David Gilman has had an enormously impressive variety of jobs - from firefighter to professional photographer, from soldier in the Parachute Regiment's Reconnaissance Platoon to a Marketing Manager for Penguin South Africa. He is also a successful television screenwriter. From 2000 until 2009 he was principal writer on A Touch Of Frost. He has lived and travelled the world gathering inspiration for his exotic children's adventure series along the way. Now, David is based in Devon, where he lives with his wife, three cats and a cantankerous old Land Rover.
David writes:
I wrote my first story titled: The Runaway Sixpence, when I was six years old. Narrated in the first person it followed the adventures of a sixpence as it rolled through the town and countryside, eventually it was swallowed by a cow and died. My teacher was adamant that the story could not be told in that manner if the protagonist was dead. I think she lacked imagination. And it took me twenty-five years before I wrote another story... but, in the meantime I was a tad busy
More?
I grew up in Liverpool and North Wales, a life of varied fortunes – from living in a tiny flat above the local fish and chip shop to a country house with horses. My family moved house about every six months because of my father’s business, which also meant a new school after every move, so I have a lot of sympathy for young people who are shunted around. Hang in there! If an uneducated fool like me can get this far …
From about the age of four I would go missing on a regular basis. I drove my parents sick with worry. Perhaps I had a karmic gene that enticed me to find more interesting experiences around the next corner, and the one after that. Luckily, my father always seemed to be there when I needed him most – rescuing me from the top of a sinking slag heap when I was six, talking me down from where I was stuck up very high trees and saving me from drowning when, at the age of nine, I attempted to swim the Mediterranean. As I grew older I seized every opportunity to escape school and walk and climb in the mountains and secrete myself in the city library where there was another kind of freedom hidden in all those books.
I’m convinced that reading helps to socialize even the most disadvantaged or disruptive child and makes an enormous difference to communication skills. Reading lights up synapses other activities can’t reach! And I’ve always needed as much illumination as I can get. After a dozen schools in half as many years my final school eventually yielded a teacher who nurtured the fast-dimming potential he saw in me. I was twelve when Mr English, my Latin master, taught me Ancient Greek & Roman History. Here, at last, was the vivid, scholarly interest I craved. My unruly mind began its first steps in concentrated effort, due to the love of the subject and the caring skills of a quietly spoken, impeccably mannered, wonderful teacher.
My life, I thought, was finally settled, but when bombshells hit families it is difficult to know at the time whether Fate is really as cruel as it seems. We were planning to go to Canada when my mother had a horrific car crash and, by the time she recovered, my father had lost his business. We were financially ruined. My mother, my younger sister and baby brother and I left our home with only a suitcase of clothes. My father went to Africa to start over and we went to live in a boarding house. The tenement had no inside sanitation, just a brick-built, unlit toilet at the end of the yard. I shared the fourth floor attic room with one of the lodgers. It was a far cry from our country house, my caring teacher and my school friends.
Having played rugby for the North Wales schools’ team, I was physically strong and probably looked older than my almost-fifteen years. I got a job working the early morning shift in a dairy. It was November, freezing cold and I started at 3 a.m. Standing in the open, under a corrugated iron roof, I joined the bottling line, loading milk bottles into crates. It was a rude awakening into the harsh reality of the world, but my £7 per week helped keep the family going, while my mother worked the evening shift in the local cinema. At least the tickets were free.
I shared the fourth-floor attic bedroom of a boarding house that had no bathroom facilities or running water. It was a long haul out into the yard with a lantern to the toilet. By the end of the year we joined my father in South Africa. I did not return to school, but worked in odd jobs – the first being in a small-town clothing emporium, where I learned to measure men for their trousers and suits. At that time an oil pipeline was being laid across the country and tough-looking Canadian welders would come into the store with rolls of cash. Hard cash for tough men doing a demanding job. I liked their roughneck manner. It confirmed what I already knew: measuring inside legs did not fit my emotional profile.
I left home when I was sixteen and drove a battered 1940s Ford car, ferrying Zulu and Pondo construction labourers to and from their work in the countryside. They would cling on the running boards for dear life as I roared across the empty veld tracks and despite a few of them falling off on that final downhill bend, they thought it great fun. Earning a living wasn’t easy. A white boy without qualifications in apartheid South Africa – I was definitely close to the bottom of the social ladder. I applied for various interesting jobs – trainee game ranger, junior crime reporter – and passed their entrance exams, but was eventually rejected because I did not hold any educational qualifications.
It’s an old cliché, but desperate times demanded desperate measures. Lying about my age seemed a good idea. I signed up as traffic cop, telling them I was over their twenty-one-year lower age limit. The job had its moments – one of which was a frightening confrontation with Congo mercenaries. Remember the part where I said reading helped your communication skills? I talked my way out of that one! Control freak that I am, I was well-suited to standing in the middle of a frenetically busy road controlling multiple streams of traffic. After a year, having brought the city to a gridlocked standstill, I resigned when an editor starting a new weekly magazine took me on. This was to be a brief working relationship. As I arrived for work Special Branch detectives raided his office. He had been on their ‘wanted list’ for subversive activities for a long time. My career as a trainee journalist lasted all of five minutes after a rather stomach-churning interview with apes in suites.
Being unemployed was becoming a habit. I learned that the Fire & Rescue Service were recruiting, providing the department’s physical and written tests could be passed. Once again, there was a lower age limit of twenty-one – I think I was still a few months away from my eighteenth birthday by this stage. Having lied about my age to become a traffic cop I had no choice but to continue the deception – and said I was twenty-three. What a job! Fifteen-hour night shifts, often doubling into day shifts without overtime. It was dangerous, ill-equipped and badly paid work. But don’t let anyone tell you it’s not enormous fun when you sit in a fire engine as that bell and siren clears traffic out of your way. When not attending factory, shipping and residential fires we were on ambulance crew roster in which we served the whole spectrum of society – from collecting wealthy white urbanites to going deep into the poverty of the unlit African and Asian townships. I remember the first time I delivered a baby. I don’t know who was the more scared – the poor infant being brought into this world or me.
My time with the Fire and Rescue Service was probably the most important learning curve of my young life. It was a time of guns and knives, hard men and brutal police. I witnessed human behaviour at its best and worse, experienced shocking and lethal violence, saw grotesque injuries and had frightening encounters. Finally though, events caught up with me. I passed my next set of fire service exams and was earmarked as a Station Officer trainee. Continuing would have uncovered the fact that I was still under age. Fate, as always, arranged an escape plan. My friend, a photographer for a magazine company, gave me a tip-off that they needed another photographer. I didn’t know one end of a camera from another, but he taught me as much as he could as quickly as he could and then stood as guarantor so I could go into debt and buy the equipment I needed. From there on it was the high life. Parties, models, and money that seemed to disappear quickly. I never realised I had so many friends in need of a loan. But that high-end lifestyle had a strange, uneasy effect on me. I felt out of touch with the ‘real’ world and after a potentially fatal incident involving a firearm, I turned my back on it. Returning to England with very little money, but still in one piece, I was soon on newspaper and broadcasters’ shortlists as a photographer and cameraman – but the wait was too long for my impatience – and after a year or so of driving lorries and then bulldozers in the construction industry, I passed an entrance exam (thank heavens for libraries) to become a farmer in Canada, but when the Canadian government changed their policy I left for Australia. I definitely need far horizons.
I was now really twenty-one years old.
Let’s zip through the rest fairly quickly and save bandwidth. Australia was (and still is) a welcoming and generous country, like the USA, for those immigrants willing to work hard. I did a stint as a logger in the karri forests and from there – just by way of a change – as a window dresser for a department store; then, once again, as a photographer in an advertising agency.
Four years later, and with the IRA terrorists murdering people in Britain I returned home and signed up for the British army. I was twenty-six – the extreme age limit. For once in my life I was too old. For some crazy reason I thought I was fit enough to tackle the selection course for the Paras. Where did I get that idea from? I somehow managed to stagger through the training and after some time in the battalion I joined Patrol Company and the Reconnaissance Platoon.
After a few years I left with the idea of becoming a writer. I’m not sure which is the more difficult – getting through the Paras selection or breaking in as a writer, especially for someone who hates sitting at a desk. A marriage took me back to South Africa where I worked as a book salesman and, after attending night school for some long overdue qualifications, as a regional marketing manager for an international publishing company.
During those years I wrote every night and every weekend after work. There were no “how to” books or writing courses – you couldn’t even get your hands on a script to see how it was formatted. But, after many radio plays and serials I began writing my own multi-stranded television series.
Fast forwarding a few more years brings me to sitting at this desk, writing these words.
Looking over this it feels as though a few lifetimes have been compressed into a short space of time.
Or is that called speed reading?
