CROSSWINDS

About a decade ago I suddenly recalled - for no particular reason that I can remember - something that an American ex-USAAF Liberator waist-gunner had said to me many years before. Do you realise, he had exclaimed, that some of our guys over here during the Second World War were actually posted to airfields next door to the same village their ancestors had left generations before in order to emigrate to the States?
I hadn't come across this before, but the idea evidently stuck in my mind. I think I liked the idea of 17th century pilgrims sailing to New England, and Liberators crews flying back. It embraced a circularity that appealed.
Then I remembered the story of Peter Foulger, the Norfolk youngster who quit this country in the 1630s and sailed to New England, eventually making quite a name for himself and becoming grandfather of the illustrious Benjamin Franklin. And I remembered the fearsome battle of Saratoga in 1777, when the British Army, including a Norfolk regiment, fought and lost, whereupon numbers of them disappeared into the trees because they wanted to forge a new life in a new land rather than return to English poverty.
Several of these themes - voyage and emigration, Franklin, the Native Indian populations, the bloody slopes of Saratoga and the desertions, and Yanks arriving in the English countryside during the War - rolled around in my mind until I decided to try to create a novel about it. A novel about human inter-dependence: what drives people to migrate, and what brings them back. But above all, about circularity.
There was a problem, though. I had never been to the States, and Google does have its limitations. Finally, accompanied by a son and daughter-in-law, I flew to Newark and took a brief look at New York. More importantly, we also went to the museum and site of Benjamin Franklin's house in Philadelphia, visited the location of the battle of Saratoga (on a blisteringly hot day, I recall) and trod the hillsides where the old Norfolk 9th Regiment of Foot had battled so bravely, and then took a short sea trip to see Nantucket, to check out the Foulger end of things.
It was all quite thrilling, but writing the novel was a different matter. It was hard, and it took several years. But after an original draft, and two complete re-writes, it was finally completed in 2013, a yarn of about 80,000 words. I called it Crosswinds.
The blow - and a blow experienced by most writers, of course - fell later. I couldn't find a publisher, either here or in the States. No-one wanted even to cast a glance at it, never mind read it. So after a year of trying, I gave up. The manuscript went into a drawer where it nestles still, happily and comfortably, I trust, alongside three or four other 'unwanted' novels and a pile of 'unwanted' short stories.
It is not sympathy I am seeking, because I really did enjoy the research and the writing, and would certainly never have visited the States had it not been for Crosswinds. As for having a pile of unwanted manuscripts stuffed in a drawer, well, that is the nature of the beast. Anyone who has made the effort to try to write a story can tell a similar tale. After all, there are far more words written than ever see light of day.
So to my mind, Crosswinds is not a complete failure simply because its current address is the bottom drawer in my study, because the experiences gained from having become involved in it in the first place were priceless, and would not have been gained in any other way.