Frank Croskerry Books

Frank James Croskerry

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Finally I can announce that I have completed and published my memoir Bootneck...Bootneck.

It is something that I began many years ago on a Remington typewriter in the back of my garage in Mongeham, Kent, England.

It started as a very lighthearted record of my enrolling in the Royal Marines and concentrated on the humour and physical effort involved. Initially it didn't include any of my upbringing which I considered too humdrum for a book of interest. I still have the yellowed pages of that early attempt that I eventually abandoned as I raised my small family and eventually emigrated to Canada in 1979.

I took up the challenge again but never took the project seriously enough until I retired, when I decided to get the thing finished. My motivation was tickled by the first publication of my book “Our Land is The Sky” and the fact that I now had a growing band of grandchildren. Someone recently asked me what motivated me to write the memoir and my response was “Wouldn't you have loved to read your father's account of his life”? This then was my motive and the thought that future generations might enjoy reading an account of a previous time in their family history.

I was to discover that it still wasn't as easy as it might seem, to write down the events that formed my persona and with the passing of time it became difficult to place things in the right chronological order.

Even now, on the completion of the book I am uncomfortable letting just anyone into my memories, some of which I've never really shared with anyone, including my personal family.

There is though a fatalistic sigh at the culmination of the story to finally release it and in the words of the wise “Publish and be damned”!

At about two years before I finished the book I was cheerfully writing a couple of thousand words a session and satisfied with my progress when in one awful moment I pressed the wrong button and lost about forty thousand words forever. I tried everything to recover the text including the help from my grown children, who are much more able than I, but the work was lost forever. I contacted a Forensic Lab in Toronto who told me that they couldn't guarantee anything but that for about a thousand dollars they were prepared to take my computer away and attempt a recovery. That offer I declined, there being a limited extent to my financial resources and I accepted my loss.

Now, I don't know if anyone reading this has suffered a similar fate but the effects were quite devastating to my state of mind and my prospects for finishing the book.

I left it alone for a long time and considered giving it up altogether, not seeing where I could begin to go back and start where I still had the beginning of my story.

With the encouragement of my wife Denise and my family I did eventually put pen again to paper, figuratively, but it took a long time.

Now here's the interesting thing. When I restarted, I tried at first to rewrite what I remembered already writing, but as time went on I found myself writing a completely new kind of story. I guess they both had the same eventual message but my second effort became much more lighthearted than the first and took on a form of its own. I became grateful that I had made the initial mistake that caused me to rewrite the whole thing. They are, in fact, two different accounts of the same story and if, by some miracle, I ever rediscovered the old book, I would go to the expense of publishing that one as well, if only as a comparison experiment. The first book was much more gory and macho than the second and would probably appeal to a much different reader.

I really do hope you enjoy reading this and who knows, I may undertake the rest of my tale one day.