Tonight is World Book Night.
So…
Hello Friends, real & virtual.
As some of you may know, but most of you probably won’t, my Dad was called Jack Sharp. His father (my paternal grandfather) left him and his mother (my paternal grandmother) in the East End of London in the first decade (or possibly the second depending on whose story you believe) of the 20th century and returned to Australia. As far as I’m aware he was never heard from/of again…
His surname was Wade-Wilkins.
Bear with me, as this gets more interesting, not much more complicated & I assure you that World Book Night is relevant.
My Dad’s surname was “Sharp” (my surname, was my bother Colin’s, is my sister Maysie’s also a number of other members of our family). He acquired it after he’d spent some of his childhood & teenage years in the USA with his maternal grandparents. He was shipped out there by his mother after Mr. Wade-Wilkins quit England suddenly for Australia. Jack spent most of his childhood touring in Vaudeville around the States with his grandparents, who he thought were his parents.
So it came as a bit of a shock to him to discover on being summoned back to England as a young teenager that his mother (whom I knew as Kopi) was living in Swanage, Dorset and was married to a Major Sharp who became his stepfather. Hence the surname. He also found that he had a half sister called Pamela. My Dad was given the Major’s surname &, according to him, adopted it formally by deed poll in later life.
Why you may ask am I telling you all this on the rather public forum of Facebook?
Simply because I discovered a few years ago that I had a half cousin called William Wade-Wilkins living in Australia who is a direct descendant of my paternal biological Wade-Wilkins grandfather.
My half cousin is in his late 70s (he thinks that he’s around 76), lives some of the time in Australia, travels extensively around the world when he’s not residing there and (this is what I find the interesting bit) for over 20 years has been writing something that might be called ‘a novel’.
I told you that World Book Night was relevant.
He’s let me look at some of it & I liked what I saw. So he asked me to help him get it published. Given the nature of this fairly large body of writing I’ve suggested that we publish it virtually in the form of episodes online initially on Wattpad. www.watpad.com. You'll be able to find it by doing a search on Wattpad in General Fiction for "Albion’s Children" which is the novel's title.
I’m creating a Facebook page for the novel & him (as he confesses to being “totally rubbish at all this virtual business”). This will be up and out there, or here depending on your virtual location, sometime soon.
We hope that you enjoy reading these initial episodes of "Albion's Children-Part 1. Blue" (with more episodes to follow) & if you do that you’ll pass the link on to your friends, both real & virtual, and ask them to ‘like it’.
Gordon