Life Term , livre ebook

Andrews UK - Mark Allen

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

165 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Life Term is a psychological thriller about a six-year-old boy who is sexually assaulted by a man on a riverbank. Many years later, whilst working as a psychiatric nurse, he seeks his revenge. However, despite a successful subsequent career in journalism and publishing, the shame and guilt lives with him until there is some resolution. On one level, Life Term is a page turner, which tells an absorbing story with twists and turns till the end. On another, it is about crime and punishment, revenge and redemption and about the borderline between good and evil.

Sujets

Thriller

Informations

Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	25 novembre 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781912788224
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0350€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Life Term
by
Mark Allen
Colenso Books
2021

Published in 2021 by
Colenso Books
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2021 Mark Allen
The right of Mark Allen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The extract from an email by Ken Callanan is published with the writer’s permission.
Front cover image copyright © 2021 Colenso Books
The portrait of the author is from a photograph by Tom Askew-Miller, is copyright © Tom Askew-Miller 2021 and is published with the photographer’s permission.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.

As flies to wanton boys, are we to th’ gods;
They kill us for their sport.
—King Lear

Preface
Life Term has been a decade in gestation, but the idea has been in my mind for much longer.
There were two reasons for wanting to write this novel. The first was that, as a journalist, I have written news and features over the years, but rarely anything of more than fifteen hundred words. I wanted to prove to myself that I had it in me to write a book of a hundred thousand words or so that relied mainly on the imagination. Had I got enough stamina and skill to sustain a novel that required both? When I set out on this journey my aim was not to write for publication; it was a private matter and not necessarily a story I wished to share with others.
The second was that this story has been with me for a long time and it needed to be told—the writing of it has been cathartic. I needed to slay a few dragons and the writing enabled me to do so. Life Term is a work of fiction, although it does draw heavily on my background and experiences. In other words there is a large autobiographical element in the book, particularly in the first two chapters. I have roughly, though not always, followed the trajectory of my own career and interwoven an enormous amount of invention with the facts. However, for the avoidance of doubt: I did go to university; I have never worked as a psychiatric nurse, although psychiatry has always been of interest to me; and I have never killed anyone! All the main female characters are fictitious and not based on women I have known: they came out of my head.
In order to write the book I took myself off to France for a week or so at a time over the course of a couple of years. There I could immerse myself in the plot. I stuck to a strict discipline of writing a minimum of two-and-a-half thousand words a day, a process which was both exhilarating and exhausting.
Having completed my first draft in France, I showed it to one or two literary friends who were complimentary about it and they persuaded me to see if I could find a publisher. Here is where I hit the buffers.
I got a flattering response from a leading literary agency, but they suggested that I wrote a secondary plot before sending it them again. I was very busy with work at the time and decided to let matters rest. After all, I had achieved my main objective in completing the book. A little later I met a man at a literary festival who had started a literary agency who persuaded me to become his client. This was a false dawn because nothing at all happened and, after a year, we agreed to part company. I was disappointed by this outcome and I more or less gave up on the prospect of having my novel published; I had no interest in publishing it myself. If it was ever to be in the public domain my novel had to be authenticated by a publisher for whom I had respect.
It was about two years ago that my oldest friend, Jim Potts, suggested I send the novel to Anthony Hirst, the principal editor at Colenso Books. Anthony sent me some copious and intelligent notes about the book. He wanted to publish it, but said the book needed to be rewritten in the first person, rather than the third, and that I should tell the story chronologically rather than weave in and out of time. This he felt was confusing and had, he pointed out, led to some repetition. It was excellent advice, but I was far too preoccupied at work to take this on board then.
Finally, in spring 2020, lockdown came to the rescue. Anthony was still in touch with me and encouraged me to rewrite the book in line with his suggestions. It was a very challenging and difficult time for my company, but I decided to take the plunge, although it proved a much more exacting exercise than I imagined, one which required a lot of new writing. It was like putting together a jigsaw. Determined that my company would not suffer during this crucial time, I would get up at three a.m. to write till eight a.m. before focusing on company business. I compartmentalised the writing and, apart from my wife, no one knew of my efforts during the early mornings when everyone else was asleep. Ironically, the rewriting of the book enabled me to cope better with what was going on at work.
There are a number of people I need to thank. Anthony has proved a brilliant and admirably exacting editor. I owe him a huge amount for the meticulous trouble he has taken over the text, correcting faulty syntax and making sure that the chronology of events was consistent. Above all, I am grateful to him for showing such faith in the book, and seeing parallels with Sophocles’ plays Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus.
Jim Potts too, whom I have known since the age of eight, has been a wonderful source of support, reading countless drafts and commenting on them. His wife, Maria Strani-Potts, an accomplished author like Jim himself, has been equally encouraging.
The image on the front cover was developed by Di and Brian Jagger from an initial concept suggested to them by Anthony. I greatly appreciate the efforts Di and Brian went to in creating such an arresting image.
I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting the distinguished Dr Faysal Mikdadi, a Palestinian–British poet and novelist, and the Academic Director of The Thomas Hardy Society, who, when he received the early part of the book from Jim Potts some months ago, wrote to me in the terms quoted on the back cover. His kind and generous words meant a lot to me.
My friend, Mary de Vere Chamberlain, a professional copy editor, read my first drafts, gave me moral support and made some sensible revisions and suggestions. I am very grateful to her.
Ben Evans, who was for many years a very talented editor in my company in Wiltshire, was entrusted with the final proofreading of this book. Thank you, Ben.
There are not many people I know who have a deep-seated knowledge of psychiatric nursing going back to the late 1960s, but I have been very lucky to be able to draw on the experience of Harry Field, whose career as a mental health nurse saw him rise to the dizzy heights of director of nursing at Broadmoor Hospital, where he was also in charge of security.
Harry put me in touch with Derek McCarthy whose book Certified and Detained, published by ChinaLitho, is a “true story of life in an English mental hospital from 1957 to 1963 as seen then through the eyes of a young male student nurse”. Although his time as a mental health nurse was in a slightly earlier period, I drew on his book and my own personal knowledge in Chapter 3 in my descriptions of a large psychiatric hospital. Such institutions were in those days a hidden world. Some good things went on in them, but in some respects they were rotten to the core.
I was reminded of this world only the other day when, out of the blue, I received a huge file from Ken Callanan. Ken was a student psychiatric nurse at Brookwood psychiatric hospital, Surrey, during the late 1970s, at a time when I was the editor of the weekly nursing magazine, Nursing Mirror. Ken was a whistle blower who reported the assaults on patients by a charge nurse. Ken was then subjected to appalling hostility from colleagues, mainly belonging to the Confederation of Health Service Employees (COHSE), and he was forced to resign.
Nursing Mirror mounted a campaign over many months on behalf of Ken. As a result, my magazine was subjected to a twenty-minute rant by COHSE’s general secretary, Albert Spanswick, at its annual conference in Blackpool in June 1980, with the delegates standing to applaud and pointing to me and my colleagues, seated like isolated rats on the front rows of the hall. It was a most uncomfortable experience.
Ken was later vindicated by three separate bodies: the Beaumont Committee of Inquiry, the General Nursing Council for England and Wales (now UKCC) and an industrial tribunal, which concluded that he had been “constructively dismissed”. The charge nurse was struck off.
The point of Ken’s letter and file? After all these years he wanted to thank me and my staff for all our efforts. I sent Ken the draft of the novel. Was my description of a mental health hospital at that time an accurate assessment? Ken replied at length and I quote here from his email:
Sadly, your writings do confirm the historical fact that psychiatric care was more hit and miss “custodial” rather than curative and it attracted too many, often unsuitable, perhaps mainly male nurses, who would not have chosen or been suited to general nursing.
The era of psychiatric long-stay care you concentrate on is a fair reflection and your brief, but brutal, re