at all, he will have his light troops snapping at our heels and his main column just behind. Fortunately for us though, no one has ever accused his Lordship of having much sense. He could have taken us at Long Island and again at New York or he could have caught us as we crossed the rivers on the way down here, but he didn’t.’ He shook his head, ‘No, my guess is that he’ll go into winter quarters and will leave the weather and starvation to finish us off.’

‘They will,’ Holte said, ‘unless we can rest and get supplies soon.’

‘We’ll rest tonight,’ Howard replied, ‘but supplies are going to be harder to get. We abandoned a lot of valuable stuff up north.’ He hesitated and then added, ‘That’s where you and your scoundrels come in. I have a job for you. How many do you have left?’

Holte forgot the passing column and turned to face Howard. War and attrition had shrunk his company just as it had the rest of the army. Like the others they needed rest and a good feed but they were in better shape than most. At least they were still a unit.

‘I’ve got twenty-eight,’ he said.

‘Where?’ Howard demanded, looking around. Holte whistled shrilly and his men appeared, seeming to rise out of the ground and stepping from behind trees and bushes. They were tough men, some very young, some older. Several were bearded, the rest clean-shaven and, like Holte himself, each wore a leather hunting shirt dyed green, gray or brown. Every man carried a Pennsylvania rifle, the locks carefully wrapped against the mud and damp.

‘Very well,’ Howard said. He nodded, ‘Twenty-eight will have to do.’

Holte rested the butt plate of his own rifle on the fallen leaves at his feet and crossed his arms over the muzzle.

‘Do for what?’ he demanded.

‘To get supplies for the army.’

‘We’re not quartermasters.’

‘No, you’re fighting soldiers and that’s what this job needs. These supplies are back in New Jersey.’

Holte grimaced,

‘And the enemy is holding New Jersey,’ he said. Howard nodded, his eyes carefully weighing the other man’s reaction.

‘Just how much stuff do you think twenty-eight men can sneak out from behind British lines?’ Holte said. ‘We’ll only be able to carry enough to feed ourselves.’

‘There are wagons,’ Howard said. ‘A dozen wagons and the teams to pull them.

Holte frowned. What Howard was saying was ridiculous. Twenty- eight men could not take a dozen wagons back across the Delaware, load them with supplies and hope to get them out again. It was not possible.

‘There are ten-thousand redcoats over there,’ he said. ‘They might object.’

‘Hopefully they won’t know,’ Howard told him. ‘I’m told these supplies are hidden in the backwoods where the enemy is unlikely to look for them or to even have a garrison.’

‘Where?’

‘A place called Wixford. It’s on a tributary of the Delaware called the Arrow River, about twenty miles from Trenton.’

Holte did some rapid thinking. If his men rested and ate a hot meal or two they could cover twenty miles in a night march. Wagons could not though; they would be lucky to make ten miles a day in this weather. If they took back roads that were nothing more than muddy tracks they might manage five miles a day at best. They also had to cross the Delaware under the noses of enemy patrols. It could not be done.

He told Howard so.

‘You don’t have to take the wagons. They’re already with the supplies,’ Howard told him. ‘All you have to do is to get there and get them out.’

‘A day to get there, five days at least to get back, and only twenty-eight men to watch over a dozen wagons? I still think it can’t be done.’

Howard laughed.

‘You have the mind of a soldier, Mr. Holte,’ he said. ‘War isn’t like that. It’s about politics.’

‘Politics?’

‘Yes, politics. These are New Jersey stores. They were collected in New Jersey, by the people of New Jersey for the sole use of New Jersey militia. They wouldn’t let you have them even if you went for them. No, they have to be collected by New Jersey troops and I have a battalion of fresh militia from that colony ready to go.’

‘So why do you need us?’

‘I need you because, as I said, these are fresh troops. They’ve never seen a musket fired in anger. They’re green as the grass in summer and their colonel is greener.’

‘Colonel?’

‘Colonel Marcus Van Derijk of the New York Van Derijk’s.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘His family owns a lot of land on Manhattan Island but his place is in New Jersey. Seems he owns about half the colony. He raised the militia himself and paid for their equipment.’

‘He’s a soldier?’

‘He served as an ensign under Braddock back in ’fifty-seven but never saw any fighting.’

‘So he knows nothing about soldiering?’

Howard smiled ruefully and said,

‘Don’t tell him that. He has the British army book of infantry maneuvers and thinks he knows it all.’

‘And I’m supposed to hold his hand whilst he retrieves his stores?’

‘You’re supposed to pretend to be under his command and to keep him out of trouble. We can’t afford to lose a hundred militia as well as the stores.’

The joys of editing:

To my mind one of the hardest parts of novel writing comes after you have typed those two magic words, ‘The End’.

That’s when the editing starts and it is a long, trying road. I don’t know how others tackle it but my method is to put the story aside for a day or two. Once the euphoria of finishing has dissipated I go back to it and go through the whole thing looking for the helpful hints that Microsoft Word has given me. The red underlining indicating spelling errors is easy to fix, you either add the word to the dictionary or spell it correctly. Green underlining is harder to fix, sure I make grammatical errors, but if they appear in dialogue I sometimes leave them in because people do not always speak grammatically and I want my characters dialogue to be real.

Once the easy fixes are done I then read the story through, looking for obvious errors. That usually takes several days and when it’s done I copy the whole thing to a flash drive and hand it over to my very able editor who will go through it suggesting insertions and deletions, pointing out bits that don’t make sense, ‘Britishisms’ (that’s things we Brits say that make no sense in a trans-Atlantic context) and continuity.

My editor is good, very good and I usually get the file back with all sorts of helpful suggestions and comments. That’s when the hard work starts again. I go through each one, seeing if it works for me and fits the story. Almost invariably I accept about 90% of the suggestions and make the appropriate changes.

Then the story goes on hold for at least a week, sometimes two or three before I do my final read through. By this time I’ve read my own story so many times I can almost recite it so this last read through has to be done very carefully otherwise I may inadvertently miss something.

After that the story is done and ready for the publisher. It’s still not perfect though. No matter how many times I re-read my own work I always find something I would change if I could. I guess when striving for perfection none of us are ever satisfied.

Stop Press! Innocent? the fourth novel in the Dean and Steph series is now available on Amazon. Check it out at:

http://www.amazon.com/Innocent-Dean-Steph-Book-4-ebook/dp/B00PUQ68DM/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1416483204&sr=1-1&keywords=derek+coleman

Writing out of sequence? Not for me

I guess everyone has different ways of writing a novel. A friend recently posted that he is working on the third book of his series and he said he already has several scenes written which he will slot in at the appropriate places. Many of these scenes were written for book two and were not used and he says he may even save some of them for a possible fourth book. I've read his books, they are very good, they flow well and there is never a hint that any part is written out of sequence. My wife’s method is similar. She writes parts of her books and then writes round the scenes she has.

I can’t do that. When I sit down to write a novel I start with the first word on page one and write in chronological sequence until I get to the end. I never write a scene and put it in, I just can’t work that way. I may go back and tweak something, put a clue in here, take a too-obvious pointer out there, but I never go forward and write a whole chunk of the book. I think the reason for this is because when I start writing a book I generally know who the principle characters will be, I know how it will end and I know how I want to start it but once I've started to put words on paper and have introduced my people they simply take on a life of their own and go their own way.

I can’t write a scene for the middle of the book because these people I've created may never get to that situation. I don’t manipulate them, they find their own way to the final chapter and I don’t think I can work any other way.

The hardest part for me is always the beginning of a book. The prologue for “Innocent?” (coming out in December) is about three pages long but it took me weeks to write to my own satisfaction. Once I had it done though the rest of the novel just flowed because these characters took over but I agonized about how to get them started on their journey.

As I said, my friend is a good writer, his books sell well and his method obviously works for him. Personally I can’t work his way, just as well I guess, if were all the same the world would be a very boring place.

Okay, I'm sure many of you prefer being entertained to reading my thoughts so this week I'm putting up a piece of fiction and, as it's nearly Halloween, it has a loose connection with the season - enjoy.

Trick or Treat?

There was no getting away from it; Stu Evans was a mean man. Not physically mean, he didn’t physically hurt anyone, he was too chicken for that. He was tight-fisted mean. He wouldn’t spend a dime if a penny would do. He was also very wealthy. That was why, on Halloween, his long-suffering wife Margie expected a fight when she told him that she wanted to give candy away to the local kids.  

She didn’t get one. Stu merely grunted that he didn’t believe in Halloween and that the kids should be locked up for extortion. Margie was surprised at his reaction; she expected to hear far more venom. She asked him if he was okay but he just shrugged and said he was fine. He didn’t care what she did because he had a business meeting and would be out anyway.

What he neglected to say was his meeting involved a brief visit to an amateur art exhibition with his long-legged secretary followed by an intimate dinner for two. Stu was confident that he would not be back till morning but he did not tell Margie that.

When it came to art, Stuart knew what he was talking about. He owned his own gallery and had a reputation as a hard dealer who could spot new talent that others might miss. He never kept his artists long, he screwed too much out of them for them to stay, but he could find them.

Tonight’s soiree was put on by the instructor of a local night class and was being held in a couple of rooms adjacent to the town library. The moment he walked in Stuart’s heart sank. He had been hoping to find someone with a little promise here but one look around at the daubs adorning the walls showed him that these really were amateurs. Even the free glass of wine lacked any finesse and he wrinkled his nose in disgust after the first sip.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s get out of here.’

‘Oh,’ Lynette, his secretary pouted. ‘Some of these look real pretty. Can’t I just have one tiny look around in case there’s something I like?’

Stuart grimaced, Lynette’s idea of ‘real pretty’ meant that he was expected to buy her some awful canvas that should be consigned to the garbage can. It would be a waste of money but one look at those sexy green eyes was enough to tell him that it was going to be worth every dime.

‘Okay,’ he sighed. ‘But don’t expect me to come round with you, just pick the one you want and let’s get it over with.’ Lynette beamed and kissed his cheek.

‘Thanks, Stu,’ she said.

‘And take this crap with you,’ Stuart told her, handing her his glass of wine.

Lynette wandered off and after admiring the sway of her hips as she walked away, he turned back to the monstrosities hanging on the wall. They really were bad; some of the artists could barely draw. Shaking his head, he wandered into the second room and gave the paintings there a cursory glance. He was about to turn away and dismiss them when one caught his eye.

It was not a spectacular subject, just a country scene. It showed an old cabin with log walls and shingle roof sitting alongside a track lined by ancient oak trees. It was not even a very big picture but among such garbage, it shone out with a depth and vibrancy that grabbed his attention and held it.

Striding over Stu looked at it closely. The detail was amazing and just for a second he wondered if he was looking at a photograph, but then he saw the delicate brushwork. It was superb, worthy of any of the masters. The colours held a warmth and a depth that truly reflected nature. Stu knew instantly that he had found his next great talent.

Pinned alongside each painting was a small card bearing the title of the picture, the artist’s details and a price. This one was called ‘The Witch’s Place’. Instead of details though it just bore the name ‘Annie’ and a note saying that it was not for sale.

Stu grimaced. Most of the paintings were priced between fifty and a hundred dollars and he knew that he could get at least fifty times that for this one. He looked around, there was only one other person in the room. She was a short, pretty, blonde woman of about thirty-five.

‘Hey,’ Stu called to her, ‘are you anything to do with the people who did these?’ 

The girl frowned. ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘I’m a member of the group. Is there something I can help you with?’

‘I want to buy this picture,’ Stu told her, gesturing at the painting. The girl leaned forward to look at it, frowned again and shook her head.

‘I’m sorry, that’s Annie’s,’ she told him. ‘She’s very old and she never sells her stuff.’

‘Aw come on,’ Stu protested. ‘Let me talk to her, I’ll treat the old girl, give her two hundred bucks for it.’ He reached for his wallet but the girl was shaking her head again.

‘Sorry, she’s not here,’ she said and then smiled. ‘She told us an old witch like her had better things to do on Halloween.’

Stuart gave a sigh of exasperation.

‘Okay,’ he said.

‘You’re welcome,’ the girl replied, turning away.

Stu’s forehead was furrowed in thought as he stared at the painting once more. It really was excellent. It was almost as if there was a breeze stirring the leaves of the trees and a wisp of smoke eddying from the chimney. He took a small magnifying glass from his pocket and leaned closer.

The detail was magnificent. There were no people but the cabin looked so real, it was almost as if he could reach out and touch it. He leaned closer and as he looked one of the drapes hanging at the windows of the building seem to twitch.

Stuart jerked back. He grinned and shook his head. It had to be good to make him imagine something in the painting moved. He had to have it. He looked round. For the moment he was alone in the room. Okay, he decided, if he could not treat the old woman, he would trick her. It was Halloween after all.

No one was watching; the picture was small and would easily fit under a folded topcoat. Slipping his coat off, Stu stepped forward and reached up to unhook the painting.

When Lynette came looking for him ten minutes later the only sign of him was his coat lying on the floor beneath a picture showing a country scene with trees and a cabin. She leaned closer to look at the picture. At one of the windows there appeared to be a screaming face.

Where oh where?

Carla Kovach, a friend and fellow writer raised an interesting question this morning. Where should an author base his or her work? Should it be a fictional place or somewhere real?

The question arose because my friend has just published a novel. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet but having read her previous work I have no doubt it is excellent. The book is a crime story and she wanted to put an ad for it on a certain Facebook page but the page admins objected because they thought the fact that it was of the crime/murder genre might put people off visiting the place where the story is set.

I wouldn’t dream of criticizing their decision of course, it’s their page and they can say what should, and should not, be posted on it but it does raise the question of where to base a book.

Stephen King invented the town of Castle Rock, Maine, and more murder, mayhem, hauntings and nightmare occurrences have happened in that small town over the years than any other place else on earth yet he never has problems advertising his books. Would it have been that easy for him if he had chosen Bangor, Derry or any other small Maine town that actually exists and which might object to the depiction of blood on their streets?

Personally I base my crime stories on the tri-state area of West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky. My hero’s office is in a little shopping plaza off the road where I live. The office is fictional but the plaza is there and so are almost all the other places I mention in my novels. The villages and towns in my historical novel “Weoley” are all there too. In some ways the way they developed over the centuries is different to the way I depict them but each exists and the book is a work of fiction so no one has complained that I have uncles murdering nephews in the middle of the Bristol Road as yet.

A lot of my research when writing a book involves my spending time on Google Maps, Google Earth and other websites. If one of my protagonists ducks down an alley you can be fairly certain the alley exists and that most of the surroundings are exactly as I describe them. I may put in the odd door, tree or clump of bushes but that is artistic license or simply because I think those things should be there and aren’t.

As I said at the start of this musing, whether to use a real or a fictional place is an interesting question. My friend tried to advertise her book on a site pertaining to the place where the novel set. She could not do so but equally, if she had set the story somewhere that doesn’t exist there would not be a site to post on anyway so she has lost nothing. Personally I intend to keep using real places in the belief that nature and the hand of man are probably more creative than my imagination. I’m not sure what my friend will do but if you want to check out her novels you’ll find them at:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_9?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=carla%20kovach&sprefix=carla+kov%2Caps%2C204

That ………

I guess we all develop various habits when we do something regularly. Some are good habits, some bad. This applies equally to writing as it does to everything else in life and I am one of the world’s worse when it comes to bad writing habits.

I do have some good habits such as writing something every day, always going back and reading over the previous day’s work before proceeding etc.

Unfortunately I also have some bad habits. “That’ is probably my worse habit. I put it in all the time, mostly where it is not necessary. I don’t think I use it in speech very often so I have no idea why I write it so much but I do.

I recently finished a first draft for a novel, eighty-five thousand words of scintillating prose any writer would be proud of….apart from the “that’s”. There were a lot of them. On my first read through I couldn’t help but notice them so I did a little test. I got the computer to count the number of times I’d used the word and then sat stunned as I looked at the answer. It was over one percent of the total. More than one word in a hundred was a “that” and that isn’t good enough.

There was only one thing to do. I highlighted every occurrence of the word and then read each sentence in which it occurred. In many of them “that” was just a redundant word; the sentence said the same with or without it so I deleted it. Then I read through the whole manuscript, looked at each remaining occurrence of “that” and tried to find a way of saying what I wanted in a different way without using the word.

In this way I managed to eliminate more than two thirds of the “that’s” in my story. I think the words flow easier and it reads much better without them but it did highlight that I like to use “had “ too so I repeated the process for that word also. It took several days to complete the exercise but it was worth it. I was left with a much smoother piece of writing and it taught me a valuable lesson. Henceforth I shall watch my “that’s” and “hads” when I write.

For anyone looking for a good read at a ridiculously low price try my page  on Amazon and see how many "thats" you can spot! The link is:

 http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_13?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=derek%20coleman&sprefix=derek+coleman%2Cdigital-text%2C246&rh=i%3Adigital-text%2Ck%3Aderek%20coleman&oqid=1410711550

Guilty? (Dean & Steph Book 1) by Derek Coleman (Jul 20, 2014) - Kindle eBook

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I don’t know about other writers but I try to write something every day. Sometimes it’s only a few lines and at others it just seems to come gushing out. This weekend has been like the second of those states and I am pleased to say I have passed two milestones with the first draft of “Innocent?”

The first of these milestones was the 50,000 word one. That target was not only met but surpassed this morning and I’ve managed nearly another thousand words since then. Those words may seem like arrant nonsense when I come to read over them for the second draft but at least the ideas will be there.

I have my own system for the first drafts of any new writing. On day one I just get it down on paper…or rather into the laptop. Then, the next day or when I come to start writing again, I start by reading from the beginning of the last session, correcting and editing as I go.  Sometimes this means I get very little new stuff written on day two but at least I know that what I wrote on day one now makes some sort of sense and most of the typos have already been fixed. It’s a system that seems to work for me so I’m not planning to make any changes to it, but others of course are free to choose their own methods.

I said earlier I’d achieved two milestones with this new novel. The second of these is that I now know who did it. You’ll have to wait for the book to be finished before you find out exactly what it was that was done and who did it to who but I’m happy that I now know the perpetrator.

You may be surprised that it’s taken me 50,000 words to decide who the crook is but that’s the way it goes sometimes. I’ve had an idea all along of course. When I started writing I knew how the novel would end and I had several contenders for the title of the bad guy but, as usual, the characters have taken on a life of their own as the book has progressed. Those who started out being the good guys have developed some bad traits while some of the nasties have shown they do have good sides to their characters. Now however, one stands out as being much more evil than the rest and I can see that he, or she, is the guilty party.

It’s strange how people who are nothing but figments of my imagination can seemingly come alive and go their own way but they always do and this phenomenon is not just true for my novels, other writers have told me it happens to them too. We try to create a world and populate it with characters we conjure from the depths of our sub consciousness I think it’s a signal of our success when these characters come alive on the page, start to create their own roads and to go off in unfathomed of directions.

On the odd occasion when a character is dull and lifeless and has no depth or personality I know it’s time to either ditch the character or to start again with another storyline. So far occurrences like this are very rare, let’s hope they remain so. Happy reading.

Like most writers I am also an avid reader. The latest offerings by my favorite authors were always top of my Christmas wants list and over the years I accumulated a vast number of books. Then my wife gave me my first electronic reader and I was in paradise. So many books available at such reasonable prices, I was spoiled for choice. I couldn’t possibly read them all so how to decide which ones to download?

Naturally I went for those in my favorite genres first but that did not help much so it was a matter of looking at titles and then at the reviews each had gotten and choosing the most popular.

That was a huge help. I bought a lot of ebooks, read them all and enjoyed most of them long before I put any of my own work out there. That was a while ago now and it taught me a lesson. I was trying to sell my books and was desperate for reviews because feedback from the reading public is not only the best way an author has of seeing what he is doing right…or wrong, good reviews are also a way of attracting the browsing reader.

The thing is reviews were slow in coming. Books were being sold but few readers left feedback and this made me realize how selfish I’d been. I’d downloaded all these books and enjoyed reading them but I was very negligent when it came to leaving reviews. I’ve changed that now. I figure if an author can spend months working on a book that gives me pleasure then the least I can do is spend five minutes leaving a review of his or her work. It helps the writer and may encourage them to persevere and write more.

I’m sure you can all see where this is leading now. It’s an unabashed request that those of you who have been driven by curiosity to download and read one of my books leave me a short review; By doing so you will earn my gratitude and will encourage me to get on with “Innocent?” and the other projects that are buzzing around in my head.

Thank you and, just to whet your appetite here is a little more fiction:

The Jade Princess

 My Granddad told me his father was a simple man. Not stupid by any means but sometimes he just did not think ahead. He was also acquisitive. No, not inquisitive - acquisitive. In other words he took things. Nothing big, nothing very valuable you understand, just bits of cash or something that would fetch a few bob in the pawn shop. Usually it was barely enough to buy him a pie and a jug of ale. Except once that is. Just once he hit the big time, in fact he hit it so big it was massive and it left us with our one and only family heirloom.

            From what I can gather Great-Granddad did not rely on his light fingers to earn his living, he actually owned a horse and cart that he used to deliver and transport things. He drove it himself and made enough out of it to keep a roof over the heads of Great Grandma and six kids. Anyway, early in the last century by some mischance he got a job transporting large items from various railway stations to one of the big hotels in the west end. Now you can see the situation, a petty thief with access to the service elevator and all the floors in a very posh hotel? Great-Granddad just had to try his luck and open a few doors occasionally.

            I don’t know whether he managed to steal anything on his previous visits to the place. Perhaps his big hit was a one off but from what I have been told on that particular day he was delivering luggage and helping to carry it up to what we would now call the penthouse suite. Anyway, somehow he was left alone for a while and as was his wont he tried a few door handles. One opened and he found himself in the most luxurious room he had ever seen. Not being one to hang about Great-Granddad naturally looked around for anything that looked as if it might bring a few quid and which was small enough to hide under in his jacket.

            He did not have to look far, in a glass cabinet against the wall was a single item, a small green statuette. He grabbed it and realised immediately that it was the delicately carved figure of a girl. Even he was impressed by its intricacy and not wishing to break it he grabbed a small carved box, emptied the cigarettes it contained into his pocket and then put the figure inside before hiding the box under his coat. Within five minutes he was out of the hotel, sitting on his cart and going home.

            At that time Great-Granddad had seen the inside of more than one London police station and he had learned from his mistakes. Instead of heading for the nearest pawnshop he stopped off on the way home and hid the box and its contents somewhere. He knew that the police would trace him and that they would check his known fences and he was right. What he did not anticipate was the furore his little escapade created.

            Usually if he was suspected of something the local copper would call and take him down to the station. This time they sent a covered police van with an inspector, a sergeant and six burly policemen. Great-Granddad was bodily thrown into the back of the van where a couple of coppers tried to persuade him to talk whilst the rest tore his little terraced house apart. They emptied every drawer and cupboard, ripped up floorboards, dug up the garden and even looked down the privy. Great-Granddad was beaten until he looked like he had been trampled by his horse and he could not think straight but he did not confess. One look at what was happening had persuaded him that if they once pinned this on him he would go away for a very long time indeed and, whilst he had already done various short stints behind bars, the thought of years at hard labour terrified him more than the beating did.

            They kept him for a week. During that time they beat him, cajoled him, promised him they would not prosecute and in the end tried to bribe him. He was a stubborn old cuss though, and he would not give them the satisfaction of admitting what he had done so eventually they had to let him go. During his interrogations he had picked up a little of what it was that he had started but it was not until he got home that he realised the full extent of his crime.

            It turned out that the green figure was a thirteenth century Japanese carving known as the Jade Princess. It belonged to the Emperor of Japan, was apparently priceless and had been brought to England by a Japanese Prince for exhibition in the British Museum. It’s loss had caused a major diplomatic incident and had made headlines in every newspaper across Europe. The figure was unique though and was instantly recognisable so  the police were promising that the moment the thief tried to dispose of it they would have him.

            Now, as I said at the start of this, Great-Granddad was a simple soul but he was not stupid. Whether he retrieved the cigarette box and its precious contents and then hid them again I don’t know but from that day on he denied all knowledge of the theft no matter who asked him. He realised that he could not sell the figure, his usual sources would not touch it and he had no way of contacting those who might have been tempted to buy it so he hung on to it.

Some time before he passed on he must have fetched the box from its hiding place because as he lay breathing his last he told his eldest son, my Granddad, the story and showed him the figure. That is how it has been ever since. The old carved box and the Jade Princess have been passed on from father to eldest son. It is never put on show but we know where it is and we can look at it whenever we want. I was given it by my Dad on the day that the doctor told him that the thirty a day he had smoked since he was twelve years old were finally going to kill him.

            He lasted just six months after that but it is a pity he did not hang on for a little while longer. Just two weeks after he died one of the Sunday magazines contained a story about the Jade Princess showing up in Japan nearly a hundred years after it was supposedly stolen in London. There were pictures with the article and the figure they showed was an exact replica of the one Great-Granddad had taken. Or rather it was the other way round. I had ours valued at Sotheby’s and they assured me that it was a late nineteenth century copy worth around a thousand pounds.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Great-Granddad, his son and grandson kept the secret for nothing. The Japanese Prince must have had the replica made and then conveniently left a door unlocked. He had proved to be a bigger thief than Great-Granddad was. I was tempted to sell the thing but I did not. I still have the Jade Princess, like I said it is the only heirloom our family has ever had and besides, I don’t need the money, not after selling the fifteenth century Imperial trinket box that Great-Granddad had used to hide his false Princess.

New to this

Okay, I'm new to this blogging business so forgive me if this has hiccups at the beginning. I chose this forum in order to give people who are interested an opportunity to sample my writing so what better way to start than by posting a short story: This is called "Hope" and I hope you like it.



 HOPE

Rain was falling. Not heavy rain but that cold, steady, persistent drizzle that soaks everything and seems to go on for hours. That Sunday in March of nineteen twenty-seven was no day to be out and thirteen year-old Barry's patched hand-me-downs were thin and worn. He did have his dad's overcoat on though. It was an old coat, it was not fancy and it was several sizes too large but it was a good, thick, workman's coat that kept out much of the rain and the biting wind.
   There had been an added bonus with the over-large coat, a pack with two cigarettes and a book of matches in the pocket. Barry was smoking one of them now, enjoying the unexpected treasure as he crouched in the lee of the hut on the side of the railroad, waiting for a train to come by.
   His father would not miss the cigarette; he had probably forgotten them already. He had other things to worry about and besides, he should not smoke in his condition. Last night he had kept the whole house awake for the third night running with his incessant coughing and that was the reason why Barry was here. His mother had sent him out to scrounge around for enough coal to make a fire because she had sent word for the doctor.
   Barry had done this often enough before. It had become a kind of game. The coal hunt they called it but usually when he did it he was with a bunch of other kids. Today the weather was too bad for anyone else to be out and he was alone. He did not mind, there would be fewer to share in the spoils and, more importantly, there would be no-one to demand a share of his precious cigarette.
   He crouched in the wet, his hair plastered darkly to his head, rain dripping from his ears and nose and his right hand cupped around the cigarette to shield it from the rain. His left hand was tucked deep inside the coat as he hugged it to himself in an effort to retain some warmth in his chilled bones. Being sent out in all weathers on an errand like this was nothing new for him. He was an experienced scrounger. He knew where to go to get whatever he needed and he was sure that this would be the best place for coal. There was a long curve in the tracks as the trains came out of the station and occasionally those with full tenders lost some of the precious black gold as the engines canted a little on the bend.
   Barry already had three small pieces of decent fuel in the battered bucket he had brought with him but to start a fire and keep it going would take a lot more and it seemed that other scavengers had beaten him to it today.
   He looked up at the sky, the rain driving into his face and making him squint. It was hard to guess the time on a day like this, the clouds had been uniformly grey since he woke up in his tiny attic room. His growling stomach told him that it was time to eat but then, it did that most of the time. His breakfast had been a stale biscuit and a spoonful of gravy with a sprinkling of salt. It was not a substantial meal but it was a darn sight better than some people managed to get in those days of the depression. It was still not enough for a growing boy though, and what little there was he had had to share with his four younger brothers and sisters whilst his mother dozed, exhausted, at his father's bedside.
   He grimaced and looked at the three forlorn lumps of shiny, black, steam coal lying in the bottom of the bucket. A fire made from them was not going to be enough to keep a dog warm. He could hunt about and find enough scrap wood to fill the rest of the bucket but wood burned too quickly, if he could get rain-soaked wood to burn at all. To get it going his mother would need scraps of newspaper and some dry kindling and then, even if they could light it, it would be gone in minutes whereas a good coal fire would last for hours.
   Shivering, he and looked up and down the line. To his left the rails, shiny and rain sleeked, bent round the curve towards the unseen station and the town whilst to his right they went arrow straight until they vanished into a distant tunnel. They were empty and with a sinking feeling of disappointment he realised he was wasting his time. There was no more coal to be found along the edge of the track, he had already searched. He was frozen, the rain was running down under his collar and soaking his shirt and there were no trains running because it was Sunday.
   He sighed, grimaced again and, with slumped shoulders, turned to walk slowly down the steep embankment. He knew his mother would get mad at him for not finding what she wanted. It was not his fault there was no coal to be found but she would get mad just the same. She was always getting mad. It came from the worry of having five kids and a husband who could not manage more than the occasional day or two's work at best, spending the rest of his time in a damp bedroom coughing his lungs up. Money was always scarce and now she had to spend a precious dollar getting the doctor in to tell her what she already knew, that her husband was dying of TB.
Reaching the path at the bottom of the bank he turned towards the hole in the fence. Pulling the loose plank aside he was halfway through when he heard the distant whistle.
   It was a train. Not a big one, the note of the steam whistle was too shrill for that but it didn’t matter, the little ones sometimes came round the curve faster and canted over further. When they did, some of those whose tenders were newly loaded down with coal occasionally lost some of it in a glittering black avalanche that would cascade over the side of the bunker to bounce and roll along the edge of the track.
   Hopefully, he turned and began to scramble back up the steep slope. He could hear the wheels now, the wheels and the busy, self-important puffing of the pistons. It was a little engine, one of the ones that they used for shunting wagons about and he could tell from the sound of it that it was not moving fast. Barry reached the top and stood panting knee deep in last year’s soaking, dead grass and weeds as he watched the grimy, black engine come slowly round the curve.
   It was one of those that had a fixed tender and even from a distance he could tell that this was not full. Disappointment welled up in him again and the strangely heavy weight of the almost empty bucket pulled at his arm. The rain increased but he was oblivious to it as the engine reached, and passed, the apex of the curve with nothing falling from it.
   His shoulders sagged, the dirty little engine was puffing past him now. He could see the figures of the driver and stoker standing on the footplate, their features lit by the glow from the open firedoor. They were passing close and going slow. Sometimes train crews jumped down and chased kids but Barry wasn’t afraid. He was not very tall but he was strong and he had no doubt that he could outrun either of the men who were staring down at him as they chugged past.
   He shivered involuntarily as water dripped from his nose and he saw the driver say something to his companion and then laugh before he turned away to check his dials and levers. The stoker did not laugh though, his face was grim and his eyes held Barry's as he was slowly carried past. Barry could not tell what went through the man's mind. He could not imagine what the man saw; could not conceive the image of the thin-faced, ragged boy with the huge eyes who stood in a ridiculously over-large coat at the side of the track, holding an empty bucket.
   He could not feel the tightening of the man’s stomach muscles nor know of the lump in his throat as he looked down on the boy. He had no idea of the memories that his forlorn, rain soaked appearance recalled or how his eyes, desperate and despairing yet defiant and hopeful at the same time, tore at the man’s very soul.
   Barry just stood there and hoped. The boy and the man continued to hold each other's stare for a long moment as the distance between them began to increase again. Barry longed to call to the man. Longed to ask for help but he was proud, too proud to beg. So he stood and watched the little engine move away from him and he did not utter a sound even when the man twisted abruptly, slashed his shovel deep into the glittering black, rain slicked coal and, lifting it full to overflowing with the dark treasure, turned back.
   Their eyes met again and for a moment understanding passed between them, the man recognized the boy's need and his pride and Barry felt the man's understanding and his sympathy. Then the big stoker’s shovel twisted abruptly and the lumps of black gold fell to bound along beside the engine for a second before coming to rest on the edge of the long grass. Barry did not speak but his expression must have betrayed his gratitude, the fireman nodded gravely once and then turned back to stoke the boiler of his engine, his heart lighter having given a shovel full of hope.