Malachi Jones

When I wanted to go to sea, my teachers at the nautical college filled my head with stories of runs ashore and jolly japes. At 16, this largely fuelled my enthusiasm for a career in the British Merchant Navy. At college, the closest we got to any of this was nearly hanging a very irritating student off a rotating radar scanner one day and electrocuting ourselves to varying degrees on a regular basis.

When I finally got to join ships three years later, it was the 1980's and things were already changing. Of course when they told their stories, my teachers had been thinking about when they had gone to sea thirty years earlier. This hadn't really dawned on me at the time. Can I sue for a mis-sold career ?

Now thirty years later, I've seen a lot of places and met a lot of interesting people and I still work with the sea - in fact, I can hear it now, gently lapping on to the beach as I type. Many of the characters I've known are dead, alcoholic or run greengrocers shops, but they will always live on in my books.