“It was his safe place. No wonder that he would do anything to protect it.”

His island has been, for Mark Atkinson, the inspiration for his life’s work, a saga he calls The Enchanted Circle. His imagination has turned this place into a land of romance and adventure peopled with tableaux from the story. His beloved Selena Delahaye has consistently rejected his love and with it his writing; but, as his cousin Fay will explain, “Whatever I tell you, I can’t get anywhere close to the impact this saga has made on Lori; and don’t lose sight of the fact that Mark has been working on it pretty well all of his life. Strange to say, I don’t think he’s ever tried to write anything else.”

Fay and a family friend, a former game warden called Dick Ford, value Mark and are not concerned about his eccentricity. When Selena helps her brother, Richard Arnold, by agreeing to look after a child called Lori for a while, Fay and Dick help with the temporary arrangement; but the girl’s delight in Mark’s story- telling soon makes him a very special person in her troubled life. She is overjoyed when Fay and Dick take her to Mark’s island to visit him there.

“Fay could see that they would get on, but she did not realise that they had met before.”

Lori’s life might easily have been a tragedy, given her mother’s drug addiction and the early death of her father. But, like Lori, all characters seem to be drawn to Mark or interested in his actions. Of all the people in Selena Delahaye’s life, “Mark has been able to anger her most – and, far worse, unsettle her.” Her missionary brother, Richard, plans to visit Mark too, to reclaim some of his mother’s jewellery, which she left in Mark’s care at the time of her death.

Where has Mark put this treasure? Richard means to use Fay’s influence with Mark to find out, even though he has coldly ignored the obvious love she has nurtured for him for a number of years.    

There are other questions. What happened to Lori as a six-year-old on that earlier visit to the island? And where did the friend her parents brought with them go after he left? Someone is now trying to find out, though any visit by him will be unwelcome to Mark.

“No matter what I may claim,” Mark Atkinson tells us,” I am reaching out to others and sharing with them the sort of escapism that gives me delight and consolation.”

It is easy for me, as his chronicler, to approve of what he says; and time to explain that the story called The Enchanted Circle (though it had no title to begin with and was then for a while called The White Fox) was first written over forty years ago. It was written very quickly and then set aside for a long time, until it became the life’s work of Mark Atkinson. It is because of those forty years that I regard my latest novel, as I did ‘Christmas Night’, as a tale of the recent past.

On other pages of my web-site, I have tried to answer questions about where my ideas originate. It is a subject examined regularly in the pages of ‘The Hiding Place’, those ways in which our private reading, our life’s adventures, things we hear or say, personal misfortune and a range of other  forces might shape the stories we come to tell. That shaping of ‘The Hiding Place’ began with a manuscript I first dated 28.7.1995. Its first typescript bears the date 24.9.1996. But I can now see that these months from the last century marked a beginning which was to go further in the early years of our present century when I looked for ways to include extracts from Mark Atkinson’s own saga. How strange (and interesting) it is for me to read the opening of this novel as it was in 1995:

Mark Atkinson knew of the hiding place long before he ever made use of it for its most romantic purpose. (I began, by the way, with ‘secret’ purpose, then changed it to ‘romantic’)

By providing the reader with selected episodes, I wanted to create the sense that you have actually read the whole of The Enchanted Circle when you have not needed to do so. The first draft of The Hiding Place, in something like its final form, was ready by the end of 2010. I then returned to it regularly while, at the same time, completing Raineland and Christmas Night. I continue to believe that stories have certain moments, certain scenes and episodes which, in my case, I have longed to write from the moment of setting out. I hope you will understand this wish and perhaps identify some of those moments as you read The Hiding Place. It is the longest and the most ambitious of my novels. I have taken more risks, I believe, than in any other writing. Both it and The Enchanted Circle are tales of personal struggle, of things concealed and the need for a place of safety. Still more is their shared interest in the creative spirit, the need for love and friendship and the commitment demanded by a quest.

As I think of my own family and those oldest and closest friends who have supported me, and of all new readers, I am tempted to close with a further line by Mark Atkinson.

“A book is a form of address to anyone who reads it……………………I hope I never undervalue the approval of people like you; such approval always makes it easier to write.”

Paul Westmoreland