Maurice G. Nicholson's Blog

LOSING A FRIEND

I lost a friend this week. I knew he would be leaving soon when I got the phone call from his wife, just two weeks ago today. Her words made me cry for I knew when I heard them that I would never see him again. The outlook was bleak – he was dying in a cancer hospital in the South West of France. Seven years had passed since we had last met but even time and space are but insignificant details when it comes to the bonds of close friendship. And we had such a friendship, in spite of the difference in our ages.

He was in his late forties and I just twenty six when we first became neighbours in 1979 in the burning heat of the Arabian Gulf. He was a hard grafting ex-pat dentist and I a newly arrived veterinarian and we ended up as next door neighbours in Jumeirah, on the outskirts of Dubai. It was one of those blessings that life sometimes bestows on us, unasked, and when least expected.

Our days were long and tiring in the tough desert climate as we worked through the heat and the humidity to service our clients, human and animal, in our very different professions. The relative cool of the Arabian evenings became our time for relaxing, for socialising and, above all, for walking and talking for he was a great talker, my friend. More importantly, he was a great listener too. There were very few subjects that escaped our attention as we walked the night-time streets of the Arab City. And on our return to his home, there were always a myriad of Single Malt Scotch Whiskeys to evaluate and discuss and then evaluate again for one always had to be sure.

At the weekends, we trolled the fish market by the creek in the early dawn hours and haggled with the fishermen selling their catches. In the evenings we explored the gold and the carpet souks and together learned all about the intricacies of weaves and knot numbers. And we talked and then talked some more.

He told me of his love for words and for language and how studying the sciences for him had been a necessity rather than a vocation. The Arts were his first love and what he had really wanted to do was to write. I knew what he meant. English, Latin and French had always been my favourite subjects at school but, like him, I knew that the sciences held the key to a more lucrative future. He was going to write a book, he told me, and sometime later, I realised that I would do the same.

We spoke twice in his last few days; just a few minutes each time for his strength was rapidly leaving him. We remembered some of our old jokes and we laughed at them again and, when I told him of the great privilege it had been to have had him as my friend, we both shed some tears. He had completed his book too and, in our final conversation, I told him I would get it out there for him. It wasn't a promise; just a statement of fact.

He didn't say anything formal as he said his final goodbye; just a few words.

"Ah, you're a gem" he said. "You're a gem."

I suppose that's what I thought of him too. He was a gem; a very rare gem.

Wild Places – The Tihamah

If we want to write about adventure then we often have to write about wild places, where nature still holds the upper hand in spite of man's ever increasing encroachment. Before we can write, however, we have to visit these places and breathe deep into our lungs their very essence. The Tihamah will remain unknown to most people on the planet for there truly is little to be found there for modern man to exploit.

A few years back, I visited there and I wrote about it at the time in a letter home to my family.

The Tihamah

I had the opportunity to spend an October night in the desert; about two hours drive south of Jeddah. This was my second trip to the Tihamah and, unlike my previous visit there in September when it had been just too hot and humid to be comfortable, this was a far pleasanter experience.

The Tihamah is the narrow coastal strip of sand dunes and subkha flats on the western rim of the Arabian Peninsula. It runs south between the Asir mountains and the Red Sea all the way to the distant Yemeni border.

Wiall Al Nammari, a local Jeddah resident, brought me down and we collected his friend General Mohammed and his aged father along the way. The old man must have been well in his eighties and was very gaunt and feeble. His two, coal-black eyes seemed to be half buried beneath the tumbling layers of wrinkles of his brow. The General lifted the old man like a child onto the back seat behind us and fastened the seat belt around him.

His father had an interesting history and Wiall told me of it as we drove south along the highway towards Mecca. He had been the chauffeur for Faisal bin Abdul Aziz for many years and when the King had been assassinated back in 1975, the old man hadn't spoken for over six months, such was his depression. His son, the general, who was a big man of considerable girth, had good English and added some details to Wiall's story, all the while attending to his father's every need.

About a half hour south of Mecca we met a sandstorm, the first one I had ever seen in Arabia. It was like driving in a thick fog and Wiall had his eyes peeled as he slowly followed the white road markings. When the murk suddenly cleared, thunder began to crash all about us and flashes of lightning lit up the peaks of the distant Asir Mountains.

Then, the first rain I had seen for months fell in a thunderous downpour but it only lasted for fifteen minutes or so. About twenty kilometres from Wadi Lith we turned off the roadway and drove across the sands to the encampment in the distance. Although the tent that had been erected for our stay had been blown down by the storm, we were met with the hospitality that is the norm among these people.

Ali bin Mohammed al Otabi was the head man of our hosts and was well in his seventies. He was tall and spare and weather beaten in a way that can only come from spending time under the desert sun. He had been a falconer for King Faisal in his youth but in older age he has made his living trapping falcons on their annual migration and selling them to the Saudi Royal family. He had been camping on the Tihamah since early September with a group of twenty others, some of them teenagers. Most are family, according to Wiall, as Ali has had a number of wives and a very considerable number of children.

The camp was about four miles inland from the sea, right on the sand and salt flats that swept away to the northern and southern horizons. There were four large tents; open sided to catch whatever breeze was about and a smaller kitchen tent off to one side. Ali brought us to the biggest tent and the occupants rose to their feet and greeted us one by one in a line. They were men of the desert but their manners were very formal and ritualised. We sat on the rugs and were treated to Gawa(Arabic Coffee) and dates and then the conversation rolled on. Ali had apparently just bought a Hurr, a first year Saker falcon trapped on passage, from another trapper for eighteen thousand Riyals which I figured was about three thousand Pounds. He was going to sell it on in due course and make some profit. He was very keen to show it to us, so he brought us around behind the tent to where the falcon sat hooded on a wakr (an Arab style falcon perch).

He leaned down beside the wooden block and backed the falcon onto his covered wrist. Deftly, he removed the hood, whispering soft soothing words all the time and we gave our nods of approval as the falcon hitched its wings and hissed at us. He had only begun manning it, Ali explained and the falcon had still the wide-eyed fear of the newly captured bird. He had two other newly caught Peregrines, both of them males, so they were smaller and of less value. One was a year old, haggard Calidus, very like the falcon I had been given a present of the week before.

Our hosts had slaughtered a sheep in our honour so we sat around on the rug in two groups and ate mutton and rice in the Arab style — from a large communal dish. Ali dropped some choice pieces of succulent meat on the dish in front of me, a common practice of the good host in Arabia. One of the young lads on the ground beside me followed suit but when I saw that the piece was a sheep's ear with a fluffy piece of wool still on it, I knew it was a wind-up. All the youngsters didn't even glance in my direction but I knew they were just waiting to see if my good manners would force me to eat it. I kept them guessing for a while, picking it up numerous times, before finally placing it to one side. Afterwards there was more Gawa and then Chai, all accompanied by more talk. I figured it made sense that alcohol was prohibited by their Islamic faith. With the importance of conversation in their daily lives, they would be in a constant drunken haze if they were imbibing intoxicating liquor at the same time.

We had camp beds and sleeping bags laid out in our tent and we headed for bed around midnight. Most of the younger residents were still up playing cards in the big tent and their voices drifted out to us as we lay there. General Mohammed's old father lay across from me, his mouth hanging open as he fell quickly into a deep sleep. I saw Mohammed hovering nearby and tucking a rug around the old man's shoulders. A cool breeze rolled in across the flats from the sea nearby and I slept soundly in my bag with a full moon and the glittering belly of the milky-way right above my head.

Early in the pre-dawn hours a cockerel crowed long and repetitiously telling us that a new day was soon to arrive. I had noticed, the evening before, that Ali had a large flock of chickens around the camp. Wiall told me they were to keep the scorpion numbers down but I still wasn't sure if he had been pulling my leg.

At about five in the morning, Ali called the faithful to prayer with a hoarse, broken-voiced "Allah Wakbar"— God is great. The men and boys struggled from their places of rest and prayed together. I turned over in my sleeping bag, feeling like the long lapsed Catholic I was and watched, through my bleary eyes, as they lay out on their faces.

For breakfast we had warm milk and rusks, as we sat out around the early morning fire and then the trappers were all suddenly jumping up and loading pigeons and falcons into their various wrecks of old Land Cruisers and land Rovers. Behind them, the full moon was still hanging in there over the distant invisible Red Sea and a pale pink glow to the east betrayed the dawn arriving on the other side of the distant Asirs.

We headed off too, with Mohammed at the wheel, while I sat in the back with his father who seemed to be half asleep. We drove north for twenty miles or so, crossing over and back on the subkha, sometimes going right down to the sea. Wiall regaled us with stories of the dangers of the subkha once the rains came. Overnight, the flats could become a deceptive quagmire underneath the hard, sun-baked crust and many vehicles had been irretrievably lost in the morass underneath over the years.

The number of different types of birds of prey to be seen on our journey was amazing. As we drove along, we were constantly disturbing Kestrels, Kites, Vultures, Harriers and Sooty Falcons, all roosting on the desert floor. The number of trappers out in open topped jeeps was just as astonishing. They crossed over and back on the flats —- all scanning the skies for Peregrine and Saker Falcons to trap. The rest of the raptors were of no interest to them. We saw a Sooty Falcon perched on a small dune and Wiall put out a small "Bal Chatri," an Indian wire cage trap with a Jerboa inside it. The little falcon attacked but did not become ensnared and then a harrier suddenly appeared and was soon caught in the nooses. It flew off, dragging the trap behind it but we soon caught up with it and released it.

As the morning temperatures rapidly soared, the falcons all began to take to the higher, cooler air and became impossible to trap until later in the afternoon. We arrived back at the camp just after nine o' clock and had a second, more substantial breakfast with the returning trappers. They would head out again as the heat of the burning sun began to dissipate. Breakfast this time was a mixture of Sudanese beans, homemade bread, honey, cream and cheese —- all very tasty. Then we sat around and more Gawa and Chai were served. Other visitors from the nearby camps came and went throughout the morning. All had trapping stories to tell from times past, some of which were relayed to me by Wiall and Mohammed.

At noon, four of Ali's lads came with us and we drove east for an hour right into the foothills of the Asirs. Two of the boys had shotguns, both single barrelled and capable of taking one round only. Wiall told me that all privately owned guns are now prohibited in Saudi Arabia but the boys acquired these from Yemen. We zigzagged around the bare foothills until the keen-eyed lads spotted a covey of Chukhar Partridge under a lone thorn bush. They were out of the jeep in a flash, raising their guns as they moved and the double reports of their shots nearly blew my ear drums out. They were back in the jeep within a couple of minutes, grinning like school-kids as they showed us the brace of partridge they had killed.

A few minutes later, we turned into a wadi with a broad flow of water flowing through it and a flock of Nubian Goats drinking at the edge. These wadis are bone dry for most of the year but once the heavy rains arrive in the Asirs above, overnight they can become raging torrents that can be lethal for any living thing in their paths. A barasti hut, right under the rocky cliff seemed to be the abode of the elderly old Bedouin we saw tending the goats. Wiall and Mohammed chatted with him for some minutes and he asked question after question —– the news from all the encampments obviously being one of the most important constituents of his daily diet.

In the heat of the afternoon, all the trappers lounged and slept under the open-sided tents. Now, I understood how they stayed up so late and rose so early — the middle of their day was for rest. We left them just as they were loading up the jeeps and heading out again, when the great heat of the day was beginning to wane. In a couple of hours we were back on the southern edge of Jeddah with the rain pelting down on us for the second time that year.

I have one other memory of my visit to the Tihamah. I was lying out on my camp-bed, dozing in the heat of the afternoon, when I awoke to see General Mohammed leading his ancient father, hand in hand, across the nearby dune. The wizened old man was like a skinny youth beside the burly Mohammed, who carried a bucket of water in his free hand and lumbered slowly along beside his shuffling father. He was helping the old man with his ablutions and it truly was the most unexpected image of tenderness in the harshness of the burning desert.

Call down the Hawk

Memorable Lines

Memorable lines are just that – memorable, unforgettable. They lodge as charged electrical particles in the axons and synapses of the neurones in our human brains, ready to be retrieved and relived at any instant. They are the kind of lines that we, as writers, most definitely want to create even if we are writing stories in the thriller genre.

Some of the great reads have them as the opening line on page one, chapter one. There, they set the scene and hint at the story and issues to come with a perfect economy of words. A few that come to mind are "He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish" from Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and "I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills" from Karen Blixen's Out of Africa. The shortest one I can think of is "Life is difficult" from M Scott Peck's The Road Less Travelled. As Peck's book is mostly about the necessity of facing the suffering involved in living life, the first three words set the tone perfectly for what is to follow.

As for me, I would settle for creating a memorable line just about anywhere in one of my stories; maybe in describing a piece of violent action or expressing some character's inner turmoil or even in the description of the wild landscape that is the backdrop to the action taking place. The only thing is; I would never know when I had actually created it. That is something only the reader can ultimately decide.

Call down the Hawk

Location, Location, Location

[image error]It's kind of important, isn't it — where exactly a novel is set? A story based in Los Angeles would undoubtedly feel quite different to a reader if it was based in New York City or even San Francisco. Each place has its own sights, sounds and smells — its own seasoning atmosphere which seeps into the tale as the words pile up.

I had a home in Mayo for ten years. It was an old lodge that sat on a high spur of the Partry Mountains and looked down on the great Lough Mask below. I knew before long that I wanted to write about the area, to tell of its beauty and history and weave a story into its fabric, a story that would be complementary to the grandeur of the landscape about.

I have always loved wild places; places where you can really be alone or, when with another, really be with them. A dramatic landscape, be it the thundering ocean or a range of towering mountains definitely adds a very suitable background to an all-action thriller. So I decided to write a thriller, Call down the Hawk, and base it in my beloved Mayo. The basic idea for the story came to me on an eventful April weekend back in 1995 and it is there, amidst the beauty of South County Mayo that the action is set.

It's finally here

Writing and publishing one's first book is no sprint, folks. It's a marathon — a long energy sapping haul with self-doubt forever lurking in the background, peeping over your shoulder, whispering to you to forget about it, give it a miss, see what's on telly. The secret is never to give up –no matter what.

My journey started over two and a half years ago when I first sat down and began to type out a story I had been thinking about for a long time. It wasn't long before I realised that I had to have my own special time for this escapade so I began to rise at five a.m. and get my three hours writing in before breakfast.

It became a routine that was remarkably easy to stick to. Writing truly becomes an addiction. A year later and after multiple re-writes, I passed it on to Marc, one of my boys who luckily has an M.A in English Literature. He carried out the first serious edit and gave me lots of tough constructive criticism. Six months and many more re-writes later I gave it to my wife Marie to read. Waiting for your first review of a finished work is nerve wracking, to say the least, even it is from your love. The result was worth waiting for, though, as she found it hard to put the book down and she read it in a couple of sittings, so I began my search for an agent the very next day.

This proved to be the most discouraging experience of all. Most never even replied to my queries and submissions. This, apparently, is par for the course. Virtually all the others sent a form rejection letter apart from one American agent with whom I had some communication. Finally, earlier on this Spring I started to go down the Kindle route having discovered that Amazon were close to selling more ebooks than paper hard copies this year. It began to look like that was the way to go.

Six months later and with fantastic help from Ali, one of my girls, I got the formatting nailed and the book-cover produced and last week I finally launched it on Kindle. All you lovers of a good thrilling read, why don't you give it a try.