Michael Jecks's Blog, page 15
July 31, 2017
A Friend’s New Book…
ALL YOUR SECRETS
I have a new book out.
It’s a thriller: ALL YOUR SECRETS.
Much like my other thrillers, this is a full-length psychological thriller, with a twisty page-turning plot and a strong local atmosphere.
But unlike my other thrillers, this novel is self-published. [You can find it here!]
Why?
ALL YOUR SECRETS (UK Amazon)
Apparently the setting wasn’t what my publisher wanted. My other two thrillers were set in Cornwall. They wanted a thriller set in London. This new book is set in the gorgeous South of France, a place I have visited many times and with which I have a natural affinity.
Last summer, I submitted two synopses and a 25,000 word sample of my South of France thriller to my publisher. Following a miscommunication of some kind, I mistakenly thought my editor was excited by the sample I’d sent and was planning to acquire the book.
Some months passed while I knuckled down and finished the book before my contract arrived. (Which is something many full-time writers end up doing, working on a book before the contract arrives.) I loved every minute of it though; it was a delightfully tactile, sensual book to write, and deeply sinister too.
In December, a few thousand words shy of finishing ALL YOUR SECRETS, I asked again about the contract. It was only at this point that I discovered my publisher did not want the book.
However, I received a contract for the other synopsis. The book I had not written. With only 8 weeks in which to write it, apparently.
I did the only thing I could.
I wrote the new book. And I did it within the required 8 weeks. It’s currently at copyedit stage and will be published in January 2018.
Bizarrely, this is not unusual in publishing. It’s the kind of thing that happens to writers all the time. Talented writers. Hard-working writers. Established writers. Full-time writers with bills to pay and no other way to pay them but through their own skill with a keyboard.
Most established writers can tell publishing stories to make your toes curl. Trilogies that flop and are abandoned as a lost cause, leaving one or even two books unpublished. Novels that are commissioned in conversation – like my own bestselling thriller, GIRL NUMBER ONE – and then rejected later, leaving a writer stuck with a book written to a very specific brief that they now need to sell elsewhere. Not always easy.
In the same vein, I was once tipped the wink at an editor-author coffee meeting that my latest outline wouldn’t be acquired unless I converted the setting to Faeryland, because ‘we’re desperate for those’. I wrote 50K of the blasted thing before the editor was made redundant. Needless to say, the remaining editors were politely baffled by the Faeryland setting, and my agent was less than impressed too. I never did finish that one. Though maybe one day …
So two years after I was forced to self-publish GIRL NUMBER ONE (a book rejected by over a dozen publishers, mind you, which subsequently sold 50,000 copies in a few months as a self-published title, hitting #1 in the UK Kindle Chart), I found myself with yet another unwanted novel on my hands.
You’d think I’d have learned my lesson by now. But hope springs eternal!
This time, I was not contractually permitted to offer it to another publisher – not under the name Jane Holland, at any rate, which has become my ‘thriller’ name.
However, I was given permission to self-publish ALL YOUR SECRETS.
When the going gets tough in this industry, the tough often end up having to self-publish. Not the most ideal situation, especially when a book has been written with a rather different arena in mind. But I have three children to feed and clothe, and this book took about 4-5 months to write and edit – an expensive time investment for me – so heigh-ho, self-publishing it was.
I proofed the book, made a cover, wrote a blurb, and started telling the poor, long-suffering souls on Twitter that my book was about to go live.
I had a pleasing number of pre-order sales. Those are my fans, and I thank them wholeheartedly for sticking with me!
Then it came out.
A self-published novel that isn’t priced at 99p – instead, it’s a modest £1.99 – is not the easiest thing in the world to persuade random punters to buy. Nor do I have the surprise of writing in a new genre to help me, as I did with GIRL NUMBER ONE.
So any sales you can waft my way will be hugely appreciated. This book has been written with all my skill and knowledge behind it, the experience of writing several dozen novels, and I feel certain many thriller-reading people will find pleasure in it.
I thank you all in advance for any retweets or Facebook shares or reviews or other promotional help you can offer this new and highly atmospheric book-baby of mine … The blurb follows.
Thank you!
Jane x
ALL YOUR SECRETS (Amazon UK)
What happens when love is perfect? Too perfect?
When her glamorous cousin Emily drowns, Caitlin flies to the South of France for her funeral, full of bitter-sweet nostalgia for the summer they spent there as wild teenagers. Her aunt Tamsin, once a film star, now suffering from dementia, invites Caitlin to stay at her chateau high above the beach at Cap d’Antibes.
Suddenly the gorgeous, charming Robin is back in touch, son of a Hollywood film producer.
Tamsin warns her to stay away from him, but Caitlin can’t resist her teenage crush. Soon the pair are falling madly, deeply in love … all over again.
But something doesn’t feel right. What was Robin’s relationship with her beautiful cousin? And what is her aunt trying so desperately to conceal? The chateau on the Cap may be beautiful, but it hides dark secrets.
Was Emily’s death an accident? Or could it have been murder?
— ALL YOUR SECRETS is an atmospheric psychological thriller that simmers with tension and will keep you guessing, from the bestselling author of GIRL NUMBER ONE and LOCK THE DOOR.
You can buy your copy here.
Tagged: All Your Secrets, commentary, crime, crime writing, Jane Holland, review, thriller, writing
June 26, 2017
The New Project
I’ve been asked how my handwritten novel project was going…
Well, not that well until now!
The fact is, people get used to specific ways of working, I think. I decided to try writing a novel by hand because I felt it would allow me more freedom to work in different places, would give me more time to concentrate on a good, working first draft, and would force me to rewrite into a second draft more efficiently. I do still believe that by handwriting the draft I will end up with a cleaner manuscript in almost the same time as it would take to write on a keyboard.
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My lovely Visconti Homo Sapiens: designed just for me!
However, although I did start writing by hand last year, I had to give up. I was delayed for a number of reasons. First and foremost, my great friend, Andy Setchell, had a recurrence of his cancer, and his death preyed on my mind while I was trying to work. Then, the pen that I was planning to use for the project (for which I am eternally grateful to the brilliant Dante del Vecchio, the genius behind Visconti and who is now the leading light behind Pineider’s writing instruments) was unexpectedly delayed. It’s a prototype of a special model, and I think created some “interesting” challenges for the design team, but the delay also meant I was already getting late on my deadline. I had to crack on with the computer instead.
So, these issues led to me starting late on my project, and caused a certain amount of grief that didn’t help the creative juices!
A third issue which I had not anticipated was that, having the freedom to choose different locations in which to write, was quite a problem in its own right. It led to a lack of concentration when I needed it. Suddenly I could wander from one room to another, and that distracted me from the job at hand. All of which means, until now, it’s been rather difficult to see the wood for the trees.
But I have now got over these hurdles, I think. I have developed a new way of working. I have dedicated two specific locations for writing: a standing desk in my office, and occasionally the garden when it’s just too hot to stay indoors. This means I’ve been growing more and more comfortable with my working environment, and that means I can concentrate better and for longer.
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My main Atoma pad
I am also changing how I was working. In the past, I’ve merely written on notepads and loose-leaf paper. Now I am using Atoma pads. I have a binder punch from the ever-excellent Cult Pens, and that means I can use any paper to write on and hold them together in the Atoma ring system. If you haven’t seen it, I can recommend Atoma for every day use. Being able to insert fresh pages, removed them, reinsert them in new locations, and basically play with the order of pages and scenes is fantastic. But there is one aspect of this system that causes me – or used to cause me – headaches. That is, that when you have filled an Atoma pad with a couple of hundred pages, what should you do? Buy another set of Atoma rings? My problem is purely that I don’t necessarily want to carry all my draft with me all the time.
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Exacompta Harmonika
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Exacompta Harmonika
Because of that I have started trying out Exacompta’s Harmonika A4 folders. These are multi-division folders, so you can have a series of sections into which you break your work. I have gone for the twelve division version, which gives flexibility and a good amount of space. I will be using each section for a number of scenes and later deciding how to separate them into chapters.
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Only 5/8ths the thickness of 80 gsm
At the same time I am using paper which is considerably thinner. I have a lot of different types of paper, but this is 50gsm paper from a company called Q-Connect. It is not, I hasten to say, the best writing paper. It is a little “toothy” with a nib, which means you can feel the nib scratching ever so slightly. Even so, it’s good quality, has no feathering or bleed-through to the other side of the paper, and is very thin. The big benefits of course are that it is lighter to carry, that it is cheap to buy, and that it allows me to fit more pages per section into my Exacompta wallets.
I’ll be videoing the project periodically on YouTube (on my writerlywitterings channel) and talking about it here, too, no doubt, as I discover more pitfalls and headaches.
For now I should just mention that the pen was given to me for this project by Visconti, but I was also enormously fortunate to have the backing of Diamine Inks and Atoma, the pad makers. I’m very grateful to all three companies.
For the other items, I can recommend SBS Consumables of Bexhill-on-Sea for the Exacompta files – I ordered from them and the files were with me in two days flat (whereas an order placed with Amazon, and which was supposed to arrive on 19th, now will apparently not get here until next week – that’s been cancelled). The paper can be found from a number of suppliers, where it’s usually listed as “Bank” paper. I think this is because it was originally developed for use in typists’ rooms where many carbon copies of letters and invoices were needed.
Wish me luck!
Tagged: Atoma, crime writer, Cult Pens, Diamine, Exacompta, fountain pen, handwriting, novelist, novels, Q-Connect, Visconti, Visconti Homo Sapiens, writer, writing
June 21, 2017
Day of Rage? But Rage At What?
Head over parapet time.
There was a lot of comment after the appalling fire at Grenfell about not “politicising” the tragedy. It should not have been used as a vehicle to advance a political agenda – but of course it was, within hours – shamefully.
The media is very keen, especially the sections devoted to younger potential voters, to demonise the Conservatives. In the Huffington Post there is a piece by an angry young (I assume) journalist declaring that the fire was due to too few Black and Ethnic Minority (BME) Members of Parliament. He lists all those Tory MPs who were privately educated, and how many were university graduates. Thus, he claims, the fire was due to power and privilege: Tories had it all; the people living in that block of flats had neither.
Okay up to a point. There is little doubt that the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea were not overly bothered by the poorer elements in their area. It is true that more BME MPs would help the country.
But as to the rest… What has education to do with anything? There are as many Labour Cabinet and senior MPs who went to exactly the same university courses as those on the Tory benches. Most MPs have had privileged lives. Most of those on the Government and Opposition benches went to good schools. A very high number went to Oxford and got degrees in PPE. Not only MPs, but their Special Advisers too. Is there privilege in Parliament? You betcher! Especially if your parents were MPs. That’s how youngsters Straw, Kinnock and others got their feet in the door, after all.
But facts don’t persuade the angry, and there is huge bitterness about the Tories and the present administration. Labour is happily fanning the flames since losing the last election.
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has written an open letter to the Prime Minister: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/sadiq-khan-theresa-may-grenfell-tower-fire-response-demand-action-residents-victims-deaths-safety-a7793846.html
On Monday I was listening to “The World At One” on Radio 4. Martha Kearney interviewed Nick Ross, the presenter of so many TV programmes, and a determined campaigner for safety in tower blocks. He was persuaded to get involved in the early 2000s and angrily spoke of the meetings he’s held with various ministers for housing, and how he always got the brush off. Since 2004 he has regularly tried to persuade ministers to install sprinkler systems without success.
One of those ministers was Sadiq Khan. There were many other Labour ministers with whom Nick Ross discussed the issue until 2010 when Labour was forced from office after the disaster of the banking collapse.
The fact is, successive governments and government ministers rejected retrospective installation of sprinkler systems. They allowed cladding to be installed that would increase fire risks. They reduced safety regulations (such as visits by inspectors).
And so, today, there is to be a “Day of Rage”. It has been eagerly promoted by those seeking to destabilise the state. Marxists and others will join forces, no doubt.
Who will suffer?
Most of all, the emergency services. The hard working people who have been rightly praised for their work over a series of terrorist attacks, who saved as many lives as they could in the Grenfell fire, and who have lost so many lives in recent years to bombs and fires.
I hope there is no violence today. I hope in particular that no police, fire and other emergency service staff get injured.
Sadly I think it’s a vain hope.
June 19, 2017
A Murder Too Soon
[image error]I had a great time on Saturday.
It is, I have to admit, a pain to have to work over weekends. It’s not as if, being self-employed, I can take time in lieu or win back spare time with the family, but going out and meeting people at events is enormous fun, and when there is a good audience at events, it makes things all the better.
In the last couple of weeks I’ve had several gigs. The more recent ones were speaking at the Charles Causley Festival, which was very enjoyable, and then last Saturday talking at Crediton Library with the Exeter Authors Association.
These events always take a huge amount of planning and organisation, and so often they just don’t quite work. The weather’s lousy, or there’s a football match on the TV, or some similar annoying event, and suddenly there’s no audience. But at these recent events everything has come together perfectly. Crediton Library clearly worked very hard with the Exeter Authors Association to make people aware of the event, and we had a good audience for the readings and workshops.
[image error]I was talking mostly about my latest book, A Murder Too Soon, which came out in May, and which has already sold out (note to publisher, print more copies next time). It’s still available, though, as ebook and hardback, but the hardbacks are print on demand rather than stock items, except for a a number which are currently held under lock and key at Waterstone’s in George Street, Plymouth. However, if you want one of these, it is easy to fix. I’ll be at Plymouth Library on Wednesday 21st at 6.30 in the evening. I’ll be very happy to sign all these copies for enthusiastic readers!
I’ve been mulling the idea of my Bloody Mary series for quite some time, and it’s good to see Rebellion’s Message and A Murder Too Soon receiving rave reviews. This book is great fun.
The stories are based on the idea of a highly reluctant hero, an opportunistic thief, Jack Blackjack, who, owing to an unfortunate event, is believed to be a cold, calculating murderer. This places poor Jack in an unpleasant – and dangerous – position, since some politicians believe that he is an assassin for hire. At the same time, he has the difficult task of keeping his past colleagues happy, since they would prefer not to associate with assassins either. So, when he is sent to Woodstock Palace with instructions to murder a lady-in-waiting, and the lady concerned is found dead soon after he arrives, how can he prove his innocence without damaging his deadly reputation?
It’s a serious conundrum for him!
So, many thanks to the Charles Causley Festival (which I can recommend), many thanks to Béatrice, Mark and the other staff at Crediton Library (likewise), and many thanks to Plymouth Central Library for inviting me to talk there too.
I hope to see lots of readers there!
June 5, 2017
Review: SUMMARY JUSTICE by John Fairfax, published by Little Brown
ISBN: 9781408708729 for the hardback priced £16.99[image error]
I have not read any books by John Fairfax before, so this came as a bit of a surprise.
As a tagline, choosing “William Benson is a criminal barrister with a difference. He has a murder conviction of his own” takes some beating.
We are introduced to William on the first pages. He is a young man at university who has got into a fight with Paul Harbeton, and although he had several opportunities to leave Harbeton, he is found to have hunted the man down and killed him. He is sentenced to life.
So there is the initial set up. Later, we learn that he told a trainee lawyer, Tess de Vere that he aspired to a career in the law, and although many tried to put him off over the years, he studied hard while in prison, and when he was released to make his way in the community, he managed to acquire the necessary qualifications. He could not find a position in a Chambers so that he could gain the experience he needed in order to be able to become a full time barrister, but then a woman accused of murder asks for him specifically, and the trainee lawyer he had met all those years ago is prepared to work with him to try to produce a defence.
Sarah Collingstone is accused of having an affair with her boss, and then, after an angry exchange, she is supposed to have broken a bottle of beer and stabbed him with it, watching him as he died.
She is a model witness. She has a son with a severe mental disability, a father who looked after her through thick and thin while fighting for help from Social Services, and when William looks at her he can see himself all those years ago when he too was accused of murder.
The only problem with her defence is, that her DNA is on the bottle that killed her boss.
This is a great thriller with some superb characters peppered through the story. No one is truly who they seem to be, and the basic structure and concepts rather reminded me of TRUSTEE FROM THE TOOLROOM, in that a lone individual on foreign territory could receive so much help at every turn. Not, I hasten to add, that it was unbelievable at all. The plot was utterly believable, the court scenes gripping, benefitting from the fact that the author John Fairfax was a practising barrister for some years.
Highly recommended.
Tagged: barrister, court, John Fairfax, law, legal, novel, Summary Justice, thriller, William Benson
May 27, 2017
Michael Jecks shared an answer on Quora with you
What did the EU do wrong to drive UK away? by Barney Lane https://www.quora.com/What-did-the-EU-do-wrong-to-drive-UK-away/answer/Barney-Lane-1?share=8cd93030&srid=tADT
April 12, 2017
Review: THE RESTLESS DEAD by Simon Beckett
THE RESTLESS DEAD by Simon Beckett, published by Bantam Press[image error]
ISBN: Hardback 9780593063477 RRP £12.99; ebook 9781409043034 at £7.99 on Amazon
Simon Beckett is now a “European phenomenon, selling over 6 million copies in Germany alone”, according to the publisher’s blurb on the press release. Yes, I know, I don’t take much notice of such comments either. Still, it was enough to pique my interest and I delved into the book earlier than I should have for the purposes of this review.
Dr David Hunter, a forensics expert, is rather on his uppers at the beginning of this book, which is, I believe, the fifth story in the series. He has been involved in something that went unpleasantly wrong in Devon in the previous book, apparently. It sounds like shades of “Play Misty for Me” or “Fatal Attraction”, but I could be wrong, but the upshot of it all is, that Dr Hunter is going to be losing his position, from the look of things, at his place of work; the police aren’t calling him anymore, and he has no income to speak of.
And then, while packing his bags to go away for the weekend, he receives a phone call from DI Lundy of Essex Police. There is a body, badly decomposed, that has appeared off the coast near Mersea Island, and the police would like him to help recover the body and identify it.
Apparently there shouldn’t be too much trouble figuring out who it is they have found, decomposition or not. Leo Villiers, the 31 year old son of the local magnate, was rumoured to have had an affair with a local married woman, Emma Derby. She has gone missing, as has Leo, and there is a firm conviction amongst the police, and many locals, that he killed her before committing suicide. So it should all be nice and easy.
And of course it would be, apart from Hunter driving over a small ford at the wrong time of the tide, flooding his car and leaving him stranded. He is lucky enough to wave down a car, but later he discovers that the abrasive character who has helped him is the husband of the missing Emma Derby.
This is a good book. It is delightful in the depiction of the countryside, it is interesting in the description of dead bits of body – you know what I mean, the author doesn’t wallow in the gore like some nowadays – and the twisted relationships of the two dead, the father, his son, his sister-in-law, and locals, and I felt that I was in the hands of a thoroughly competent writer.
It is not only the plotting, which is good, it’s the writing. Beckett does have a nice turn of phrase, for example: “houses with cherry trees lining the grass verges. The pink blossom gave the street a celebratory look, like the setting for a wedding.” A nice line that most authors would miss.
I did find it a little difficult to get into originally. I cannot lie. However, I started this in the week that my father died, and that did undoubtedly colour my initial impressions. It wasn’t the book, I don’t think. It was just the family situation. It is true to say that at the end of my days working, it was a relief to put my own work and troubles aside and pick up this and read it.
It is good, with a strong series of characters, an intriguing lead character, and the author has no embarrassment about popping off thoroughly usable people at the drop of a sharp dagger. But, although I really enjoyed this book … there is something that doesn’t quite ring true and I’m not sure what that is.
Perhaps it is just that the blurb was so overblown, I was prepared to be knocked sideways. And yes, it was good. But was it really deserving so much more comment than “Paradise City” by Joe Thomas, or “Amnesia” by Michael Ridpath? No, I don’t think so. Perhaps it was just that it felt quite parochial, set in a small community, with lots of people who knew each other too well. Perhaps. All I can say is, it did not strike me as quite as strong as some books I’ve read this year, and it’s left me wondering whether it was just my family situation or whether it was a weakness in the plot.
I don’t know. However, blurb aside, this was a good read, and you, lucky reader, don’t have to read the blurb if you don’t want to.
So, after weighing it up and considering the options, yes, this is a highly recommended story. I’ll be interested to know what you readers think about it.
Tagged: books, Dr Hunter, Restless Dead, reviews, Simon Beckett
April 8, 2017
Review: AMNESIA by Michael Ridpath, published by Corvus in May 2017
Trade Paperback: 9781782397564 at £12.99
ebook: 9781782397571 at £5.99
[image error]Okay, I have a confession to make here. I hadn’t heard of Michael Ridpath when he first started writing. I was a lowly author of three or four books, and it was my sister-in-law who persuaded me to pick up a copy of THE MARKET MAKER and read it. And it was a “Wow” moment when I did.
There are some books that grab you slowly, and you have to give it time. It may be that it’s writing about a situation you have no knowledge of, such as a football club in a favela in Sao Paulo where all the players are transvestites, or a book about someone with incredible courage (or stupidity) who puts himself into danger every five minutes. But you give them time, there’s something really nasty about leaving a book half read. I don’t like to do it, not even now. In fact, when I was a kid, I couldn’t do it. There was one book, THE WORM OUROBOROS, which is here in my office now, somewhere, and which I doubt very much I’ll ever read to the last page. Similarly there’s the grim tale of a castle somewhere that’s collapsing. I tried, and I failed to get far into that. I couldn’t get to page 100 of Patricia Cornwell’s ISLE OF DOGS, and there was another book about a unicorn flying over New York that got a similar raspberry in my memory.
Now. Having said that, there are other books, books where you barely have to open the cover, where you know that the author is taking you into familiar territory, and where you will be comfortable and understand everything in moments.
Michael Ridpath is one of those writers.
He has written about money traders, about financiers and about obscure places I’ve never been to up in the wild northern seas, but every time I come away from his books knowing more about those places.
Perhaps it is Michael’s depiction of places. I have always used Dartmoor as one of my own characters, and in the same way Michael uses landscapes and houses, woods and trees in a way that puts the reader right there in the middle of it all.
But to this book.
AMNESIA is a brilliant piece of work. It begins with a young woman, Clemence, who is asked by her aunt to visit an old man who has had an accident and fallen downstairs. She finds a grumpy, confused elderly fellow who is mostly desperate to escape the hospital. But he can’t be released without someone to help him, because in the fall, he’s lost his memory.
The prognosis is not bad, the doctor assures Clemence, but it would be good if someone could sit with him and read to him, talk, make sure he’s eating, getting some exercise … all the normal things. Clemence is a strong-willed young woman, and besides, her aunt has always been good to her. So, yes, she takes on the job. She has a car, and drives him up the long, winding roads to the house, WYVIS, where he lives.
But the old man has some secrets, although whether or not he will admit them even to himself is another matter. Clemence finds a biro-written manuscript called DEATH AT WYVIS by the man she was looking after, Alastair Cunningham. On the first pages she reads:
“It was a warm, still night and the cry of a tawny owl swirled through the birch trees by the loch, when I killed the only woman I have ever loved.”
The woman, Clemence knows, was her own grandmother.
Thus begins this book within Michael’s book, and it is as riveting as only the best writers can make it. The story is quite like an F. Scott Fitzgerald in the types of character depicted: vapid, but beautiful, rich and idle, seen through the eyes of an English traveller. There is casual cruelty and astonishing generosity, but it all adds up to death.
Michael’s story is how the two people get to learn and understand the story that they read in DEATH AT WYVIS, and how this old story of a death many years before, can come and threaten them again even now.
This is a superb story. It is well-plotted, imaginative, with intensely believable characters all struggling in a morass of old jealousies and grudges. It is told by using the book within the book, which works stunningly well in Michael Ridpath’s hands. I’d love to know whether he wrote the inner story first, and then fitted the present day book around it, or whether the interior story developed while he was writing.
Either way, it is a fabulous story told by one of the best crime writers working today.
You need to ask? Of course it’s highly recommended!
Tagged: Amnesia, book, Corvus, crime, F Scott Fitzgerald, Michael Ridpath, thriller, writer, writing
April 5, 2017
Roy George (Peter) Jecks – A Son’s Perspective
[image error]How do you sum up a life that was so full and so long?
Even knowing what to call him is fraught with difficulty. He was known as “Peter” for most of his life; in the Army he was known as “Lieutenant”, before a brief stint as “Private” (we won’t go into that), and rising later to the dizzying heights of “Captain”. But to the family, after seeing Eric Morecombe call Ernie Wise a “Funny little man with short, hairy legs”, it seemed only natural that our father would be named “Funny Little Fat Man”. And he liked it, I think. In recent years he became TOM, for “The Old Man”, when he turned into a slimmed-down version of himself, or “Grumps” by many of his uncountable grandchildren, but for me he was always FLFM.
The Fat Man was always a delightful, outgoing character. When a toddler, he would wake in the early hours and demand that his parents should play with their only child. They were modern parents. They believed in indulging their young son. So at three a.m. and earlier, they would play. Naturally, after a while, they wondered whether they had a hyperactive child. They took him to a child analyst, who cost them the then appalling sum of twenty one shillings for an hour’s consultation. At the end, he told them gravely that the only thing their son suffered from was a lack of parental discipline. “What should we do?” his father asked the consultant. “If I were you, I’d give him a good smack on the bottom,” was the cheering advice.
RG Jecks’s father used to say gleefully, so I am told, that the next time The Fat Man tried appealing to his parents to play at three in the morning, his father got the full guinea’s worth.
He achieved a lot in his ninety six and a half years.
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Off to scare the Germans!
With impending war, he was one of the first to be called up. This was one of his less intelligent moves: you see his best friend, Don Morton, and he were convinced by someone that the safest place to be at the outbreak of war was in the Territorial Army. They would be the last to be called up. How the two could have been convinced of such a daft line, I do not know, but the two duly joined up, and naturally they were in the thin green line that was called up in the first mobilisation.
The Old Man was soon spotted as a bright spark, and was lucky enough to be stationed far behind any danger in the new Regiment, the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, of which I believe he was a founder, and was soon an expert in RADAR.
When he was demobbed, he quickly decided to become an Actuary, having heard that the pay was good. He qualified in 1951, and started employment at the Legal and General for the princely salary of £1,000. He was rich. Soon he was noticed by the L&G: with his wartime experience in REME, he was selected to learn about computers, and was the first Actuary to be trained on an IBM System One. He was the nation’s first Data Processing Manager of any insurance company, and he retained that until his retirement.
Not that he believed in working overly hard. Although he only ever took a total of three days off sick from work in the whole of his career, he also took every single day he was entitled to in holidays, and was keen to advise others to do the same, including those working for him. Workers in those paternalistic days were fortunate. His methods of management were based on the systems of leadership he learned in the army: he would eat his lunch in the staff canteen so he could hear the gossip and learn how the staff felt about the company; he knew all his staff by first name, as well as knowing all their wives’ names, children’s and any interesting aspects of their lives, and would walk through departments daily to speak to staff. Many thought that it was because he had a marvellous brain. No. But he did have an efficient card index system. Each day before walking to a specific department to speak to staff, he would read through his indexes first. He knew the importance of motivation.
He was, of course, an Actuary’s nightmare. He lived to enjoy more years taking his pension than he did paying into it. Still, he found time to keep busy. Although he retired at a younger age than I am now, he took time to work as a consultant with other companies. He hugely enjoyed his two years spent in Nairobi, setting up a new computer system for the Kenya National Assurance Company, and loved sitting in his back garden in the sun, drinking ice cold Tusker beers, or putting on a jacket and tie and going to the Muthaiga Country Club.
But he was happiest with his four real loves: his wife, his family, his Rhodesian Ridgebacks and his pipes – until he gave up smoking. He felt that at the age of seventy five or so, it was better not to tempt fate any longer.
[image error]He was always utterly devoted to his wife, Beryl, our mother. They were married for sixty six happy years, and even after her death, he remained independent, self-reliant, and a contented supplier of gin, dubonnet and whisky to anyone who visited.
It says a lot for him that, on the day of our mother’s funeral, he went to her celebration and mingled with the guests, gave an oration that had everyone laughing, ate and drank to her health, and then, when he returned to his flat for a snooze, fell down and had to have a medic called to patch him up. Yet after all that, he was still keen to go out for supper with Clive and others.
[image error]He lived life to the full, utterly convinced that this life was the only one on offer. He intended to hold onto it for as long as was practicably possible, and as with most things he set his mind on, he achieved that too. After all, how many people can say that they went skiing for the first time in 1935, and the second in the mid-80s? He was hopeless, but he enjoyed himself, as always.
And now he’s gone.
When remembering people who have died, it is often the fact that those left behind will have sadness. It could be that things were not said that should have been; that the end was traumatic; that a grudge was allowed to fester; that an apology was neither given nor asked for.
I am sad that when my father was ill in the early months of this year it grew progressively harder to speak to him – my deafness and his slurring made FaceTime a boon and the telephone an instrument of torture. Although I tried to hurry up the motorway to see him, I did not manage it as often as I would have liked. And yet, there was nothing we needed to say to each other. I know he adored his grandchildren, and (most of the time) his sons. I think he found us infinitely easier to get on with when we became adults (more or less). He never understood children when his own brood were younger, but that changed as he aged and, like a good wine, mellowed.
He did not understand how a son of his could have leaped into the white water lunacy of trying to earn a living as an author, and every time he asked how the income was, and heard the depressingly honest response, I could see that he wished I had followed him into the Actuarial profession (I tried – it was my first and only experience of failing every exam I took). But he never criticised or tried to tell me I was wrong, and I think he was genuinely as proud of me as he was my other brothers (who are actually enormously successful and have pensions to prove it). And now I have his collection of Jecks titles, I know that he did read them all!
Yes, we will miss him. But it’s the selfishness speaking. We, the four sons and our sister, will miss the “Wotcha, Cock” on the phone, the sense of fun, the puffs of pipe smoke by which you could gauge his position over the other side of the hedge as he went up and down on his lawn mower, the shrewdness, the mathematical brilliance even at ninety six, the recollections of his life in the army, at school, at the L&G, his refusal to move from his armchair until an emergency called, such as Keith, the most gormelessly accident-prone of all the family, cutting off the top of his thumb and asking for help from the kitchen.
But when I think of him, I’ll always see him strolling along a Devon lane with his Rhodesian Ridgeback, Kumi or Suzie, or standing at the top of Helvellyn with Don Morton, or sitting with a pint in a quiet pub, or laughing till the tears streamed down his face, gin and dubonnet in hand, while he tried to tell us the punchline of a joke, and failed miserably because he was laughing so much. [image error]
There’s a lot to miss.
RG Jecks
15 June 1920 – 11 March 2017
Tagged: Actuary, Fat Man, obituary, Peter Jecks, Porky, REME, RG Jecks
