Sailor Mark Tissington celebrates success of debut novel - an wartime adventure inspired by his time in Scarborough

Here he talks about The Skipper Goes to War.

Please tell me about yourself.

I am 62 years old, married, and have two daughters with three grandsons. Originating from Ranskill, a village south of Doncaster, I served in the Royal Air Force for just under thirteen years, having joined up at seventeen. On returning to civilian life, I worked in the energy sector for many years, before starting an environmental and safety management consultancy. I had cherished the idea of writing for many years, so after having an article published in a professional magazine, a process I enjoyed, I decided the time was right to test myself with a first novel.

Outside of work, we sailed dinghies and keel-boats for many years before joining Scarborough Yacht Club and bringing our boat to Scarborough. We purchased a slightly larger boat in the harbour after a year or so and enjoyed many years of weekending and summer cruising. The club was and is friendly and fantastic. As Ellen MacArthur said in one of her books, 'the most cheerful welcome of any port'!

Currently, our leisure time is most often spent with grandchildren, though we do manage to get out walking as often as we can; though not as often as we'd like!

Please tell me about your time in Scarborough.

The Yorkshire Coast had been the holiday destination of choice during my childhood. My parents had a caravan in Filey and I was a keen sea angler, so the area had fond associations for us.

We had a somewhat nomadic life for a time because of the demands of working life. We lived in Lincolnshire and London before finally moving to Ganton in 2013, after an interesting few months moving between holiday lets until we found a place to settle! The people were (and are) wonderful and we were very happy in the village, but eventually we moved to Leicestershire to be nearer family.

The boat and yacht club meant we spent much of our time in Scarborough itself while living in Ganton, but the whole area is very special, Ryedale itself, Scarborough, Filey, the Moors, the list is endless. In my study I have a print of Scarborough Harbour by Richard Blades, a superb local artist who joined us in the yacht club for a drink when delivering the painting, so I never feel far from Scarborough.

Who and what inspired your interest in writing?

As a young child, I was completely captivated by 'The Wind in the Willows' by Kenneth Grahame. The characters are so vivid and the depiction of nature is superb. I also loved the 'Bill Badger' and 'Little Grey Men' books by 'BB' (Denys Watkins-Pitchford): Bill Badger is the skipper of a canal boat and his mate is a hedgehog, Izzybizzy, while the little grey men books are about the last four gnomes in England.

At school, I had some notable teachers in English and developed a real love of the written word. In my teens it was Tolkien, and various sci-fi books, particularly Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, but as a young man I tended toward naval fiction, particularly Douglas Reeman (as himself and under the pen name Alexander Kent), and Nicholas Monsarrat being special favourites. I came to realise that the written word is incredibly powerful, and that reading is a more immersive experience than watching TV or movies. I also believe the reader is made more important in literature because characters and descriptions are interpreted through their own lives and background, so no two readers will experience a story in exactly the same way. The question then became, 'Can I do it?'

Please tell me about your book and what inspired it.

Once I decided to go ahead, I felt I wanted the book to be nautical. Casting around for inspiration, I came across tales of the Royal Naval Patrol Service in both World Wars. In the early days of World War Two, their training could be eccentric, let's say, and the service was a patchwork of trawlers, drifters, ferries, tugs, and even yachts! Despite this, their achievements were stunning. Even in the so called 'phoney war' they were battling the 30,000 tons of coal per week needed to keep the south of England going down both east and west coasts while under attack from aircraft and submarines (mostly laying mines rather than torpedoing ships). The ships and men of 'Harry Tate's Navy' served in every theatre of war in a huge variety of roles: anti-submarine patrols, minesweeping, rescue ships (especially in the early stages of Atlantic convoys) among many others.

That a working crew could move from peacetime to war roles in the way they did just seemed a wonderful idea for a story, so I created an imaginary skipper and crew, based in Scarborough, whose ship is requisitioned by the Admiralty. They are engaged in the normal duties of the patrol service but are also approached to assist the Secret Intelligence Service. It is the SIS who involve them in a mission into occupied Norway, which is the subject of the book's climax.

Is it based on a true story and real people?

The characters are all my own, but I have taken dreadful liberties with Quay Street, adding a good deal of length and a pub, the Mariner's Rest Inn. I would have loved to use the Three Mariners, but as I understand it, that pub had been turned into a museum in 1918. I also invented a training establishment for the RNPS in Lincolnshire, mainly because I was worried about plagiarism when details of the real-life depot in Lowestoft mostly come from the work of other writers, or veterans own memoirs.

To make the book more authentic, I have tried my best to fit the plot around real events and make the technology accurate for the period. The ship is based on digitised plans of ships built by Cook, Welton, and Gemmell in Beverley. They are available online and are fascinating.

What plans do you have for a second book?

Once I began researching the RNPS, I realised there was enough material for a series of books. The Skipper and his crew are, of course, a proxy for the hundreds of such ships who gave their all, so the difficulty is picking which of their feats to replicate!

In parallel to planning, researching and drafting the second book, 'The Skipper Goes West', I am recording an audiobook version of the first story. I've been humbled by the response to the first book, both in direct sales and the number of people who read the eBook under Amazon's Kindle Unlimited subscription. I genuinely never expected my first novel to get the response I've had, and reviewers have been very kind: a common theme being that readers seem to look forward to the second book! The first book, 'The Skipper Goes to War' is available as paperback and eBook on Amazon, and will be available as an audiobook on Audible as soon as I can make that happen.

What books do you like to read?

I have very eclectic taste. I recently read Adrian Tchaikovsky's 'Children of Ruin', 'Convoy Escort Commander' by Vice-Admiral Sir Peter Gretton, 'Slow Horses' by Mick Herron, 'The Midnight Library' by Matt Haig, 'Agent Running in the Field' by John LeCarré, 'Stranger Times' by C.K. McDonnell, and the original 'Dune Trilogy' by Frank Herbert. These are all great reads.

In between my normal reading, if I want to relax, I re-read books by 'BB' (Denys Watkins-Pitchford). It's like time travel to a bygone era, and the connection he had with nature and landscape is mesmerising. The latest is 'Autumn Road to the Isles', an account of a caravan holiday to the far north of Scotland in 1958. His descriptions of flora, fauna, weather and landscape are beyond compare, in my opinion.