Starlight is a short and deceptively simple story, making use of the author’s deep familiarity with the world of the canals:

Harry Turner is eleven years old, and his world is about to be turned upside-down. His parents are moving, leaving the only home he’s known, to live in a tiny village near the Oxford Canal. Uprooted from school and friends, he despairs of finding any agreeable company in his new home – until he meets Jake Woodrow, the son of the local lock-keeper.

From shaky beginnings, their friendship develops rapidly through the long, hot summer of 1955 into a deep, strong bond – a bond whose strength is to be tested in spectacular fashion. The drama and tension of two young boys, each seeking for friendship in spite of their widely differing backgrounds and circumstances, takes place against a backdrop of carefully- researched factual events; and real characters, working boatmen of the time, add a spice of authenticity to Geoffrey Lewis’ tale.

The mood ranges from heartwarming humour to unbearable poignancy as he leads the reader through that heat-wave, as it was seen by a young schoolboy in the idyllic setting of an Oxfordshire village.

Starlight reverses the balance of the David Russell stories: Told in the first person by Harry himself, it is the adults who are the secondary characters.

His father is the owner of an engineering company, with a factory in the town of Kidlington, just north of Oxford itself; his mother has no need to work. Harry is the only child; comfortable perhaps rather than really wealthy, his lifestyle, the surroundings he takes for granted are in dramatic contrast to those of Jake. Son of the poorly-paid canal employee, an ex-boatman who has lost an arm in a boating accident, their way of life is basic in the extreme, partly because the lock cottage has no gas or electricity, nor any road access. Shunned by his classmates as a ‘dirty boatee’, his response to Harry is at first very wary, while Harry, as the unknown ‘new boy’, senses a kindred spirit in the apparently self-reliant loner. As their friendship grows, each shows his strengths and vulnerabilities, until they are virtually inseparable.

But then, tragedy strikes…


STARLIGHT sample chapter:

"I live here now.

Things have changed over the years, at Burdon Lock – I have mains electricity now, a television set, DVD player, washing machine and drier, a fridge-freezer, even a microwave oven, although I don’t use that much. And I have gas for my cooking, even if it is delivered by a man with a big tanker who backs carefully down my lane and connects his long black umbilical to a tank discretely hidden behind the hedge. Inside, the rooms are much as I remember them, although brightened up and rearranged many times over by the different owners. The old Victorian fireplace and mantle are still there in the living room; now, in pride of place at the centre of the mantleshelf, stands a beautiful hand-made model of an old working boat…

Perhaps it was blind chance, that led me back to live in the place of my childhood’s greatest happiness, and its greatest sorrow. But, although I am not a religious man, I do believe that there is some kind of outside influence, a power which can and does guide our faltering steps through the journey of life: So – was it chance, or destiny, which led me to make that rare visit to the village, to that meeting outside the long-closed post office with old Mabel Caddick? I remember her as an energetic, cheerful housewife in her thirties; she’s over eighty, now. In the course of conversation, she asked, did I know that the old lock cottage was up for sale? I hadn’t known – but I made it my business to find out, to contact the agent for the details; and to persuade Mary that this really was the place where we wanted to live, now that Sarah, our youngest, was ready to fly the nest.
We got it at a good price, too. Houses in the middle of nowhere, still more than a mile from the nearest vestiges of civilisation, probably aren’t too easy to sell, even if one of the previous owners had laid in a proper crushed-stone roadway, and converted the larger of Ernie Woodrow’s old store sheds into a two-car garage. Not that I need two cars now, of course, not since my Mary’s been gone. We had almost six years here, together. The children keep on at me to move, to go and live with one of them, or at least to buy myself a little place somewhere else – they’re afraid the memories will get to me, I suppose, the thought of her short, hard struggle against that final illness; or the being alone here, where we’d had so many happy times in those last years. But I still love it here; I like to meet, chat with, the people who come through the lock – all holiday-makers, now, of course. The likes of old Joe Skinner, Frank Shine, Albert Beechey and the rest are long gone. And sometimes, of an evening, I let the starlight on the still water take me back to those days of my childhood…"

From the press:

‘Compulsive Reading’
Roger Wickham

‘A Beautiful Tale, Beautifully Told’
Amherst Publishing

‘I’m sending the bill for the box of tissues.’
Pamela McManus

Starlight was published on September 5th, 2005, at a cover price of £6.99 for the paperback. ISBN is 0-9545624-5-3; the title is listed on Bookdata. Copies may be obtained through any good bookshop, or direct from the publisher’s distributor:

T&G Fulfilment Ltd,

9 Mackay Trading Estate, Station Approach,
Bicester, Oxon OX26 6BZ
Tel: 01869-369505 email: sales@tgfulfilment.co.uk
In the event of difficulty, please contact the publishers.