A WRITER'S YEAR - Press Release
Over A period of twelve months a writer
looks back over the 78 years of a
remarkably varied life, including his upbringing in a small mining community in
Yorkshire; the wartime years at sea; the late forties and early fifties living opposite
the London home of Winston Churchill as amanuensis to the sculptor Jacob
Epstein. In the mid to late Fifties he worked in unusual circumstances in heavy
engineering in the North of England. From 1960 onwards he became one of the
leading television writers in the world, frequently topping the ratings and winning
many awards.
Volume One is complete, Volume Two will
be available in early March, 2004. It is
timed to coincide with the UK/US video/dvd issue of his classic television series, A
Family at War, which features in both volumes.
The work is currently on offer to any
interested publisher, internationally.
Further details can be obtained from the
agents, Karst Media, by phone at 01729
822697 or email mail@jonfin.freeserve.co.uk.
PREFACE
It was not yet
dawn on the cold December morning in 1941 when I sailed from Liverpool, a
sixteen- year-old apprentice to the trade of being a man. Rain turned to snow, and snow
crusted on the iron decks, as the Liver building where my father had worked on the day I was
born, vanished into the darkness. I would not be aware then of that young khaki-clad figure
from that other war, where he harvested the bullet that brought him out of the horror to the
quiet hospital ward where my mother nursed him, later to marry him. I would in the year 1941
only be aware of the alien world that was beginning to wrap around me; aware, as we
ploughed into the gale-whipped open sea, of my churning stomach, and of the finality that my
choice of occupation had brought upon me. No going back. A child watches from the shore.
The familiar land vanishes behind us. Never to be young again; or to sleep the sleep of
innocence.
For we had a kind
of innocence in those days, despite the cruelty of the depression and the
hard way of the world. When my father left us when I was nine, the devastation was hidden
somewhere inside me. All he left behind were his medals and a book on bankruptcy through
which I endlessly pored as if I might find some answer to a question I could not then have even
formulated: novice that I was in this world of profit and loss. I never saw him again, or even his
image, for my mother destroyed every photograph.
We lived for a
time with my grandparents; my grandfather a retired miner with a good heart but
little else. We lived with oil lamps, water off the roof and a soil closet at the back of the house
through which the wind seemed to blast straight from Siberia. My grandmother was a
disciplinarian, not from choice but of necessity. A good woman; a blessed woman; a woman
remembered with love, and with shame for grief I must have caused her; but remembered
especially now as this world of today she would have been totally lost in, so distant in so many
ways from her own, grows up around us. Later, when I became too much for my mother to
cope with, hooked on an errant father who, I believed, would one day return and save us from
the poverty and degradation, I was sent to a bleak charity school in York. Then came the war
and faced with the few choices available to someone with my background, in 1941 at the age
of sixteen I went to sea.
It is dark outside
and four oclock in the morning, for I have been an insomniac since a night in
1943 in the North Atlantic when I attempted sleep with 10,000 tons of aviation spirit
underneath me as the hunters gathered round for the last big convoy battle of the war. "If we
lose the battle of the Atlantic," Churchill said, "we lose the war". Always from then,
and from
that other date I cannot precisely remember, almost without knowing it I have been a survivor;
sometimes in the process not satisfied with survival, sometimes reaching for the stars. A long
journey; uneducated, broke, hungry and silently despairing for some of the time, but also, later,
unbelievably lucky and successful as a writer with audiences exceeding twenty million in the UK
alone. On the way I lived for a time opposite the home of Winston Churchill as amanuensis to
the sculptor Jacob Epstein; I worked as crime reporter, a manager in heavy engineering¸a
milkman, space salesman and, from time to time, a washer up at Joe Lyons and other survival
occupations.
In this new world
into which my grandchildren are growing, almost more alien in its way than
that other, when I trod those iron decks, I look back with disbelief that so much has happened
in so little time.
1. Sam
