You were right as ever, dad

My new book, The Nature of Winter, has just been launched at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. First of all, how cool is that? The thought occurred as I walked on stage in a well-filled theatre in the tented village that takes over Edinburgh’s Charlotte Square every August to accommodate the book festival. Simultaneously, I heard my father’s voice in my ear from about 50 years ago: “Your trouble is, Jim, you’re no good for anything but pushing a pen.”

It was a light-hearted quip, delivered with a laugh (and how I miss that laugh even after all these years) but not without making its point. So, walking on stage at the EIBF and being introduced to the audience, I acknowledged that my father was right, as he so often was.

I’m still a boy from the prefabs who left school at 16 (slipped out through the door of Harris Academy when no one was looking because this newspaper had offered me a job!), and I still have trouble coming to terms with the idea that people, most of them complete strangers, will part with their own money to buy something I’ve written, and then part with more money to come and hear me talk about what I’ve written.

My father didn’t live to see my first book published. He died much too young, at 63, and I still have trouble accepting the idea that I have been older than him for the past seven years. I honestly don’t know what he would have made of it. My mother, who outlived him by 18 years, was thrilled by it all but, then, she was the one from whom I learned to love books and music and art. Dad had been a soldier and telephone engineer, and dealt with life’s practicalities and did so with confidence and wisdom.

He would have been happier, perhaps, if I had been a professional footballer or a cricketer, and although I loved both games, I was never better than mediocre.

The great thing about book festivals, and about Edinburgh’s in particular (for it is a phenomenon, astonishingly well organised and despite its size, it is hospitable and welcoming, and for a writer, just a true pleasure to be a part of it), is the opportunity to engage with the people who read, the heroic, world-wide and grossly undervalued army of book lovers.

Writing is done in isolation. There is no other way to do it. Regardless of what a writer may think of his or her new book, you only find out whether it’s any good or not once it’s out there, once people decide whether to read it or not. Book festivals are where you find out if you are still any good at pushing a pen.

For that single remark of my father’s, when I was still a very young newspaper journalist learning my trade, has become my great motivator. I still want to be the best pen-pusher I can possibly be.

And this Edinburgh International Book Festival, with my father’s quip ringing in my ears yet again, it occurred to me for the first time that perhaps that was exactly what he intended all along, and that its sub-text was this: “If you are going to do this with your life, don’t settle for anything less than being the best you can be, and never stop trying to get better at it. Because it won’t be easy.”

It hasn’t been. After I gave up my staff job as a newspaper journalist in 1988, I was broke for years, causing family hardship. I declined every piece of well-intentioned advice to go part-time. I was never very good at compromise. The strange thing was that although I made very little money, I kept getting published.

For me, that was enough. I didn’t decide to be a nature writer in order to make money. If money had been my prime motivation, I had a perfectly well-paid newspaper job. But the truth is that I decided to become a nature writer at the age of 18 when I read Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water for the first time, immediately read it again (twice within a week) and then thought a single, decisive thought: “I want to do that.”

It would take another 22 years before I took the plunge but I never once stopped thinking that thought. Sooner or later, I told myself (and have been telling myself ever since), I will write my own Ring of Bright Water.

I think my father would have been torn between his generation’s assumption that it was a man’s job to provide for his family, and the fact that I hung in there. Because the launch of The Nature of Winter at the Edinburgh International Book Festival last week was not my first book, it was my 35th.

“For that single remark of my father’s, when I was still a very young newspaper journalist learning my trade, has become my great motivator

“Book festivals are where you find out if you are still any good...”