IDEAS AND PROJECTS I’VE BEEN WORKING ON LATELY #1

BOMBER BOYS

This is the story of an RAF bomber crew – average age of just 19 years – and follows them as they prepare for an ill-fated mission to attack Berlin, towards the end of the Second World War. It’s due to be published in the new year (Jan 2008) by Barrington Stoke. Barrington Stoke are a small publishing house set up to produce books suitable for teenagers with reading difficulties, though the stories on their list are so good they can be enjoyed by anyone. Authors such as Kevin Brooks, Alison Prince, Keith Gray, Nigel Hinton, Vivian French, Alan Gibbons and many other great writers have produced books for Barrington Stoke. The main difference between Barrington Stoke books and novels produced by mainstream publishers is the word length. Barrington Stoke books are comparatively short in length – Bomber Boys, for instance, is 9,000 words. But some stories are meant to be short, and there are actually very few outlets for short stories for young people these days. When my idea for a Second World War story was accepted, I was told to write it in just the way I’d write any other book. The manuscript was then sent out to a team of teenage readers and their response to the text was used as a guide for the final edit, which was done over the phone – in my case, two phone calls of 2 ½ hours each! All the readers have their names printed in the book, since they’ve all contributed to the final version of the text. I was surprised at how often this technique actually resulted in not just clearer meaning, but a stronger, more robust feel to the language.

There was only the occasional need for compromise. For instance, an operational RAF airfield was always referred to as a “station”, but in the edit we used the word “base” (which was what the American Army Air Force would have called their military airfields). We did that to avoid confusion, because these days, of course, the word “station” implies a railway terminus more than anything else. It was my Uncle Pete who told me a lot about the RAF. He joined up in 1946, just after the war finished, and served with the ground crew on a bomber station. He has maintained a keen interest in aeroplanes ever since – he has thousands of model planes that he’s made over the years – and has some excellent books on the subject. He lent me a series about the Lancaster bomber aircraft, called Lancaster at War by Mike Garbett and Brain Goulding, which was very useful. I must drop them back to him.

I’ve read a lot about the Second World War myself, and also heard a good deal from my dad. He was ground crew – like Pete, his younger brother - but he was in the Fleet Air Arm (the Royal Navy’s air section) and he joined during the war. However, he was seconded to the RAF, where he worked both on Lancasters and on Spitfires, the famous fighter plane. The stations he was based at were maintenance depots, where worn out aircraft were sent to be repaired. Some of the things he said about that time filtered into the writing of Bomber Boys.

I’ve always had a great interest in the history of both World Wars. My grandfather was in the First World War, as an infantryman in the trenches on the Western front, where he was badly wounded. And my parents both grew up during the Second World War, living through the London Blitz. Dad joined up and was eventually sent out to fight the Japanese (but luckily for him the war ended before he got there and he spent a year in Egypt instead). I consider myself very privileged in that I have never had to serve in the armed forces (something I would hate – I would make a very poor soldier) or fight in a war.