Frank's bench
Description
FB Blurb
It's Armistice Day, November 11, 1940.
The Blue-Funnel liner 'Automedon', lies 250 miles from the northwest cape of Sumatra heading for Penang.
The free world is at war with Germany and Italy.
Japan is fighting China and needs only a tiny push for it to join the fight against the free world allies and turn a European conflict into the Second World War.
Stand with 16-year-old deckboy, Frank Walker and ship's carpenter Bill Diggle as they share a pair of binoculars and watch a smudge of smoke on the horizon turning into a ship heading directly for them.
Taste the dryness in their mouths as neither ship alters course to avoid what must inevitably end in collision. Hear their shouts of alarm when this ship hoists a Swastika battle ensign.
Heed the cry of Automedon's captain:
'COME ON LADS … WE'RE GOING TO FIGHT'
Then share the pain, hunger, humiliation, despair and some self-made joys, as Frank and his shipmates serve out five long years in a German prison camp.
Then groan when you learn Automedon carried the instrument that gave Japan that final push … and brought on Pearl Harbour.
A bench stands in Mariners' Park as a memorial to Frank.
So, who was Frank Walker?
Buy the book to live his life and therein to find the answer!
More details
Person
Peter Thomson has lived a rich and varied life as a soldier, commercial seafarer and businessman.
He was born under the Gemini star sign and raised in a village on the outskirts of the old Roman city of St.Albans. Humour and tease tempered the hard manual work of the family's day. Peter quickly developed his wits to give as good as he got. Whenever his father ribbed him,he would come back with -'You weren't at Mum's bedside when I was born. You were away at the beach with your mates.' It felled his father with laughter each time it was said. Thomson's father was fighting the rear guard action at Dunkirk when Peter came into the world. Some beach!
Motivated by unfairness and injustice in our society, Peter will often craft his fiction around real events. 'Nobody has gone to jail yet for engineering the sub-prime mortgage scam. That has to be wrong.' He makes the point along with an explanation of how it happeend and the unregulated corporate greed that engineered it in the second volume of his 'The Stopover' series.
He now lives in South West France with his wife and a colony of feral cuts. When not writing articles and books, Peter grows enormous quantities of fruit and vegetables.
In addiiton to continuing The Stopover series, Peter's other work in progress - Drive For Freedom - about an Afghan family's flight from evil.
