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After a lifetime of experience, including flying in Bomber Command during World War II, emigrating to New Zealand and decades of dealing with criminals, it’s no surprise that Warkworth’s Brian Allen has stories to tell. However, whether they’re macabre tales for adults or whimsical rhymes for children, Brian’s books are pure fiction. At 89 he’s finally found time to put his thoughts together under three diverse titles, all released this year. Thanks to the digital age, and a US-based online book marketing company, they’re available almost instantly in print and in digital form around the globe. After just a couple of months, he’s getting a financial return on projects that he told Adele Thackray have already paid off in terms of the pleasure and personal satisfaction of getting them done.
My father was a full time author who occasionally wrote novels and did a lot of ghost writing of biographies, along with stories and articles for the many weekly magazines of the 1930s and 40s, but I didn’t begin writing myself until I retired.
I was brought up in small towns close to London and always liked reading and writing, but I wasn’t brilliant at school, which I didn’t much enjoy. I learnt Latin, Greek and French, and also woodwork, carpentry and carving. The latter remain among my greatest interests today. When World War II began, I left school to work in various jobs until I was old enough to join the air force at 19.
As a wireless operator/air gunner, I flew in a four-engine Stirling bomber. This included a few months flying over Germany with Bomber Command, before being diverted to towing gliders, supplying the Maquis (the French Resistance) and dropping paratroopers at the likes of the Battle of Arnhem and D-Day’s Normandy Landings. Once we crashed on takeoff and appropriately, ended up in a bomb dump. The aircraft was a write off, but I wasn’t injured.
After the war, I married my first wife, Hilda and started a market garden in Suffolk. I have loved gardening ever since my father gave me my own patch and encouraged me to put in stuff like radishes and nasturtiums, that you just throw down and it grows. However, it was hard for small operators to compete with big companies that began to take over the region’s vegetable production, and post-war England wasn’t an easy place to live. Emigrating to New Zealand turned out to be the best thing we ever did.
We docked in Wellington in 1952 with £40 and our eldest son. Another son was later born in New Zealand. I went to work on Waikato farms and then in a dairy factory, which I particularly enjoyed. The company planned to put me through Massey University until a pleural effusion (fluid in my chest cavity) put me in hospital for about six months.
I got back to work as a government clerk before becoming an accountant for a Hamilton grain merchant, where I handled a turnover of around £1.5 million ($3m) with no qualification other than an accounting book I bought. When the firm started to collapse (not due to my book keeping) I decided to follow the example of an aunt I liked and become a probation officer. I stayed in the Hamilton Probation Service for about 30 years, eventually becoming regional manager and meeting Marie, another probation officer. We married in 1983, after Hilda died.
We dealt with all sorts of offenders, writing reports, making recommendations to the court as to whether people were likely to respond to probation, and supervising people when they came out of prison. Inevitably, some got cross. One rather difficult gentleman waved his fist at me and said, “I don’t know who you are but I hate all probation officers, especially tall ones.” As I’m six foot, I hastily sat down and said “you’re alright now then?” Luckily, he then sat down too. You can defuse most things, but sometimes people are just plain nasty.
First you have to listen to people and while you don’t advise them what to do, you may point out various options they could follow and the likely outcomes. I helped one perpetual thief calculate that between his income and his time in prison he was only earning about $50 a month. I suggested he either had to become a much more capable burglar or should take up a steady job. It’s a silly example, but it’s important to look at the results of your actions.
In the early days probation was a chance for someone to show that they could behave themselves and that it wasn’t necessary to lock them up. The focus used to be on first offenders, with the hope of diverting them from a life of crime by assisting them to realise the futility of their ways. However, limited resources are now targeted at the most serious offenders. I feel particularly sorry for Department of Corrections staff involved in the upcoming release of a recidivist sex offender in Whanganui. It’s an intractable problem, the really dangerous offender who must be released under law. Like doctors, probation officers do their best to put things right, but they can’t guarantee what will happen in the future.
When I retired in 1985 we moved to Red Beach before coming to Warkworth in 2007 for a more rural lifestyle on a hectare of land, closer to The Cottages holiday accommodation we rent out at Scotts Landing. This finally allowed me time to write.
Rickety Rackety Rhymes is my latest book and consists of 34 poems for young children, written largely in rhyming couplets, which have a cheerful sound, are easy to read and simple to remember. They’re silly, funny tales of people and animals that remind me of the sort of things my father used to say. I like poor old Monty Mouse trying to find himself a winter house and Gus the Hippopotamus who has run out of water, but I don’t believe children should be condescended to. It doesn’t matter if you use the odd word that might be strange to them or has a few more syllables, it just helps them learn.
My first book, Brain Food and Other Tales, is a collection of compelling, but rather sinister, short stories for adults and took over a year to compile. There is at least one happy story of friendship, although still with a twist in its tale. My second book, Dubious Definitions – a dictionary of misinterpretation, contorts the meanings of over 1000 words and may be enjoyed by lateral thinkers, who love words, cryptic ideas and a laugh.
Marie is my editor. You can’t effectively edit your own work. The copy then goes to the United States company that markets and promote the books around the world, making them available in paperback through major wholesalers like Amazon, Ingram Books and UK Book Depository, as well as in digital format for Kindle and all other e-book platforms. I make an up up-front contribution towards production costs and get a share of the profit from sales.
Brain Food has only been listed for a month or two, but it’s doing reasonably well in both forms. I also contacted every library in NZ and most of the two-thirds that replied bought copies. I’m not going to sell thousands, but with a bit of luck, I might sell a few hundred. I don’t expect to make a lot of money, but I have found it a lot of fun and definitely plan to write more.
