The Pearl Diner, Pearl Street NYC

Extract from my journal November 2016

I remember my last day in New York. It was spent managing a familiar but unwelcome churn in my stomach. The pain that always pinched whenever I thought about leaving the city behind. Though it was late November, the skies were endlessly blue so I’d spent the day wandering the East River Promenade. I’m always at my easiest beside a river, and while walking by the East River you wouldn’t guess you were on the periphery of a glitzy metropolis swarming with some 1.6 million residents, and who knows how many thousands of tourists. There’s an unexpected stillness there and all the honking and rumbling and screeching of daily New York life seems to be happening in some other universe.

I’ve been in love with the rough and the smooth of New York City for as long as I can remember. It’s inexplicable, really. I was born and raised in Yorkshire and can count on one hand the number of times I’ve visited the place. But for whatever reason, I just feel at home there and am always scrabbling around, trying to find ways and means of going back.

My last excuse for crossing the Atlantic was to research the setting of my Starlight Diner books. I saved for a year to be able to make the trip. I’d written the first draft of Starlight in New York but I didn’t have a book contract when I reserved the flights. Consequently, my family were convinced my ‘research trip’ was just an excuse to gallivant around America for a few weeks eating more cheesecake than was proper.

And I’ll admit, cheesecake wasn’t in short supply.

I visited more than my fair share of diners on that trip and, following my river-side walk, my final few hours in Manhattan were spent in The Pearl Street Diner, an eatery not far from the tip of the island.

Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree played out over the speaker as I walked in. Festive music had followed me from the East Coast to the Mid-West since my plane had touched down in October, such is the American love for the holidays.

Inside the restaurant, the silver-backed seating was upholstered in blue pvc and ‘fresh baked cookies’ were piled up along the counter.  I’d been to so many diners by that point I didn’t even pause for instruction from the waiting staff. I just walked up to the counter and dropped down into one of the high stools.

‘It’s cold outside,’ the waiter said to me.

I gave him a wry smile. ‘I just came from Chicago.’

The waiter almost snapped himself in half with laughing. Chicago wasn’t exactly known for being clement at this time of year and in the few days I’d spent there the whole city had been lost in a merciless blizzard.

‘That is…’ the waiter managed to reduce his hysterics to a chuckle. ‘That is a little different.’

I ordered a Diet Coke and watched him work, notebook and pen in hand. He knew what every customer wanted before they even ordered but one regular surprised him. Changing her usual cream cheese and tomato bagel to an omelette and reveling in the opportunity to take him off guard.

Watching him go about his day to day routine, I grappled once again with the same question in my head: why was saying goodbye to the city so difficult every time I had to leave? Why couldn’t I bear the thought of New York once again fading away; falling away from me as my plane took off?

In the four weeks prior, I’d flown three and half thousand miles with nothing more to get by on than the cash I had in my pocket. I’d taken buses and trains out to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and back again to better understand the places my characters hailed from. I’d been raved at by random strangers on the subway late at night, I’d chatted merrily to a young woman on the Greyhound bus service who was traveling to see her boyfriend on his first day out of jail and narrowly dodged a confrontation with a gang in a Cleveland parking lot. I’d done all this because I believed in the stories I was writing.

And so, sitting there in the Pearl Street Diner during the final days of November 2015 I decided to keep writing my stories with or without a book contract. My plane home beckoned and if I couldn’t stay in New York in person, then, I decided, I would stay there in my mind. Living vicariously through the characters of the Starlight Diner.

Three weeks after my plane touched down in Heathrow, I got an email from HarperCollins offering to publish my first novel and by January 2016 I had signed a two-book deal. There are a lot of people who helped me on my journey to whom I will always be grateful but it was my unconditional love for New York that kept me on my path.

Built to serve: a love letter to the lighthouse keepers

This post was inspired by my visit to the National Lighthouse Museum in Staten Island, New York.

George Bernard Shaw said lighthouses were built to serve. What about the lighthouse keepers, then? They served not only locals and sea-farers but the very lighthouses themselves. They sat awake in the bleakest, starless hours while all others slept, and dreamed of grander destinies.

A life of such servitude comes at a price. It is lonely. Others don’t always understand the desire to give and look for motive where there is none. Interpret humility as lowliness and wonder why a person would choose that over power. Such minds will never understand that the most powerful act anyone can carry out in this bewildering universe, is to give.

Most lighthouse keepers were men. The women who took up such posts were typically those who had never married or were widows. Looking at their pictures mounted on museum boards, I wonder if those friendless men and women ever invited broad-shouldered sailors into their sleeping quarters during the wild, windswept hours before daylight broke once more over the horizon.

I wonder if they ever wanted to feel something other than froth and sea spray against their skin. If they yearned to be lit only by the shine of a lover’s eyes for once. Or if they resigned themselves to the fact that the moment they took up their station at the top of the tower, they had committed their whole being to the ocean and would never know another master.

Even in the modern world, we are all slaves to something. Smart phones. Alcohol. Sugar rushes. Nicotine. Diet routines. If one were to choose an overlord of their own free will, there are much worse prospects than the ocean. She who is bound to carry out the moon’s bidding.

Yes, the salty waves are merciless at times. Cold. Murderous even. But they are also a source of endless kaleidoscopic beauty. Perhaps most importantly, despite her tides, the ocean is one of the most constant forces we know. She remembers our beginning and will witness our end. In an existence that churns just as vigorously as the North Sea on a grey February day, it is heartening to think that even when we are long gone something that once touched us will live on. I expect the lighthouse keepers understood this idea only too well.

Westway Diner 9th Ave, NYC

Whilst researching my novels Starlight in New York and Sunrise in New York, I reveled in a two-week tour of New York City’s finest diners. It was important, you understand, to make sure I had the details just right. The sounds, the smells, the tastes of everything that was bad for me on the menu.

What follows is an extract from my travel journal written on November 2nd 2015 when I visited The Westway Diner.

***

The Westway Diner on 9th Avenue, just north of 43rd Street, is a neat oblong decked out in shades of rhubarb and custard. The lighting fixtures look 1970s by design. Large, circular bulbs, the colour of terracotta and mustard, suspended from the ceiling tiles. Liquor bottles and upturned Martini glasses are stacked behind the cash register, and all the staff wear black.

Faux leather booths promenade down the centre of the restaurant. They’re filled with families and friendship groups who laugh, and tell stories about their day-to-day lives.

I sit in the corner on a table for one near a man who mutters show tune lyrics to himself.

Though Halloween came and went three days ago, spiders still dangle from the ceiling and the spooky drawings graffitied across the front window in the spirit of All Hallows Eve have

yet to be washed away. There’s a pleasant buzz in the air but this isn’t a tourist extravaganza like Ellen’s on Broadway. Here, locals loll about, chomping on omelettes and pancakes. Dressed in tracksuits and sneakers; jeans and sports T-Shirts.

One older man in a baseball hat and lightweight anorak joins another. The fella already sitting at the table doesn’t even look up to acknowledge his companion. He waves his hand, holding it up, while his eyes and his pen stay fixed on his paper. The guy in the anorak starts talking but still his friend doesn’t raise his head. He offers only the occasional side-ways glance to make it clear he’s listening even if he is, at the same time, scratching the side of his jaw over some headline in the news.

A band of off-duty cops enter the diner. They order fried breakfasts while Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell plays out in the background.

If you’d like to read the books inspired by this travel journal, you can find them here.