Turn Back Now

Fourteen stories filled with love and hate; mystery and suspense; hope and fear; regret and triumph; truth and lies; fantasy and reality; winners and losers; and life and death.

Stories of ordinary people who are living ordinary lives, doing ordinary things.

Waiting for a train

Waiting for a mechanic

Still waiting for a train

Working salesman

Spending a day at the hospital

Meeting a new patient

Planning a surprise

Meeting an old friend

Revisiting a precious memory

Standing in a quiet street

Experiencing scary night

Feeling a woman’s passion

Searching as a budding reporter

Receiving a generous gift

They are all ordinary people until…

Tile Tales

When young I often wrote stories, either to fulfil the requirements of school or for my own pleasure. At one point I joined a circle of budding writers; we never met but circulated our tales by post. This was a short-lived experience. The rather harsh criticisms dampened my enthusiasm, it would appear. Thereafter, a working life and family needs pushed the idea of writing largely out of my mind, until that light-bulb moment arrived. Like so many others, I had been playing the popular word game, Scrabble, with family and friends over many years, and more recently a similar internet-based game using a tablet. I decided that, by keeping note of the final medley of words from each game, it might be possible to write a short story utilising some of these words, which might trigger in my mind a setting, a plot or characters of a short tale. One more constraint I imposed was that each story should be no longer than one printed page. So, this I set out to do, and while not every game produced words that fired my imagination, many did. This collection of short stories is the result.

The World Behind Glass

The World Behind Glass is a collection of short stories that try to depict a world that every human being creates in their subconscious and lives in fear of. A world that is bigger than they imagined and beyond the world in which they live. Every moment they try to know themselves in the world of their imagination, but every moment they find themselves in a labyrinth that brings them back to the beginning of the road, creating eerie and frightening conditions for them. Frustration and fear pervade their whole being, and every moment, this person shows a different reaction from what is their character.

The Woman from the Other Side

This collection of short stories focuses on the lives of ordinary working-class people from Northern Ireland. It is set against the backdrop of the ‘Troubles’ and the province’s more recent history. Strong female characters often carry the narrative, and the story which gives its title to the collection is that of a Catholic woman from the South who marries a staunch Northern Protestant, and they settle in Belfast. The strife which ensues reflects the divided communities which the rest of the book can testify to.

In their depiction of everyday violence and intimidation, the stories bring to light more latent themes of homosexuality, sexism, and prejudice. A strong focus on family bonds means that the collection provokes a profound resonance with a large number of us who have grown up in tight family circles. In many ways, the ‘Troubles’ serve to underline the tensions inherent in these bonds.

The Things We Keep in the Cupboard

The Things We Keep in the Cupboard is a collection of four short stories which reflect on lives not quite lived.

In the title story, Linda May Grey is dead but there are things that need to be dealt with. She has left eight items for collection but there is no answer to the executor’s letters. Will anyone come forward to claim them?

In Whatever Happened to Sarah-Jayne? (shortlisted by the Cinnamon Press Short Story Competition) Otis is haunted by a life he could have lived, if only he hadn’t told her about what happened in the cloakroom.

Transplant sees Raf Lieke returning home to a familiar face, but is the person underneath it the same as when he left?

I Salute the Sea is set in a strange future where each person is awarded one day in an ultimate reality. But when you have just one day to tell a stranger you love them, just one day to live a lifetime, what day would you choose?

The Tales of Hidden Truth I

As little Azure’s fears and doubt begin to grow more and more powerful, she sets out on a quest to find the one thing that can liberate her: the fabled ‘Dream Flower’! Along the way, she meets various people and beasts, and learns more about the world, while steadily reaching her goal. In the second story, we follow Globalea’s road to power and her fall from greatness. As she narrates her story and of her various ordeals, more and more of her emotions reach out, ultimately resulting in dramatic showdowns and a heart-stopping finale.

The Orphan Plus Others

This collection of short stories traverses times in the distant past all the way up to more recent moments in the 20th century. These vignettes provide glimpses of lives very different to our own, from the experience of war and poverty to social attitudes which might appear alien to us today. To have lived through some of these times has been a privilege, and the author looks back on them with a sense of nostalgia. The memories of the past remain, and with the aid of stories they can be passed on to future generations. These stories can evoke both laughter and tears, plumbing the vast depths of human emotion to bring history to life in a vivid and compelling set of narratives.

The Midnight Mannequins and Other Stories

The Menagerie

This book is a collection of eight separate stand-alone short stories. These stories will take you on a journey of suspense, adventure, mystery and horror.

There is something for everyone, whether you like gritty detective stories, mythological adventures or enticing horror, all that and more in this Menagerie.

The Lost Man and Other Tales

When our two children were small, we lived on a small farm near Exeter. The farmyard was immediately outside the house which meant I could spend a little time with our two sons at their teatime and go indoors again when they were bathed and put to bed. My wife would read to them, and then I would. As they got older, I would tell them stories too, often involving input from them too. Hence, the idea of creating stories as well as just reading other people’s writing.

A few years later, I felt the need for the extra income, so I did a one-year teacher training course at St. Luke’s College and took a part-time job at our local secondary school, teaching slow readers. A colleague there, a teacher of English, heard of my occasional scribblings and asked for some short stories for her to use in class. This worked surprisingly well.

For a number of reasons, we sold the farm in 1978 and moved to a house with a three-acre paddock near Kingsbridge. I became a full-time teacher with multiple handicapped teenagers. Not much time for writing. Also, in later years, when we were gardening beside the River Dart a few miles downriver from Totnes, there was no time for writing.

However, when we sold our smallholding and retired to Totnes in 2000, I took up writing again and got down to it more seriously. This book is the result of my scribbles over the last 20 years.

The Gray Mind

The present book, called The Gray Mind (a collection of short stories), is taken from the daily conditions of every human being that he sometimes encounters during his life and is considered a great challenge for him. But why humans find themselves in such a critical situation is a reflection of the behavioural complexities that lead them to a world far removed from individual imagination and to a world that is more like a hell that endangers their peace of mind.

In this book, the author has made every effort to portray these conditions and to show that human beings are victims of conditions left to us by the superstitions and wrong frameworks of our predecessors. The author’s attempt is simply to use the smallest spaces and the least characters to achieve the greatest concepts, which in today’s terminology manifests itself as minimalism.

The Doctor and Other Stories

A book of six short stories that move from a London doctor in the 1850s to a soldier in Sussex in the early 20^th century, and from a person who brings a dog into his life to a citizen’s view of how his beloved city has changed.

These stories will not just take you to places and eras you’ve never been to before, but will also force you to look deeper within yourself.