End of a series

The ‘Strong Winds’ series has been part of my life since first I sat beside Alton Water in Suffolk long ago in 2005 watching my youngest children learning to sail. I noticed how naturally some children take to sailing and what freedom and confidence it can give. It was a treat to be there again this summer watching my 7 year old niece from Germany enjoying the same experience.

First time round,in 2005 I was also feeling angry at the way official State powers can come down hard on people least able to resist. As the joint owner of Peter Duck, I wondered how the ‘Swallows and Amazons’ series characters would have coped in the 21st century. How would they manage without financial security, self-confidence and stable family backgrounds? I’d been avoiding writing fiction all my life — perhaps a little too overwhelms by the greats of the past. Now I felt it was time to pluck up my courage and have a go.

Secretly the writing was easy (I pretended I was still doing the footnotes for my PhD thesis but the words and characters came pouring out. Getting it published was much harder. When there was chance of an offer from Penguin, it turned out that the Arthur Ransome Society felt I was infringing copyright by using his characters names. That took a bit of a work-around and at the time I felt fed up - now I’m glad and I think they were right. The Palmer family let me use their names instead and burying the Ransome link has given me so much more freedom to develop. I didn’t know that then.

It took until 2011 for the first novel, The Salt-Stained Book, to be written and published and by that time I’d written the second, A Ravelled Flag and was well under way with Volume Three Ghosting Home . Even then I couldn‘t stop when younger characters from the early books demanded their own stories and what was intended as a trilogy became a series.

I wound myself absorbed in some of the particular issues that young people face in the 21st century, as well as the abiding magic and challenge of sailing. But even in fiction time, children grow up. Voyage North is the last ‘Strong Winds’ book. It’ll be published on October 15th 2022.

How to celebrate? What better way to celebrate than by handing on to the next generation? Instead of hosting a conventional launch party, Golden Duck, has joined other sponsors of the UK National Cadet Class sailing team (https://www.cadetclass.org.uk/ )as they prepare to set off for their World Championship in Australia . My grandchildren will be among them.

In addition to a financial donation, we’re running ‘Paying it Forward’, an event where the Cadet sailors (aged 10 -17) get a chance to make personal pledges either to protect the environment (which matters so much to them) — or to reach out to other young people who won’t have had the same opportunities to discover sailing. Don’t let anyone tell you that today’s youngsters aren’t just as brave and as competent and as caring in life as they are in adventure fiction. But they still don’t all get a fair chance to prove it…