Bernard Ashley
About Author
Bernard Ashley lives in Charlton, south east London, only a street or so from where he was born. He was educated at the Roan School, Blackheath and Sir Joseph Williamson's Mathematical School, Rochester.
After his National Service in the RAF, Bernard trained to teach and specialized in Drama. His teaching career included schools in Kent, Hertfordshire, Newham and Greenwich, and he was head teacher for thirty years.
He is now writing full time. His first novel, The Trouble with Donovan Croft (OUP), was published in 1974 and won the 'Other' Award, an alternative to the Carnegie Medal (for which he has been shortlisted three times).
He has written another 16 novels since then and he has a reputation as a 'gritty' writer in sympathy with the under-dog. In Margaret Meek's view he gets inside children's heads, who say that this is what it's like for them.
Philip Pullman, who reviewed Of Tiger Without Teeth in The Guardian, wrote:
'A commonplace setting, an everyday situation, ordinary characters. Bernard Ashley's great gift is to turn what seems to be low-key realism into something much stronger and more resonant. It has something to do with empathy, compassion, an undimmed thirst for decency and justice. In a way, Ashley is doing what 'Play for Today' used to do when TV was a medium that connected honestly with its own time, and what so few artists do now: using realism in the service of moral concern.'
Johnnie's Blitz (Barn Owl) drew on his wartime experiences as a child in and around London; while Little Soldier (Orchard) sums up his writing: a pacy plot with an emotional turning point, a theme that concerns him, and characters that grip as real people. It was shortlisted for The Guardian young fiction prize and for the Carnegie Medal.
His latest novel is Down to the Wire - a thriller, the second of the Ben Maddox stories.
Bernard has also written picture books including Double the Love (illustrated by Carol Thompson) from Orchard, Growing Good (Bloomsbury), Cleversticks and A Present for Paul (Harper Collins). Tamarind published The Bush, illustrated by Lynne Willey.
His popular stories for young readers include Dinner Ladies Don't Count (Puffin), Justin and the Demon Drop Kick, and I'm Trying to Tell You (both Happy Cat).
Bernard has also written for television, including Running Scared (from which he wrote the novel), The Country Boy (BBC) and his adaptation of his own Dodgem.
Stage plays include The Old Woman Who Lived in A Cola Can (Edinburgh Festival and tour), The Secret of Theodore Brown (Unicorn Theatre for Children in the West End), and Little Soldier (published by Heinemann). He is on the Board of Greenwich Theatre.
A strong family man, Bernard is married to Iris Ashley, a former London headteacher, and they have three sons. Their eldest son, Chris, also a headteacher, co-wrote with Bernard the TV series Three Seven Eleven (Granada). David is a London headteacher and an expert on children's reading; and Jonathan is an actor, writer and director.
Bernard and Iris have four grandchildren, Paul, Carl, Rosie and Luke.
Author link
Interview
SHADOW OF THE ZEPPELIN
ORCHARD BOOKS
MAY 2014
Bernard Ashley has written well over fifty books since his 1974 debut The Trouble with Donovan Croft, which, along with more than thirty other of his titles, is still in print; this year Shadow of the Zeppelin has joined that extensive list.
This new story, which takes place during the First World War, has three distinct 'scenes of action': Woolwich, where the book's hero, Freddie Castle, lives, the front line in France, where Freddie's older brother is part of a gun battery crew, and on one of the massive Zeppelin airships the Kaiser sent across the Channel to drop bombs on London.
While this year's centenary of the outbreak of the Great War makes setting a novel at that time something of a no-brainer, Bernard's authorial track record made him an obvious choice when Orchard were casting around for a writer to do just that. "It was actually my publisher who asked if I'd ever thought about writing a World War I story," he says; he hadn't, although he had written several World War II stories, and enjoyed doing them, making use of incidents and events from his own childhood in them.
"I didn't have to think about it very long because the two experiences, World War I and World War II, sort of ran into one another for me," Bernard continues. "I was never 'bombed out', as the phrase goes, but I was certainly bombed at; I'd been in London, in an air raid shelter - not that they had them when the Zeppelins flew - and heard the bombs falling in the streets around us."
In that respect, direct experience is all you need, but when you don't have the experience of, say, piloting a Zeppelin airship, or loading, aiming and firing a field artillery weapon, research is what you have to do. But where do you begin? Bernard's mother remembered the Zeppelins flying over Woolwich in World War 1, and he had an aunt who used to tell him about a house near where she lived that was destroyed by a Zeppelin. "So", he says, "I thought that was where I wanted to start the story".
It did help that a lot of the aerial bombing of London was concentrated on an area close to where he lives now: the Royal Arsenal. This was an armaments and munitions factory that, at the time the First War, covered over a thousand acres and employed nearly 80,000 people. "So I could begin to do my research locally", says Bernard. "I found out about a house in Eltham, on an estate that was built in 1915 for people to live who worked at the Royal Arsenal, which was bombed by a Zeppelin in August 1916... and that's the house Freddie lives in in the book.
"In the book, Freddie's father, Sam Castle, works at the Royal Arsenal making bullets, and when I found my Granddad's death certificate it said 'former explosives worker', so he actually did the job Freddie's father did."
He worked his way out from the Royal Arsenal, expanding his story "...and then I thought that I wanted to show things from a German perspective as well, which of course would have to be in a Zeppelin," he says, "and I invented the character of Ernst Stender and his side of the story." This, in many ways, is the most fascinating side of Bernard's story, as you rarely get to see a war from the enemy's perspective. On top of which, you also get to fly in a Zeppelin and after reading the book you do come away with the impression that Bernard himself might actually be able to pilot one. True? "Well, I know how a Zeppelin flies," he laughs, "but don't put me in command!"
There are times when he makes it sound as if there was every reason why these behemoths were called 'airships' as being on board was like being in a flying boat - but one which was kept aloft by vast amounts of hydrogen, a highly combustible gas. "The most fascinating piece of research", he says, "was about the bullets the British used against the Zeppelins towards the end of the war. What did for Zeppelins was the invention, by a man called Pomeroy, a New Zealander, of exploding bullets."
Bernard had assumed, before he started the research for the book, that a Zeppelin was a single,huge balloon of hydrogen gas, when the truth turned out to be that it actually had up to sixteen individual 'cells'. "Ordinary bullets just went through the outer covering, making a tiny little hole, and through a cell," he explains, "only causing a small leak and not making much difference."
There a number of moments in the book that pull you up, prompting you to remember that this all taking place a hundred years ago, when the world was such a different place in so many ways, and I wondered whether it had hard work doing this. "I suppose it was," he says. "If you think about it, in 1916 they'd only had cars for fourteen or fifteen years,and the Wright brothers had first flown just thirteen years before."
Taking into account all the research he did, including a trip to the battlefields in France to get a feel of what it must have been like for Freddie's brother, Will, how long did the book take to write? "I'd say about a year," says Bernard. "I'd finished the research last April when I went to the Somme, which was the last bit of it. It wasn't the full trench experience, more like doing a recce for a film."
While some books can sink under the weight of the research behind them, Shadow of the Zeppelin, like the airship of the title, floats. It is a great read.
Shadow of the Zeppelin
