Description
Story Origins:
One pleasure of writing books can be the feedback received from readers. Sometimes they tell you what they enjoyed, or point out something you’ve missed. And occasionally they ask a question you cannot answer.
That happened to me after I completed the fifth and final book in the Lodge Looks Back series.
My friend Luke Brian Martin, whom I first met at Shillingstone railway station, the inspiration for the fictional village of Shillington, and the first person ever to buy a book directly from me… asked a simple question:
‘Where did Stephen Lodge come from?’
It caught me completely off guard.
Over the course of five books, Stephen Lodge had risen from Lieutenant to Captain in the Royal Navy while becoming involved in all manner of adventures and assignments. Yet I had never really stopped to think about what had shaped him into the man he became.
Over a cup of tea, Brian as his friends call him, told me he wanted to know what made Stephen Lodge tick.
I had been challenged before to write about my own years in the Royal Navy, and that brought back a memory of my mother telling me about the Royal Hospital School, where one of her three boys could have gone on a scholarship, but none of us did.
Suddenly, the answer was obvious. The Book of Lodge would not be a sequel. It would be a beginning.
Drawing heavily on my experiences, memories, and observations, and looking back at the decade we now call the Sixties. Remembering the people I had known, the places I had seen, and the events that had shaped me, I mixed a large dollop of fiction with an awful lot of fact, and built the young Stephen Lodge.
Every one of us has a book hidden somewhere inside. Childhood adventures, lifelong friendships, scrapes with authority, first loves, family, work, triumphs, mistakes and regrets. Most never get written.
A man I met many years ago, the last gas lamplighter in my town, carried his life with him in a shop’s carrier bag, a jumble of memories and papers he wanted someone to ghost-write. I told him to speak to a librarian. But he had not come looking for directions. He had come looking for someone to listen.
Perhaps that is why The Book of Lodge mattered so much to me. Stephen Lodge may be fictional, but the impulse behind him is not. Ordinary lives are seldom ordinary to the people who have lived them, and once their stories are gone, no one can recover them. This book became my way of listening before it was too late.
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