The Story Behind My New Novel 'London Skies'

Notes on my second novel, out now

Mar 10, 2024

“An admirably ambitious … and beautifully told story of intersecting lives and histories….”

"Poetic and beautiful prose … The connections across space and time are what really spark and make the novel fly.”

Kirkus Reviews

London Skies can be bought via all Amazon outlets, in Kindle, hardback and paperback formats, subject to availability. (Search if you’re not in the UK or US.)

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Coincidentally…

A series of very weird coincidences surrounded the writing of my second novel, London Skies, which itself centres around some strange coincidences.

Sometimes, truth is indeed stranger than fiction – but let me explain some of the fiction too.

While the novel is in no way autobiographical in terms of story (albeit it relates to feelings and situations I could connect with, and deals in what I can relate to), it is definitely geographically autobiographical.

And some of the interconnected stories were inspired by things I grew up around.

Though I had little interest in his job at the time, all I knew as a child was that my father ‘fixed’ planes at Heathrow Airport. I didn’t realise that he was merely a mid-skilled metalworker, patching up sheetmetal, and nothing more exotic.

(That said, he worked the cabaret scene for 50 years on weekends – up until his late 70s – and some weeknights as an impressionist, under the stage name Tommy James; and appeared on ITV’s ‘New Faces’ in the 1970s – doing okay on the show, but put off his stride by being asked to drop the best part of his act – Ken Dodd – minutes before taking the stage.)

I loved aircraft and helicopters. There used to be a heliport just beyond the railway tracks behind our house; and planes from Heathrow would fly overhead, albeit we weren’t in the direct flightpath for takeoffs and landings. From our school window, on the Bath Road, we could see one of the runways.

My friends and I, when we weren’t playing football, used to go to the viewing gallery in the Queen’s Building aged 10-12, as eager plane-spotters; a grotty place, by the 1980s, that I was surprised to discover (like all things) had once been shiny and new.

While not a glamorous hobby, we obviously saw as massively superior to the dowdy train-spotting, albeit that term got jazzed up a decade or two later.

(Maybe London Skies should have been called Planespotting? But it might have implied more drug taking, whereas most of our highs were due to kilos of Cherry Bonbons.)

I remember being jealous and feeling excluded when my friend Jason, small and blonde, was asked by an older man to join him on a trip to the Biggin Hill Airshow. Why was Jason considered the better plane-spotter, I wondered, with wonderful naivety?

Neither of us went to Biggin Hill, but the man did eventually go to jail.

As a family we never made use of the free flights British Airways afforded us, albeit years later I did fly to places like Mexico, Spain and the Canary Islands as a student on free or cheap standby flights. (I never flew until I was 20.)

My mum, no stranger to tragedy, had grown terrified of flying. She’d flown a few times in the late 1950s on her bank clerk’s salary (to places like the Portugal and Spain with her friends), as one of only four people in her inner city London school to do a maths O’ level (they all failed). But once she had children, which itself followed a near-fatal car crash in 1966, she never flew again for almost 40 years (under heavy sedation!).

Even that car crash ended up having a weird connection to London Skies, as the more I researched, the more coincidences I found.

The incorrect idea that my dad somehow fixed broken planes stuck with me, and was a partial inspiration for the character, Geoffrey; only with far more expertise.

I’d already researched a lot about WWII over the years, and wanted to expand on some chapters I’d written 20 years ago (for another novel that I’d started and abandoned), which centred around the diary of a young RAF nurse.

The flying theme fit in with the new novel, and my fascination with the glamorous modernising of London Airport in the 1950s, before it became Heathrow.

I’d always liked Charlotte’s diary, but could never make use of what I had.

For London Skies I revisited it, and expanded it in many new ways. Her character, now mostly third-person and more idiosyncratic than I’d originally drawn her, is at the heart of the story (albeit someone else suggested the allegory of Charlotte’s Web, which never occurred to me).

In April 2015, inspired by Sigur Ros’ beautiful musical film Heima, which I fell in love with in 2007, I went to Iceland for a week, to do some research (and meet some online friends), as the shutdown of aviation in 2010 due to the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull gave a good way to connect to what I was writing.

That said, my illness kicking my arse meant I had to cancel half my itinerary.

Still, I got to see a few places, and, with my camera, spent time in two different main locations; and, having had to cancel my trip to a glacier, two of my readers kindly drove me all around the Golden Circle, and then on to the edge of a glacier.

So, 2015 was when work properly started on the novel, albeit I mostly wrote it in bursts of a month or two here or there, over the next nine years.

Where it wasn’t geographically autobiographical, such as with Iceland, I went there to research.

Indeed, I wanted to do something ambitious; to do so because it was hard, not because it was easy.

I also realised that I wanted to write about Hayes in Middlesex, the then-bleak town I hated growing up in, but which, looking back, was fascinating in its unique industrial way; with Heathrow on the doorstep, too, along with key locations for the Battle of Britain (RAF Uxbridge, Northolt) and the massive EMI vinyl factory on my doorstep for my entire childhood, where stereo sound was first recorded, and where Beatles records were pressed.

Indeed, having just this week read David Hepworth’s A Fabulous Creation: How the LP Saved Our Lives it made me recall that I was originally going have Stanley working at EMI.

Roy Matthews was born into the record business. He came from Hayes in Middlesex, in the days when that was a company town. His mother, like most people in Hayes, worked for EMI. “We had no electricity in the house until I left school. We lived on a big estate. We didn't have a radio. Radio came via a cable system. When I started at EMI I was working on 78 presses. At that time we were moving over to 45 rpm singles and 33 rpm LPs. I was trained as an engineer. I could just as easily have been working with pots and pans. I was lucky to be working on something so alive. I had a little while away and then came back in 1967 as General Manager of the factory. At that time we had over eight hundred people there. The factory was running twenty-four hours a day five days a week. We had a hundred men working the presses. They were all men. It was heavy manual work. We were preparing the plastic which was specially mixed on site. We had our own chemists. We even had ink manufacturers working for us. You couldn't use just any paper for the labels. Everything had to be done specially. It was all done by hand at first. During my time there we grew from producing 50,000 LPs a day to 250,000 a day.”

As often seems to be the case, I had no idea about half of the history of the town I grew up in, and the stories behind what I simply saw as normal and ‘everyday’; albeit I did know that George Orwell taught in Hayes in the 1930s (and thought the place was a shithole, basically).

I also found out only after he died over a decade ago that my father spent a year at Fairey Aviation in Hayes. Fairey was long-gone before I came along. I didn’t even know about the Fairey Rotodyne before I started researching London Skies, but in the end I wished I’d travelled in one. There’s a tragedy there, about a project, not a disaster. I wish I’d be able to ask my dad about stuff like that, but often it’s only when your parents are gone that you think of the best questions.

From ages 16-20 I worked as an office cleaner after school, and later after college (before upgrading to a security guard at Blockbuster Video’s European HQ*), at various buildings (mainly Safeways HQ, adjacent to the EMI vinyl factory), and one of those was Mercury House, which I didn’t know had been part of the Fairey office complex.

(* One lazy Sunday morning in 1991 a northern man wearing only bright red underpants ran to the front desk. Someone was breaking in around the back, he said, having dashed from his HGV cab, with drivers using the industrial estate to park overnight. With my trusty clip-on tie I ran around the back accompanied by the man in the tiny-reddies, only to see that, rather than break into the huge warehouse, they’d broken into the gardener’s tool shed and stolen his lawnmower. Looking back, I’m not sure why I ran anywhere for £3 an hour. On another job for the same security company I spent the night in a needle-strewn abandoned house which squatters had trashed, with no electricity, and reading Ian McEwan’s discomforting The Comfort of Strangers by the light from the streetlight and the moon. When my 8am replacement hadn’t turned up by 10am I knocked on a neighbour’s door to ask to use his phone. It turned out to be Johnny Speight, creator of Alf Garnett, who became Archie Bunker in the US. He let me use his phone. As another connection, my dad had done an impression of Alf Garnett on TV in 1976, and is the middle-left frame on his promotional material.)

I also didn’t know that Fairey’s wartime airstrip was in a small village called ... Heath Row, and that they lost the valuable land to the government as a wartime requisition (whatever became of Heath Row? Perhaps we shall never know.)

My original idea for the Charlotte, going back to 2004, centred around the facial reconstruction work at the Queen Victoria hospital in East Grinstead, pioneered during the war by Sir Archibald McIndoe; fixing the faces, and more, of broken airmen. I’d just seen a BBC documentary about what was termed the Guinea Pig club by the men having their faces rebuilt.

At that point I had no idea that this was the very place where, 25 years after the WWII pioneering (starting during the 1966 World Cup), my mother would spend months in the very same Queen Victoria after a near-fatal car crash that left her with a broken back, jaw, cheekbone, arm, leg, and all manner of other injuries.

It never occurred to me she’d be there, down towards Brighton, as I assumed the accident happened in London. But it turns out the accident happened in Croydon, albeit I didn’t even know that when, in 1991, I went to do a degree in graphic design in Croydon, travelling back to do my weekend shift at Blockbusters’ HQ in Uxbridge.

I also only even more recently discovered that the insurance payout, via the negligent driver, amounted to a couple of thousand pounds. In the ‘60s this paid for a good chunk of the house I grew up in, adjacent to some fairly rough council estates – and no longer in the nearby railway estate where they were living with my grandparents. But for that money, we’d never have lived in a nice enough end-terraced three-bed house adjacent to the druggy flats at the end of the road (albeit next to a rowdy pub), but probably in them. While we remained working-class – I was the first in the entire family to go to higher education – it was less squalid than it might have been.

Even more weirdly, I’d created a character called Geoffrey for the novel, who worked in Farnborough in 1956. In 2021 I signed up for newspaper archive site to research aspects of 1950s life, and while searching, did some digging on my family history, and ... discovered a Geoffrey connected to Farnborough who had greatly impacted my family’s life before I was born, which will be article all of its own.

(The reason I didn’t know any of this was, in part, that it was one of those tragedies no one of that time ever spoke of, like the silent generation after the war.)

It all showed the weird coincidences that can pop up, and how lives intertwine; and that proved the point of what I was writing, and the connections that exist, even if we can’t always see them.

In my mid-20s, despite some clear health problems emerging, I played as a semi-pro footballer for Harefield United (Middlesex’s oldest club, established in 1868), near to the pioneering heart hospital.

Again, that had a far more interesting wartime backstory, before the heart replacement specialisation, than I could have imagined, and which proved inspirational for London Skies.

I never ended up in Harefield Hospital, but I had a fair few trips to Hillingdon Hospital (broken leg, broken arm, various asthma attacks, and seeing all manner of specialists as a kid).

For a place I hated at the time, it turned out that Hayes has a lot of interesting history. As for Iceland, I’d love to return one day, but it’s now five years since I last flew anywhere – and the turbulence on that 2019 flight was so terrifying even the cabin crew said it’s as bas as they’ve known. I wasn’t scared of flying – but I think I am now.