Erich Romberg was born in Essen in 1950 and grew up in the Ruhr region. He still remembers the bombed-out houses of the post-war period, which he visited with his father to collect roof beams for firewood. The family was barely making ends meet.
Then came the economic miracle, and little by little the ruins disappeared from memory and the many empty fields were covered with new houses.
All he remembered from primary school was that most of the teachers beat the children and that a
trainee teacher read his essay about a walk in the woods out loud to the class as an example of how it should be done. It was his first A and a source of satisfaction, because his class teacher thought he was a boy who would never amount to anything. But he never had to repeat a year. There were still quite a few teachers like that back then.
After completing a craft apprenticeship, the essay writer was drawn back to school, an evening school in the Ruhr area. Here he was amazed to discover the beautiful things of the mind. Although he actually wanted to do something completely different, he studied physics. As a physicist, he researched in various fields for a while and eventually became a consultant for air pollution control and local climate.
Writing had always been a part of his life; he felt the need to express his personal insights and feelings in poetry and stories. He discovered the momentum that stories take on when you simply write them down. They develop a life of their own, and the writer doesn't know in advance what the end result will be - at least that was the case for him.
Just as he wrote his stories spontaneously, he also ended his previous life and moved to Ireland, which he had cycled around on holiday for two years. He got to know Kiltimagh on his first holiday there. After his second holiday in Ireland, he rented a house in Kiltimagh for five years from an Irish friend from Germany. There he found time to write and windsurf, which he enjoyed equally. He also met his current wife through his online published literature. Today, the author lives with her and his young son in a village in Saxony-Anhalt. The idea of leaving books behind for his children became increasingly appealing to him. He himself knows very little about his father, as he told him very little about his past. It was probably the collective silence of that generation.

Der Leser soll sich in erster Linie gut unterhalten und den Mehrwert soll jeder für sich selbst berechnen. Der Autor ist kein Moralist, versucht aber, besonders in der Titelgeschichte, ohne Kreuzzugsmentalität gegen Vorurteile und Vorverurteilung zu wirken. Das Erlebnis in einem Supermarkt, in unserem Verständnis ein Tante Emma Laden, hat ihn beschämt, weil er nicht den Mut hatte, zu protestieren. Der Inhaber hat die Türen verriegelt und die Fenster verdunkelt, weil die sogenannten Tinker dort einkaufen wollten. Der Inhaber war ein ehrlicher und rechtschaffener Mann, doch er hatte Angst. In der Titelgeschichte geht der Autor darauf ein und die weise Alte Méabh liefert eine Erklärung dafür, ohne den anderen zu verurteilen.