Photo of Me
I have been told…
I have been told to be successful in promoting my novels, it’s important for me to tell you something about myself, where I came from, some background to my life, that sort of thing. I’m not very good at writing about myself…
So here goes:
My first memory of life is war. I was born in 1938, so I was about two years old when the bombs rained down on our home on Merseyside in England. With my brother I crawled into a bomb shelter, which was little more than a dining table made of steel. We lay there and listened to the anti aircraft guns, literally at the end of our street, firing shells of steel into the night sky as the fragile German planes flew overhead and dropped their bombs on us. The ground shook and the windows blew in. They were trying to kill us.
In those early days of the war, vast areas of Britain were razed and many thousands of civilians were killed.
Years later, when the tide had turned against Germany, day and night raids by Allied bombers sought and found revenge. Their bombs killed thousands of helpless civilians and in the process flattened and all but eliminated German towns and cities. The Nazi enemy was bloodily beaten into submission and the war ended.
I was seven years old when the war ended. Just eleven years later, as a member of an elite Scottish Regiment and just eighteen years of age, I was posted to Berlin, the one-time capital of Germany. The Berlin of photographs I had seen in war magazines. The Berlin of the films clips showing Hitler and his generals taking the salute from their massive, goose-stepping army at the Brandenburg Tor.
My great-grandmother was German. My great-grandfather was a Scotsman and a Professor of Mathematics at some German university from which they fled before the Franco – German War (1870 – 71).
Berlin in the nineteen fifties was a long way behind the Iron Curtain; I was a British soldier of occupation in the Father Land of my ancestors.
Berlin was a city divided into four sectors. British, American, French and Russian or East German. From our barracks we could see the Spandau Prison, where those Nazis who escaped execution at Nuremberg, were incarcerated. For those of us who survived the War, the inmates of Spandau were household names.
My Regiment did a month long guard at Spandau Jail. I saw first-hand the Nazi German leaders about whom I had read and been taught to hate during the war. By then they were just pathetic looking old men. No swastikas. No shiny boots and breeches. No open cars. No Heil Hitler! Just old men shuffling around.
It was the Berlin before the Wall. Before Checkpoint Charlie. Instead of the Wall there was a white line painted on the ground. Sometimes, and always at night, the Russians, would paint out the line and re-paint it meters inside the ‘West’. The next night, usually supervised by the British Military Police, it was moved back. It was a silly game at the height of the Cold War. It took our minds off hydrogen and atom bombs.
We did a Remembrance Day parade in Berlin with our Regimental Colours furled. Some Germans watched. Some of them wore poppies. Some cried. Some spat on the ground in front of us.
My novel Hearts of Stone is about a different kind of war. It’s about terrorism. The perpetration of terror. Those that perpetrate terror, as we all know too well, are called terrorists. Who is a terrorist and who is a freedom fighter? What is the difference between the two? I don’t know.
When I was in the army we were fighting terrorists in Cyprus, Kenya, Malaya (as it was then), Yemen and of course in Ireland and the UK. Most of the British Army at that time were conscripts.
My paternal grandmother was Irish and a Protestant. My paternal grandfather was a Scot but born in Liverpool in England. I don’t think my father ever went to Ireland but he could recite the history of Ireland from before King Billy. My father was also a Mason.
My father was a lovely man, a well-educated man, and the loving father of four boys. He was also an Irish Protestant bigot – but he didn’t know it – that he was a bigot that is. He was simply living the knowledge, values, attitudes and beliefs that he had learned on his Irish mother’s knee that she in turn had learned from her mother and so on down the ages in Ireland. That is how it still is, even today, in Ireland.
Some of my relatives were no doubt, and maybe still are, involved in the Troubles between the north and the south of Ireland. The terrorist war between the British North and the Republican South hasn’t really finished; they say it has. In truth, they hope it has.
Just a few months ago, as if to confound the optimists, the Real IRA or some other mad group claimed responsibility for shooting dead, two British soldiers in Northern Ireland.
If you think the Irish troubles are over in 2010, think again. Come with me to Belfast at Easter, when the Apprentice Boys march—and watch.
We came to Australia.
My wife and I, with our first daughter, came to Australia in 1967 to work as a farm hand on a wheat and sheep farm in Coorow. I had been to Ag College in England on a Returned Serviceman’s Scholarship. I grew up on a farm in North Wales.
From Coorow to Mingenew as Head Stockman to 15,000 Collinsville merinos. Our second daughter was born while we were at Mingenew.
From Mingenew to the Kimberley to manage a 1.3 million acre cattle station. Then back to Geraldton to manage 20,000 acres of wheat and sheep. Then to ICI Rural, to finish up seven years later, as national sales and marketing manager of that company, based in Melbourne.
Then, back to Perth to become the marketing director of a major Public Relations firm.
We bought our farm in 1989. We were debt free. In the early years I ran an international agribusiness consultancy and the farm. With wife, Lynne, of course!
We now have three grandchildren. A boy seventeen and twin girls who are ten years old.
We lost our farm in 2007; we were heavily in debt.
I joined the AGMates (All Good Mates) online Community in May 2009. Steve Truman was running a story on ‘Banks Behaving Badly’. I can’t remember how I stumbled across the site but there it was, an invitation to tell the world on the Internet, how we had lost our farm. How, just a couple of years previously, we had been sold up by our bank. It was a story I had never told before. It was a story that my wife and I had kept to ourselves.
In June 2009 I wrote our own ‘Banks Behaving Badly’ story which was published here on the AGMates News blog. It’s not a pretty story—it is an abject lesson for others. We lost our farm by doing nothing wrong. We made one mistake—we trusted someone, someone whom we thought was loyal and a friend. Our story will also tell why I despise most lawyers and why our legal system, is rubbish.
You must be asking by now, ‘What has all of this got to do with the price of fish, Roger?’
The answer is that I wrote two books during that time. Strange as it may seem, writing fiction was my escape from severe depression caused by the trauma of fighting to keep our life’s work, our farm.
Writing fiction was my cave— somewhere where I was safe from the world for just a while.
My depression was bad. I was given every anti-depressant known to medical science. They didn’t work—I got worse.
I had more than twelve, I lost count, Electro Convulsive Therapy (ECT) sessions. (For those who don’t know what ECT is, go and get a DVD of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—yes, they still do it! Or just Google it.) I had ECT three times a week. I was sixty-five years of age, over the recommended age I learned later. They told me ECT would make me better. It didn’t—it made me worse—I went to some bad places—got to know the Black Dog like a friend.
I stopped the ECT. Then I met a doctor who took me off all the pills and, would you believe, talked to me. I slowly got better. He saved my life. I started writing. (Go to www.Ganieda.com.au and meet the man!)
Then, when I was nearly better, I was diagnosed with cancer.
What started as one book became two. Hearts of Stone is available now on this site. The sequel, Flight to Australia, will be available in February 2010, again, on this site.
There is no trace of my illness in my writing, so I am told. It is not a story about mental illness or cancer. I was living in the real world, so I wrote fiction.
Roger Crook
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My first book Hearts of Stone is a love story that starts before WWII.
It is also a story about terrorism and religious fanaticism. Not Moslems in the twenty first century but the Christian Irish in the twentieth century. Whether Terrorist or Freedom Fighter, the ‘cause’ is as old as Ireland itself.
Brendan McGonigal exiled from Ireland as a student for his political views becomes a wealthy cattle dealer in North Wales and falls in love with Phyllis a medical student and daughter of a Welsh hill farmer. Their love further binds the ancient culture of two great Celtic nations.
Thirty years on David McGonigal, the only son of Phyllis and Brendan, serves with the SAS in Northern Ireland and later with the Home Office Counter Terrorism Unit. He leaves the army and tries to forget his former life—then one placid Saturday night in Wales, hooligans threaten the landlord of his local pub. David goes to his aid and finds that there is another sinister and dangerous agenda. The pace is frantic to stop the killing, this time in the name of God, from starting all over again.
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Flight to Australia is the sequel to “Hearts of Stone”. It brings David McGonigal and his wife Barbara to Western Australia to join his uncle Paul McGonigal and away from the threats on his life from his old enemy, the IRA
Flight to Australia is the story of David and Barbara’s first month in exile. On their first day there is a bomb threat. David fears the IRA have broken their deal—but it’s Paul that’s the target. He doesn’t know who they are—or why they want him dead—but they keep on trying.
Then David’s old boss from Counter Terrorism in the UK turns up in Perth, now leading a shadowy team from the British Foreign Office. David realises that the only thing he can be sure of in Perth—is that the sun will shine tomorrow.
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