Whilst Covid 19 has dealt death and misery around the world, and we anxiously await a vaccine that will enable a return to life as we knew it, or a semblance of that, what can we take from lockdown? During those weeks when we clapped the NHS on Thursday evenings, like many I was struck by how clear and clean the air felt. The almost complete absence of air and road traffic seemed to signpost a future of cleaner energy and transport alternatives.

I am one of the lucky few who rather enjoyed lockdown, because I finished my novel. It had been a long journey. My first book, Project Sponsorship, was commissioned by Jonathan Norman of what was then Gower Publishing, now Routledge, back in 2009, and published in 2010. The agony and ecstasy of writing left me wanting more, so I enrolled on the Open University Creative Writing course, and later the advanced course. My first TMA (Tutor Marked Assignment) didn’t get a great mark, but my second did and was later published in an anthology, Something Hidden.

During my creative writing studies I read George Malcolm Thomson’s biography of Sir Francis Drake, and discovered Sir Anthony Standen. As Standen is a family name I became interested. “The time had come when Walsingham was no longer satisfied with news that came to him at second-hand, whether from Santa Cruz’s kitchen or from the Governor of Guernsey’s reports of the gossip on Breton ships or in Rouen taverns. He needed an accurate and detailed stream of information about the number of Philip’s ships, their tonnage, the sailors who would man them and the soldiers they would carry. Thanks above all to Standen, he got what he wanted.”

I read Standen’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and it was the most astonishing story I had read. But it didn’t seem to really explain what this remarkable man was about. I kept asking myself why did he do that, and how did he do that. I visited the British Library to read accounts by Venetian diplomats concerning Standen. I read Daphne Du Maurier’s Golden Lads, in which Standen features. I read documents from the archives of the Duke of Tuscany, for whom Standen worked for a time, and then I started to write.

I tried hard, but I didn’t enjoy it. The completion of chapter two coincided with my retirement, and whilst you might think I would then really start making progress, in fact I decided I should use my retirement for sailing whilst my health was good. When lockdown arrived it took me only a few days to realise I had unfinished business. I am ashamed to say that it took my wife Claire to say, ‘ditch the first two chapters, start in the middle of the action.’ I knew that, how could I have missed that? Perhaps I just had to get to know Standen and live the backstory. My novel has the working title The Spy Who Sank the Armada. It is not a biography, but rather an Elizabethan spy novel. It is true to the known facts of Standen’s life as well as that period of history, but I have tried to answer my questions, why and how. Now I start down the road towards publication. I’ll keep you posted.