Vincent Cobb
AUTHOR

Vincent Cobb

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
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Hi, welcome and thanks for visiting my website. I thought you may be interested to learn what prompted me to start writing at such a late time in my life. Having spent most of my working life in the travel industry, going right back to the late fifties, when we were lucky to use obsolescent, world-war two aircraft to carry our passengers to Mediterranean holiday resorts, and eventually moving from the North of England to London where I became joint managing director of the tour giant, Thomson Holidays, it came as no surprise when I received an invite from Testimony Films to appear in a travel documentary they were planning to shoot. The programme, entitled, ‘Sun, Sex and Sangria,’ actually went out at peak time on ITV in January of 2001 and attracted an audience in excess of 5 million viewers. Resulting from that, and the extensive interviews I gave at the time, I was encouraged by the producer of the programme to set down my experiences in the inclusive tour industry in book form, and from that my book 'The Package Tour Industry' was published in the summer of 2002. Although writing the book was, to say the least, difficult, I have to admit I did enjoy the experience, especially since it coincided with my having to have a coronary by-pass operation earlier that year. In other words, it gave me something to take my mind off that distressing experience, although I wouldn’t recommend the trauma of that surgery as a motivation to become an author! After that, I was still recuperating and found myself with little or nothing to do. So I began recalling my own childhood and the hardships we, as children, had to endure from a bullying father and an indifferent mother, and thought it might have the makings of a further book - albeit, a fictional one. I then went on to consider what might possibly have happened with my life had I not been the resilient survivor I proved to be. And thus was born, ‘Leave a Light on for Jesus’, an expression my mother used to use when I was a child; she was always afraid that if Jesus came for me in the night, he might not find me in the dark! I have been asked a number of times just how much of the book is based upon fact and how much is fiction; I have also been asked if I found the experience cathartic. Suffice it to say that the initial background of the story, based in Blackpool, where I was born, is largely true, including the violent abuse of our father and the physical punishment meted out by the Christian Brothers at the College. Where it begins to stray into the realms of fiction is the point where my sister was ‘beaten to death’ by our father. Of course this did not happen, although I have to admit that my older sister, Pat, did endure a great deal of suffering at our father’s hands and she did die at a relatively young age, and were I asked who was to blame for this I know where most of the responsibility lies. But writing ‘Leave a Light on for Jesus’ was not in any way cathartic. For me it is a story that needs to be told as an exposé of the abuse that was quite common amongst my generation, and which largely went unpunished. It was quite usual in those days, where we to turn up at school sporting black eyes and serious bruising, to be told, ‘you probably deserved it.’ It certainly is not intended as a story for the fainthearted but rather an indictment of the belief in those times of institutions like family, school, and even Church, that they had an inherent right to brutalise children in their care with absolute impunity. Thank you again for visiting my website.
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