Featured Interview With Jonathan Trahair
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
Devon born and bred (but with Cornish overtones), I lived in Devon for 48 years except for school in Dorset and 9 months of fun and mayhem working on a farm in Lincolnshire. Since 2004 I’ve lived in Spain with my wife and the dog.
I haven’t always been a writer – far from it, I only published my first book on Kindle this year (2015). In 1975 I went to work on a farm in Cornwall for a year before going to agricultural college in Devon for 4 years, where I learned how to grow 2,000 hectares of potatoes – and not to go farming when I left. I’d passed my HGV test so I bought an old tipper lorry and ran a spectacularly unsuccessful haulage company for a while, then gave it all up and worked for different small companies for ten years or so during the 1980’s and 1990’s – either exporting Swiss chocolates from Switzerland to the Far East, or selling and installing industrial factory and warehouse equipment in the West Country.
Then I started to write better business computer programs than the ones we had at work, and I’ve been doing that ever since. That’s the day job. So far, anyway.
When I wasn’t doing that, I was often to be found playing the organ in a local church for Sunday services, and singing in choirs – and occasionally conducting them, too. This began at school, when I played the piano for a service in the school Chapel for the first time aged 13. By 18 I was organist of a small parish church on the south western slopes of Dartmoor, and I’ve been the organist or keyboard player of any church I’ve been to ever since then.
I am married with two daughters, one grandson, thirteen step-grandchildren and three step-great-grandchildren (at the last count). Plus the dog, of course.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I have loved reading ever since they stopped forcing me to do it at school, but especially in the last twenty years or so. I tried writing a few short things, off and on throughout my fifties. I did a short series of 6 aspects of having a log fire, called Six Pieces Of Wood. I did a short piece on my idea of what Heaven will be like. I even did a very short children’s story called Grumble And Auntie Blorat Go Shopping, based on my two year old (as he was then) grandson’s inability to say Grampa and Auntie Florence, one day when it rained and we all went to a monkey sanctuary in Dorset. Apart from Six Pieces Of Wood, which was read enthusiastically on Kindle when I gave it away for free one week, the others here have only been read by members of my family. Well, they said they had read them.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I read and re-read books from a wide variety of authors – from CS Forester (not just Hornblower but all his other books too), Bill Bryson (the travel books, Shakespeare, and his books on history and language), Jasper Fforde (the Thursday Next series, and others), Lindsey Davis (the Marcus Didius Falco series) and PG Wodehouse, Robert Harris, Cornelia Funke, Douglas Adams, Hammond Innes, and more. I keep discovering new ‘favourite authors’. My wife reads even more than I do (I have to work), and I think we’re the only private house in southern Europe with its own library.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
Just Some Old Letters is my first proper ebook. It’s about Natalie English, a young woman who at last gets a job in her home town, Kingsbridge in south Devon. Her new employer is Andy Somerton, and she becomes aware that the Somertons have never got on with her mother’s family, the Linklaters – there seems to be some vague 100-year old feud between the two families. On her first day at work she finds an old box containing some handwritten love letters and an engagement ring. When she reads the letters she begins to discover why the two families don’t get on, and when her new boss’s mother finds out who she is, Natalie is given a hard time for being in the ‘other’ family. Natalie finds more old letters and begins to work out what actually happened a hundred years ago. All sorts of things happen and it goes downhill from there on. There is a satisfying twist in the tail, however, so all is not lost.
The story is set during the time that I was writing it – Spring 2015, and I found I had to wait for certain real events to take place, such as the UK General Election, before continuing the story past that date (in case reality go in the way of a good plot).
The blurb.
Natalie English, 24, is ecstatic – she’s just got a new job. It’s a good job, exactly what she has trained for. Not only that, but she can go on living at home and helping her mother look after Great Aunt Joan.
Oh well, you can’t win them all.
Her company boss is a young and handsome single man (this is a good thing), and she comes across a bunch of old letters in a wooden box (this is not such a good thing) dating from before Great Aunt Joan was born (too long ago to contemplate).
His family and Natalie’s have never got on. Not since the First World War. And the letters from the box seem to have opened a can of worms.
Each letter she reads leads her further backwards in time, but this is not usually helpful if you want to get to the bottom of things.
She finds more boxes and more letters, which uncover some unexplained events in France during the First World War.
Is the pretty engagement ring she finds in one of the boxes the answer, or is it another problem?
When her boss’s father plans a World War I Centenary Remembrance Parade, why does it nearly cause more casualties than the original battle?
Her father’s car sales business is going through rocky times, and Natalie finds that her job and her father’s business are in competition with each other, which never makes it easy around the dinner table.
Who started the fire in the maintenance shed? Will she be able to save the company and her job? And what’s the link between a lorry driver, her boss’s granny and some old photos of Kingsbridge?
Only Natalie can unravel the mystery, clear her family’s name, save the town from itself and marry her man before the truth is lost again – this time for ever.
Just Some Old Letters is set in today’s times but focuses on some little-know goings-on during the First World War.