Tiny Excerpt from The Lemon Tree Forest

My novel The Lemon Tree Forest really is going to be launched soon. I’ve been having trouble getting the right cover just right - and also weighing up the best way of getting it out there to the three men and a dog who might want to purchase a copy.

A great deal of the narrative has been “borrowed” from things I have seen or experienced in my own life. I guess am fortunate to be able to say I’ve had quite a colourful one - so I do believe a great many of my existing newspaper readers will not find the story and its many diverse elements too boring. We’ll have to see what you guys think..

Here is a single moment from the narrative - and although all the characters in the novel are fictitious, I really did once see this little episode happen in an old manor house in which I used to live…

Some friends had been to stay with me and their little boy was going through one of those periods kids have when they become obsessed by something that grabs their imagination.  This child loved the idea of mediaeval knights and derring-deeds.  So when he’d shown me his plastic figures of King Arthur, Sir Galahad and the like, I told him there was a real knight living in the house.  He wanted to meet Sir Fred, so I took the boy down and we came across the old squire click-clicking along with his stick under the oak stairwell.  The top of that great hallway was crowned by a large glass dome through which, during the daytime, a beam of light would descend to the dark nether-regions far below.  It was in that beam that the boy and the old man met. 

Tap of stick and scratch of dog paw on polished wood…  That was the audible wallpaper of the manor.  And there, between the suits of armour, mounted swords and ceremonial shields - and under the portraits of deceased ancestors and paintings of long forgotten battles - they met.  The huge old man and the tiny boy.  The child held out his little hand to shake the withered old appendage the knight extended, and he asked in an awed whisper: “Are you Sir Cricket Bat?”

 Only Fred could have done the strange thing he did in reply.  Instead of saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or putting the kid right about his name, he said: “Would you like a balloon?” 

Stretching his other hand into the darkness to reach behind a suit of armour, he retrieved a large colourful orb which he handed to the boy.  The kid, of course, was enchanted.  He will remember that moment for the rest of his life.  And I will not forget that meeting in the sunbeam under the stairs.  Apart from the visual imagery of it, where had the balloon come from?  The old knight didn’t go shopping, he only ever ordered things to be delivered by ‘trades-people’, as he called them.  But never anything as frivolous as a balloon.  And it was a fresh and shiny sort of balloon - not the deflated remains you might expect as a left-over from some forgotten hunt ball.  The balloon was a mystery.  It was as if it had been behind that suit of armour, waiting for just the right moment to come along in the shape of a small impressionable child. 

It was ever thus with Sir Frederick Bat-Patcham.  He often did things which brought me up sharp.  Things that would make any modern person stop and think: “Did I just see that, for real?” And then you’d think: “No.  It must be the whisky talking.”