It is 1798 and our story begins on an early day in autumn after some of the wettest summer days on record. Admiral Nelson is at last beginning to win the war at sea against the French and life in the English countryside should be good. But it isn't.In a quiet Devonshire valley a family lives and works peacefully at their flour milling business. On the hill above their small cottage stands a windmill, a robust tower that is the heart of their business. It is old, built nearly a hundred years ago, but in the hands of the master miller it produces flour that is famous for its quality throughout the south of the England.Not very far away to the West, is the busy, bustling River Tamar, an important trader's waterway and the ancient border between Britain and Cornwall. To the North of the Mill, is a vast estate owned by Sir Jeremy Wyke, a domain that the mill had once been a part of.England's Lords and countryside landlords are losing their manpower to the autocratic war-machine, as well as having their purses bled dry to finance this terrible conflict and many of them are approaching bankruptcy with remarkable speed.Our friends at the mill fall foul of the corrupt, desperate plans of Sir Jeremy that are designed to reclaim the land on which the mill stands and to absorb the income that it generates. And for Joseph Goss, the owner and the family's Master Miller, that awful day began the same as countless others before it. Alan was born in Poole, Dorset, England on October 1st 1948. As a child, he lived in Canada for a few years in what was then a tiny settlement called Malton near Toronto, Ontario. He went to his first school in the village, a one-room school that was quite basic but typical of the times, in those outlying areas of the Canadian countryside.Later in life he travelled to Western Australia where he worked as a design draughtsman and, in his spare-time, played drums with a very active band called 'Unicorn'.Eventually, Alan returned to England, where he found a winter season of high unemployment and a frosty cold that he'd forgotten about. After a couple of dead-end jobs he joined the Royal Navy and quickly worked his way up to become a Chief Petty Officer.His first ship was involved in the brief skirmish of the mid 1970s that they called the "Cod War". He should have seen the trend, because a few years later he was involved in the Falklands Conflict while serving on the frigate, HMS Argonaut. They were hit by two enormous bombs within minutes of the first day of action. One landed in the boiler room and the other became lodged in an ammunition magazine. Luckily neither of these devices exploded, but unfortunately two of our gunners were killed. One of them was just twenty-one years old that day.Alan's writing began some years later when, as part of a team producing Technical Handbooks, he began to experiment with fiction and wrote a bag-full of short stories. The experiments continued until 2010 when he set out to use his new-found skills in a second career.Alan now lives with his wife Stella in a quiet part of central Brittany, surrounded by books, forests, fields and their precious dogs, Elsa, Jester and Monty.He still plays drums occasionally too.
