A True Tale For Hallowe'en

 

Michael James Flynn in the middle, with the moustache and waistcoat,
seated next to the man with the tar bucket.

I don't know quite what to make of this story even though it happened to me - but it has stayed with me ever since. I leave you to make up your own minds.

Most writers, whether of fiction or non-fiction (and I do both) will tell you that we become so absorbed in our subject matter that we feel as though the people we're writing about are not just real - as they often are - but alive. Sometimes that sense of reality even rubs off onto our nearest and dearest. When I was  researching and writing a novel called The Jewel, about poet Robert Burns's wife, Jean Armour, back in 2015, I had talked about her so much that my husband swore that he saw her one night, walking through the door between our bedroom and my office - a woman in old fashioned dress, with something like a mob cap on her head. 

My tale for today is quite different, very personal and not nearly so fleeting. 

In 2018, I had been deep into research for a new book, about a murder in my Leeds Irish family. The book, called A Proper Person to be Detained, would be published in 2019 by Contraband. On Christmas Day, in 1881, my nana's uncle John Manley had been stabbed in the street by one John Ross and died where he fell. The two men had been casual friends. John Manley had refused to fight, but Ross was angry and drunk and found a tobacco cutting knife in his pocket. The murderer fled, to be apprehended a few weeks later. He was tried and sentenced to death, but the sentence was later commuted to hard labour, a mercy that I felt was probably justified. 

In writing the book, I explored the situation of this poor Irish migrant family, whose parents had fled famine, only - like so many - to be abused and exploited in the industrial cities of England and Scotland. Researching the book also gave me the opportunity to find out more about my great grandfather, Michael James Flynn from Ballinlough, County Roscommon. (He went by both christian names.) He married my great grandmother, the murdered man's sister, Mary, already a widow with children, in St Patrick's Church, Leeds, in 1888. The Manley family had come from Ballyhaunis in Mayo, but the two villages are only five miles apart, so there may have been family associations. At that time, he was a paviour's labourer, but later, he would describe himself as a paviour. He built roads and pavements. 

From the accounts of those who knew him, he was a good, kind, generous man who managed to transform the fortunes of the family. The household into which I was born, more than sixty years later, was by no means wealthy. It was still a working class household,  but it was warm, clean and comfortable. Nobody went hungry. My nana remembered Michael as the most generous of fathers. If he was wearing a winter coat and he saw a beggar on the street, he was quite likely to hand it over to the more needy man, to the occasional frustration of his wife.

So what about my Hallowe'en story?

It happened in a supermarket car-park of all places. Not long after I had finished the book. It was one of those chilly, misty mornings, with a low sun shining in my eyes as I walked from my parked car to the door of the building. It was early and the car-park was fairly empty. A man walked out of the mist and the sunlight and headed straight for me. I had just crossed the narrow roadway leading into the parking spaces, but halted as he approached. I remember that he put a gentle hand on my elbow and encouraged me to step up onto the pavement. 'Take care, madam,' he said. He was Irish. Not Northern Irish, as so many visitors to this part of south west Scotland, but a soft southern Irish voice. 

'I was wondering,' he said, 'if you might be able to give me something to get myself a bit of breakfast.' He glanced back towards the supermarket doorway. 'They've all been ignoring me,' he said. 

I looked him up and down. He was covered in grey-white dust - it looked like plaster dust - from head to toe. He wasn't dirty or drunk. Just dusty. He wore boots and they too were dusty. He looked like a working man, a labourer. 

I didn't hesitate. I looked in my purse, found a five pound note, and gave it to him. I don't carry much cash these days and it was all I had. He thanked me. 'God bless you,' he said. 'God bless you!' And off he went. I watched him walk into the misty winter sunshine, as he headed towards the steps leading up into the town. I never saw him go up the steps.

I had one of those sudden intimations of something odd. Not frightening at all, you understand, but uncanny. And strangely uplifting. I headed for the supermarket, but had to find a seat and sit down for a moment or two. I felt quite shaky. It struck me that I have seldom, if ever, seen or heard an Irish labourer travelling alone in this part of the world. Ulster yes, but Irish? Tattie howkers used to come, but they seldom do now, and besides, it wasn't that time of year. 

I've never met one since. 

I can see him now, feel his gentle hand on my elbow, his warm 'God bless you!' 

All through my shopping, and all the way home, I thought about my kind, generous, much loved great grandfather, a man I had never known, but who was very much on my mind. Of course the sceptics will easily explain it away. And in a strict sense, it is perfectly explicable. Isn't it?

But I know what I saw. And I know what I felt. And it's an encounter that I still treasure.

What do you think? 

PS, If you would like to read a made-up supernatural tale, you'll find my strange little novella Rewilding  free on Kindle, from 31st October, for five days. 

How Not To Be A Writer - Part Eleven: A Cautionary Tale

David Rintoul and Paul Young as David Balfour and Alan Breck
in my radio dramatisation of Kidnapped and Catriona - a happy production!

Once upon a time when most of my writing involved plays, especially radio plays, rather than fiction, I was a member of a UK union for professional writers, focusing on drama. I had been a fully paid up member for some years. 

Membership involved a banding system, paying a percentage of one's earnings, which had to be declared. I think the same applies now, although when I had a look at the required payments recently they seem more reasonable than they did back then. Nevertheless, I was happy to pay, and membership meant that the BBC had to pay me the agreed rates for my radio drama, which constituted the bulk of my paid work back then. 

Even so (and possibly more so now) the 'agreed rates' for small independent theatres - for example - always seemed unrealistically high for those of us outside London. Funded though regional theatres might be, the vast majority of tiny companies simply couldn't afford these high rates. Most of us managed to hammer out agreements that seemed fair, especially when nobody else connected with the production was earning a fortune.

I think we were always uneasily aware that there seemed to be a focus on London and on the few 'big names' who were working in film and TV and earning what were - for the rest of us - vast sums. 

Some years into my membership, I had my own annus horribilis. It involved family illness and bereavement, house problems and the cancellation of projects I'd budgeted for. In short, our entire income had fallen drastically. We were struggling, mentally and financially.

I wrote to my union, explaining as far as possible what had happened, and asking if a payment holiday might be possible. 

The reply, when it came, fairly took my breath away. The (salaried) General Secretary had written to me personally. If I wanted to spend my money on 'make-up and lunches rather than supporting young writers', that was up to me, he wrote. This at a time when I - only in my mid 40s - was spending my money on food, lighting and heating and buying my clothes in charity shops. 

When I picked my jaw off the floor, I wrote to them, resigning and explaining why. 

I got an apologetic letter from the very starry president, but I didn't rejoin. I've often thought that - as with the theatrical disaster described in a previous post - if it happened now, I would go very public. Back then, there seemed no way of doing it, so I simply soldiered on. Meanwhile, the uneasy perception remains that any man who could even consider sending that letter to a female member was a rank misogynist. There's a lot of it about. Why was nobody aware of it? Or were they aware of it and had decided to ignore it? 

 

The Amber Heart: Free for Three Days Only!

 

My big beautiful Polish saga, The Amber Heart, is free on Amazon Kindle for three days: Thursday 10th, Friday 11th and Saturday 12th October . This was another book that struggled to find a publisher, even when they were publishing other work of mine, mostly because 'nobody is interested in Poland' they said. 

One editor reported that she loved the novel, couldn't put it down and had 'wept buckets' but they 'couldn't take sales with them'. Incidentally, that's another way not to be a writer. If you really don't want to be a writer, make sure you're Polish, living in Britain. Here in the UK, Poland is a very long way away. They do things differently there and nobody wants to read about them. Well, according to most traditional publishers, anyway! I like my Polish citizenship. My dual nationality. But my longing  to write about Poland has done me no favours at all as a writer.

All the same, I think you might enjoy The Amber Heart if you like a good epic love story set during a time of great turbulence. I hope it's accessible and understandable. and besides, people are always falling in love when they shouldn't.  

Unlike Bird of Passage, which nobody would even look at, various agents and editors did look at this one. Two of them suggested that I cut a third out of it. The trouble was that one suggested the first third and the other suggested the last third. One of these was one of my 'disappearing agents'. I had two of them who simply went missing, never to be seen or heard from again. Ultimately, I did some serious pruning but no big chunks. The story needed those 'thirds'. Just a bit less of them. 

You may be interested to know that the story in the novel is very loosely based on truth, and if you want to know more about the real thing, you could read my account of my father's family in eastern Poland - the Last Lancer. My great grandfather Wladyslaw Czerkawski died, my great granny Anna was left a young widow with five children, and she married her estate manager. It was something of a scandal at the time. But not half as much of a scandal as the events of the Amber Heart, which is set more than half a century earlier. 

It's our wedding anniversary on Thursday and we've been together for a very long time. So this is a little gift from me to anyone who thinks they might like to read it. Paperbacks are available, but the freebie only applies to Kindle. If you haven't already read it, I hope you enjoy it!

Great granny Anna

How Not To Be A Writer - Part Ten: A Theatrical Disaster

A few years ago, I had a chance encounter with an actor I had worked with in the past. We greeted each other, trying to remember when we had last met, and suddenly he said 'Oh my God, THAT PLAY!' I had a much younger friend with me, one who had directed one of my short plays, and she looked aghast. We both hastened to reassure her.

'No, no,' we said, practically in chorus. 'It was a disaster from start to finish.' 

It was a play called Heroes and Others about the situation in Poland, martial law and the rise of Solidarity. It was staged at Edinburgh's Lyceum Theatre with a couple of performances at Ayr Gaiety. And it put me off writing for theatre for years. 

What do I remember about it? 

I remember the Director from Hell, whose style involved rewriting my script so that it became a political diatribe, all while mercilessly bullying the Scottish cast members, as well as myself. We would often retreat into the nearest lavatory to have a good cry. 

I was very inexperienced as far as theatre was concerned. I knew that 'developing' a play involved making changes, but the director's rewrites were destructive rather than constructive. There followed a prolonged nightmare of trying to assert my own version, without, I might add, any help at all from the organisation that had commissioned the play. I was on my own, except for the cast, who agreed with me. But we were all browbeaten.

Inexplicably, we were rehearsing in a derelict building, in the middle of winter. I had a serious asthma attack from the mould and dust, and remember walking and wheezing through the streets of Edinburgh thinking that I should be in hospital. Like most asthmatics, I tried to pretend that it wasn't happening. Fortunately it abated, and the rehearsals in that impossible space finished, perhaps because the toilets froze, so there wasn't even anywhere to pee or weep.

The icing on the cake was when the doorman at the Lyceum refused to let me in to wish the cast good luck on the opening night. Although William Goldman was excluded from the premier of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and he wrote the screenplay, so I can't really complain, can I? 

The production had mixed reviews. I had managed to rescue a lot of my original script but nothing about it gelled the way it should. For a long time, my memory of it was of complete humiliation, until I looked back at some of those reviews to find that what most of them were saying was 'this is a good play, struggling with a terrible production.' 

With hindsight, when the whole thing was at its most turbulent, I should have gone to the press about it. I had one or two cautious interviews with Scottish journalists I respected, but I had been persuaded not to rock the boat. I'd bloody overturn it now, but then I'm old and bolshie.

I put it behind me, but it was years before I went back to writing for the stage, with a play called Wormwood, about the Chernobyl disaster, for Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre. The play was a great success, with glowing reviews, although even then, I didn't learn my lesson about not being too amenable, too accommodating to changes. I should have remembered how I worked on my radio plays, with the director asking questions. In thinking about and finding the answers to those questions, I improved the work. But it was still my work, my writing, my solutions. Nobody ever rewrote for me.

Wormwood was fine, but a subsequent full length play for the same theatre, Quartz, suffered from too many rewrites and the last minute imposition of other people's views. There was a fault running through the play and with hindsight and the benefit of experience, I know what it was. Ironically, none of those directing noticed the precise nature of that fault. One simple question, one simple observation would have helped tremendously. Instead, there were meetings and the picking of holes. Not, I should stress, that any of this was the fault of the excellent cast. The play was reasonably successful, but it wasn't a great experience.  

A major London critic hoped that the Traverse would 'nurture this promising playwright'. No nurturing ever went on, and my next play for them was turned down without the courtesy of explanation or comment. Rather, the script was met with a chilly rejection. I had been attempting to write about abuse in sports coaching. A challenging subject that I went on to tackle in a novel called Ice Dancing. As far as theatre was concerned, much like in the real world, nobody wanted to know about it at all. 

As for the Director from Hell - well, he's dead now. He was an actor too. He once appeared in a James Bond movie where he died horribly. I confess to watching it from time to time with a certain amount of relish. There he goes again, I think. Serve him right. 

Lady Chatterley's Lover

Once upon a time, when I was very young indeed, this novel caused a sensation. You can read all about the trial here. The trial was essentially a snobbish, misogynist enterprise. Not just 'would you like your wife to read this book?' but how would the 'working classes' read it? In summing up, the judge said it would 'be available for all and sundry to read. You have to think of people with no literary background, with little or no learning,' he said. In other words, rude books are for the intelligentsia.

The jury took only three hours to find Penguin not guilty of an obscene publication. Yay for the jury some of whom at least must have been part of that 'working class all and sundry'. 

My parents bought a copy. 

I remember it on our bookshelves and I also remember them laughing about it. 

I have it still - it's the 1961 reprint, a yellowing Penguin edition, complete and unexpurgated, costing three shillings and sixpence. We had spent a year in London, where my father was working in a research institute, and came back to a flat in Bramley, in Leeds. It must have been there that I saw it. Nothing was off limits as far as books were concerned, so I must have had a brief look at it, in search of the sexy bits, but there was so much small print to plough through that I quickly lost interest. 

Cue forward till now. In one of those odd, circuitous routes by which we sometimes go back to old favourites - or not-so-favourites - we started watching the whole series of Sharpe, on ITVX. I can wholeheartedly recommend it. It's wonderful. But that made me remember that I'd admired Sean Bean in other performances - and so I went back to the BBC's 30 year old dramatisation simply called Lady Chatterley. (You can find it online.) And then I went back to the book. 

I'm not sure why the Beeb felt the need to meddle with the title, because the original novel focuses quite as much on Mellors, the gamekeeper, as it does on Connie Chatterley. The adaptation more or less does the same thing, although poor old DHL (as snobbish in his own way as those 1960s lawyers) feels the need to make him more educated, more well read, more 'delicate' - more like DHL himself? - than the excellent Bean's performance. In the book, Mellors' dialect comes and goes. He sometimes weaponises it, which I can sort of understand. Still, I much preferred Bean's interpretation, which was his own north country (Sheffield, I believe)  dialect that could fluctuate a little depending on circumstances, but was always there, a barrier or a bridge between two people. Which it might be, barrier or bridge, is really what the book is about. Bean manages to make Mellors attractive, angry and at the same time vulnerable. You can see what Connie, starved of love, starved of human touch, finds irresistible.

I loved the dramatisation, and I didn't love the book. 

It was as though the drama had taken the heart of the book, the important bits, the central story that was engaging and moving, and left out all of DHL's maundering misogynistic diatribes. It was strange because I kept wanting to like the book. There were whole passages that I loved. And then something would trigger him and off he would go again, interminably, with his borderline fascist view of the working classes and women. And I know we were supposed to be hearing Mellors' thoughts, but we weren't. The author was right there, haranguing us. 'I am Mellors' he must have thought, considerably to his own satisfaction. 

This was a book that I thought ought to come with trigger warnings  Not for the sexy bits. No. A sort of 'here he goes again, you can skip this bit' kind of trigger. As in Stella Gibbons' hilarious Cold Comfort Farm, a send up of rural novels, but with a considerable side swipe at DHL, the reader could do with asterisks denoting the most turgid, repetitive passages. Of which there are many. 

It also reminded me that we read quite a lot of DHL at university, albeit not this one. I think it would have embarrassed some of our more perjink lecturers. Many of my female friends either disliked DHL or were indifferent to him. The more I read, the more I fell into the former camp. How on earth did he enter the 'canon' when there was so much more exciting work - much of it by women - out there?