In 1980 David Jarvis used to work for one of the country’s first landscape architects, John Windsor, in a garret office immediately above Church Steps in Frome.
On the drive in from collecting someone in Shoscombe he would pass Marston Bigot House and daydream about the Earls of Cork and Orrery and the mechanical model of the solar system named after one of their ancestors.
He could never foresee that he would establish an international strategic planning practice years later and would work with Foster Yeoman who had their headquarters in that building.
Indeed, after 40 years working all over the world in ‘interesting’ countries on even more interesting projects David wondered what to do… and his answer was ‘write a novel’. He had worked on everything from the planning of Military Cities in Saudi Arabia to being deputy director of a World Bank-funded project to plan Jamaica for the next 25 years in a climate-resilient way. During the Falklands War in 1982, he was in Saudi Arabia working on the new Diplomatic Quarter and viewing the international tensions from a different viewpoint. When coupled with the emergence of computer technology in a pre-mobile phone and pre-internet era, this provided the backdrop to his recently debut spy novel called The Collation Unit.
The idea began with: How would the Secret Services cope with receiving too much information? Something would need to change or things would be missed. The Falklands War brought the matter to a head and the newly-established Collation Unit, located six floors underground beneath a Cotswold wartime airfield and staffed by a small group of ex-GCHQ staff, rose to prominence. More importantly it began to challenge ‘London’.
The Collation Unit believed that an incident in the Middle East in 1982 should take precedence over the Falklands War given its wider international implications; London disagreed.
As is so often the case, it eventually fell upon an innocent individual to sort matters out… someone working in Saudi Arabia to pay off his mortgage after a small incident involving a fire. To complete the circle, David included Marston Bigot House in the novel, heavily disguised as the home of a main character.
The Collation Unit is a light and funny novel that builds to an unexpected ending. It is available in printed and electronic forms from all the usual sources – local book sellers can order it via the publishers, Matador. It costs £9.99 as a paperback on Amazon, £8.19 in WHSmith and £4.79 on Kindle.
