The Boat in the Bay - Afterword [Extract]
I am often asked how I came to write The Boat in the Bay. To answer that I must go back further than I dare remember, to a remote summer in which my two brothers and I decided to dig a tunnel from the bottom of the garden into the cellars of our house. It was a plan hatched in secret - even our innocent parents were kept in ignorance - and only abandoned when my brother Stuart (old enough to understand such mysteries) calculated that the end of the school holiday would leave us hopelessly stranded below ground, well short of our objective. As is the way with such things, his unwelcome news arrived too late: long days of toil had already produced a considerable hole. We mourned the loss of the tunnel but quietly allowed our project to translate itself into the sinking of a well. Your own source of water in a hot summer has its uses and, in any case, it was not long before the hole was judged deep enough to need a ladder. More precisely, a ladder which lay (surely abandoned) in a neighbour’s greenhouse.
That is how it came to pass that one crisp summer morning, the sun barely up, the air damp and shivery, three conscience-stricken little boys lowered their stolen ladder ... [END OF EXTRACT]
The new edition was published in June 2022.
I am often asked how I came to write The Boat in the Bay. To answer that I must go back further than I dare remember, to a remote summer in which my two brothers and I decided to dig a tunnel from the bottom of the garden into the cellars of our house. It was a plan hatched in secret - even our innocent parents were kept in ignorance - and only abandoned when my brother Stuart (old enough to understand such mysteries) calculated that the end of the school holiday would leave us hopelessly stranded below ground, well short of our objective. As is the way with such things, his unwelcome news arrived too late: long days of toil had already produced a considerable hole. We mourned the loss of the tunnel but quietly allowed our project to translate itself into the sinking of a well. Your own source of water in a hot summer has its uses and, in any case, it was not long before the hole was judged deep enough to need a ladder. More precisely, a ladder which lay (surely abandoned) in a neighbour’s greenhouse.
That is how it came to pass that one crisp summer morning, the sun barely up, the air damp and shivery, three conscience-stricken little boys lowered their stolen ladder ... [END OF EXTRACT]
The new edition was published in June 2022.