IN BED WITH JAMES HEWITT
Mike Walsh
I doubt if there is anywhere where you will find people as interesting as our neighbours scattered along Spain’s Costa communities. It is a ghost-writer’s dream to live and write here.
Before re-locating to Spain, I fantasised about a sun-kissed veranda, typewriter, and a glass of wine to my right and a blonde on my left. My lovely wife is a brunette but everything else is much as I wished for.
Writing runs in the family. My father, a lifelong friend of Irish playwright Sean O’ Casey, was an associate of Ernest Hemingway during Spain’s Civil War. He and my mother, another literati, tutored me.
The ghost-writer applies his skills to bring to life the stories of others. Most authors engage ghost-writers. The author sets out the plot and the ghost fills the gaps. When I become involved in an author’s story, I share their experience. Imagination and empathy are essential tools of ghost-writing.
My clients include a German who, as a child, survived the blitz on Germany. As it was far more intense and destructive than was the war on the West, it was enlightening to see it from an ordinary German’s perspective. What a story of Cynthia’s. Suffering a paedophile for a husband, she lived life on the run to avoid Social Services abducting her children.
Chris Nand started life in a primitive Fijian South Sea Islands village. Using his fists as a professional boxer to save his fare he followed his dream to England where he met the Beatles (and me) and then to Spain.
We met by chance nearly fifty years later. Such was the romance threaded into his story that it became two books in one. Then there was Nina born into a boma (kraal) in Zambia. Out of Africa, the story of her struggle to make a better life for herself would have you cheering her on from your armchair.
There were times when, to compose myself, I left my keyboard when writing about Richard. As a child, accused of a minor social sin he was sentenced to four years confinement in a place of correction run by so-called Christian Brothers. I wept as I wrote.
A Swedish client penned a thoroughly engaging novel as did Will, an ex-London police officer. Yes, my writing career has taken me on multiple diving exhibitions off South Africa’s coasts, through the first Afghan wars, and revealed a murder most foul that (may have) occurred on the Costa del Sol.
Talking of where the bodies are buried one of my clients; Barbara Isaacs worked with me on her memoirs. A respectable English civil servant, due to marital circumstances she became hooked on swinging group sex and prostitution. Leaving nothing to the imagination all is revealed including her steamy session with James Hewitt, Princess Di’s ex-lover. As Will Shakespeare surmised: ‘It is all part of life’s rich tapestry.’
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Michael Walsh. www.michaelwalsh.es keyboardcosmetics@gmail.com