Author(s): Roy Watkins

Literature | CB Editions

I hear everything. I hear for miles and miles. I can hear everything that ever happened. Some nights, the fog bell. That’s all right if the ships are safe. It’s the drummer I can’t abide. I say it in my prayers, Please not the drummer, but that makes no difference. He’s far off when I first hear him, over the stile at the sea bank, and slowly he comes closer, closer and louder, down the grass track between the cornfields, beating a drum as he comes along.

One morning in 1969 Roy Watkins woke up to find words on the sheet of paper he had left in his typewriter before going to sleep: ‘an incoherent jumble of apparently unconnected phrases about fire, explosions, soldiers, and railway lines’.

The words recorded an actual event in Watkins’s life that took place just before his third birthday. Simple Annals is informed by these and other images and memories that surfaced over the following years: the sounds and songs, scrapes and surprises, of childhood in an ordinary but loving family in Lancashire in the 1940s and early 50s, brought to the page with an almost pre-verbal immediacy.

‘What I most admire is his emotional delicacy and perceptiveness. The spare but telling descriptions of his parents’ relationship when his father comes home from the war, and the evocation of the character of his friend’s mother and his fascination and then full love for her, wonderfully conveyed by a quote from Isaac Babel: “‘The love and jealousy of a ten-year-old boy are in every way the same as the love and jealousy of a grown-up.’ And I would add: and perhaps more painful, since the ten-year-old has also the pain of knowing himself to be a child.”’
     – Ruth Fainlight

‘The memoir of the world as seen by a child with its partialities and misapprehensions belongs to a distinguished tradition, from Great Expectations to Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist and Frank O’Connor’s An Only Child, and from What Maisie Knew to The Death of the Heart. But Watkins does something new and remarkable. He gives a more faithful representation of the child’s perceptions by often leaving its confusions unresolved . . . The ultimate strength of this marvellous book is founded on the author’s insistence that he ‘invented nothing: NO fiction’. Everything – real and imaginary - is drawn from faithful recall. This short memoir is an absorbing masterpiece which sustains over its 127 pages the lyric intensity of the great practitioners of the short story.’
     – Bernard O’Donoghue

‘The past is a banana. It’s extraordinary how often that once exotic fruit features in a wartime memoir. In Roy Watkins’s case, it comes home from Alexandria in his father’s kitbag, blackened and mysterious. Either the first banana since the war was a common but perhaps even epiphanic experience, or it is an urban legend. So vivid and unvarnished is Watkins’s recall that one tends to believe there is truth in it after all.
    ‘The past is also a banana skin. The temptation to rationalise and explain, to do a little Freudian voice-leading, can be almost overwhelming. Miraculously, Watkins avoids that altogether, ending his memoir in his eleventh year so as to avoid any attempt to give artificial coherence or psychological significance to his memories. They are simply delivered … It’s an astonishing achievement.’
     – Brian Morton, Times Literary Supplement

‘There isn’t an iota of sentiment or nostalgia in his recollection partly because the past isn’t embalmed but seen as an ecstatic and traumatic living root and presence in the writer’s being ... Watkins is entirely original and this book is a masterpiece.’
     – Nuzhat Bukhari (full text here)

Roy Watkins was born near Southport, Lancashire, in December 1939. After spending the early war years with his Welsh grandparents in Liverpool, he was carried back to his birthplace by his mother to escape the Blitz.
In 1966, Faber & Faber published some of his short stories, after which he taught in secondary schools, then left England for the USA to attend Columbia University Graduate School of Arts. After teaching at various universities he moved with his wife, Eve, to Wales, where they founded a letterpress publishing concern, Embers Handpress, printing and binding books of poetry and translation by hand.
He retired in 2014, and now lives in northern France