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Out of the Blue by Val Rutt Find!
Out of the Blue is a story of first love in wartime Kent. It is a fictional story, with imagined characters, but inspired by an actual event in June 1944, when a V1 flying bomb was shot down and exploded on a camp near Charing, causing the loss of over 50 lives.
Describing how the story evolved, Val Rutt writes:
Reading the letters of survivors who had witnessed the tragedy, I started to think about the men who lost their lives that day and all the people who had been affected by it. The bereft loved ones, the survivors, local people who were sworn to secrecy.....
..... the loss of life in a Kent field that June morning is as significant a part of D-day as the Normandy landings and should be remembered.
(Out of the Blue was published earlier this year by Piccadilly Press as a 'Teen Book', and I've reserved a copy at Maidstone Library. I hope to update this blog if this website is still open when I have read the book.)
H E Bates and Flying Bombs over Kent
A tip-off from Rob led me to discover that, during World War 2, the literary career of H E Bates was given a boost when he was appointed writer-in-residence by the Air Ministry.
Initially Bates wrote a number of stories on service life, and these were published in the News Chronicle under the pseudonym Flying Officer X. (Later they were published in book form as The Greatest People in the World and How Sleep the Brave.)
Bates was also instructed to prepare an official history of the concept, design and use of the ferocious V1 and V2 flying bombs, which were being sent over from Germany in a last-ditch attempt to turn the tide of the war immediately after the D-Day landings in June 1944. Drawing on his detailed knowledge of his subject, Bates conveyed a vivid picture of these "vengeance weapons" and their impact. He described the tense atmosphere of the time, when the people of Kent, living in "V1 alley", were constantly under the shadow of these air-borne weapons; he explained their highly skilled design; he described the devastation they caused, and he showed how they were finally repulsed by the men and women of this new front-line Battle of Britain. But, in 1945, the Government immediately imposed an embargo on Bates' manuscript for 30 years. It was kept locked away in the Public Record Office where it was forgotten about until nearly 20 years after Bates' death. It was discovered in 1993 by the Kent writer Bill Ogley, who was carrying out research for a book on flying bombs. With permission from the Bates family, Bill Ogley published the manuscript through his own publishing company, Froglets, in 1994, giving it the title Flying Bombs Over England.
An article published in January 1994 in The Independent reports on this discovery:
22 November 2009 from Julia
Finds
- Pangbourne - a love affair with a gorilla
- Out of the Blue by Val Rutt
- The Kent Factor
- Grubby Tales from Beardy Ardagh
- The Men of Kent March On
- The Curse of Aphis Minimus
- One True Crime
- Why Pick Lydden?
- From Maidstone Prison to the Wide Sargasso Sea!
- Dover- Life's a Beach
- The ideal home
- The Tramping Methodist - more tramping in Kent!
- The Small Years by Frank Kendon
- Everyone Loves Rupert Bear!
- Knole
- On the write tracks in literary Kent - Day 4
- On the write tracks in literary Kent - Day 3
- On the write tracks in literary Kent - Day 2
- On the write tracks in literary Kent Day 1
- On the write tracks in literary Kent
- Penshurst is the Place
- From Country Pursuits to the Western Front
- Edmund Blunden - echoes from Yalding church bells
- Jane Austen walk
- John Knatchbull from Quarterdeck to Gallows
- Catherine Aird
- More from the tramps .....
- Van Gogh in Ramsgate?
- Tissot A Passing Storm c1876
- The Downfall of a Reading Detective
- Male Georgian/Regency authors
- Bluestocking writers
- Sketches By Boz - We must leave town!
- If You're Going to Snodland...
- The Kent Tramp Trail
- The Altar in the Loft
- Regency and Georgian Literature with a Kent Connection
- Jane Austen and Godmersham by The Rev. S. Graham Brade-Birks
- Kent Clues!
Recent posts
- Poetry dropping in Sandwich
- Reading Detectives film
- Out of the Blue - continued
- Denton Welch
- 45 London Road Sevenoaks
- To Penshurst
- Kent Finale!
- Mon 21 Sep 10.30 am DETECTIVE EVENT AT CENTRE FOR KENTISH STUDIES, MAIDSTONE
- Cat Lovers
- W H Davies
- Silence on the home front as my hard drive has died
- Jeffery Farnol
- Denton Welch, a look back to simpler times
- What Jane Austen really looked like !
- Life in the Country: With Quotations by Jane Austen and Silhouettes by Her Nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh
- First Meeting for Kent
- Jane Austen - Monster Mash Up
- Launch of Kent's Reading Detectives Team on 12 August
- Jane Austen Heritage Link
- Reading Detectives are starting soon in Kent
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