Chrysaetos books

In the sixties Percy Stewart used to draw and paint birds and wild flowers, which led him to photography and writing in his teens.  At fourteen he was posting long letters to a sweetheart hundreds of miles away at boarding-school, in Lyme Regis.

'A few years ago I discovered her reply to one of those letters, in an old suitcase.  She was so polite, so tolerant.  To my horror, my letter to her was a list of questions about butterflies, snakes and orchids around Lyme, which I imagined as Paradise, thanks to the natural history books on a shelf in our school library.'

'Everything of interest seemed to live on the sunny cliffs and heaths of Dorset, including the girl.

'Sadly for me, she soon grew to appreciate the Lyme Bay lads more than the butterflies which I asked her to find on the famous Undercliff where John Fowles set 'The French Lieutenant's Woman'.

'Sarah was a lovely girl, and her parents were great, but our paths took different directions.'

Being a fish out of water has been the single most important factor in creating 'Percy Stewart' the writer.

'When my father's job took us to live in a city, I was like a fish out of water.  My 'new' school felt dark and alien, because the 'old' one really was bright and wonderful, with a towering Victorian headteacher who ruled over his staff of incredibly enthusiastic, excellent teachers.

'We had a swimming-pool, tennis courts and a brilliant language-laboratory, where my French came on very quickly.'

'If my attention wandered as I struggled with Algebra or Compound Interest, beyond our football pitch were open fields where kestrels would hover until a funny, fat yellow plane came in to land on a grass strip right next to our school hedge, loaded with elegant young ladies in fur coats who vanished into a silver Mercedes. 

'It eventually emerged that the said furs were being smuggled in from the Continent and distributed from a cold-storage warehouse run by a town councillor who was already a rogue when he was in my father's class, back in the forties.'

'I have no idea where the ladies went, but the town did have its own casino and strip-joint, owned by the same friendly chap, until the place burned down and a big insurance pay-out went into other properties.

'The week we left town, one of the brand-new late-sixties places called a 'discotheque' also burned down.' 

'Police gossip circulated about Mafia connections...my uncle was one of the coppers and my father was the artist who had covered the dance-floor walls with UV-glowing psychaedelic figures making exotic moves.

'Even a quiet little town in the middle of nowhere can have its own dark underbelly.  No wonder I have eventually turned into a story-teller!'

'The small-town school only had about two-hundred and forty pupils, all of them boys when I started.  It had lots of clubs and within weeks I had a wide circle of interesting new friends from small towns and villages around the Cambridgeshire Fens.  Some of us hoped to gate-crash the strip-club, but we could never figure out how to pull it off.'