Small Isn't Always Beautiful

Catherine, way back when.

When I was a student, I had a summer job working in a small hotel in Wales. I almost wrote 'spent a summer in Wales' but I didn't spend the whole summer there. I worked there for a few weeks and then chucked it in and came home. 

I don't remember why I chose Wales, but I think it may have had something to do with liking Alan Garner's book The Owl Service so much, even though when I had written Garner a fan letter some years earlier, and innocently? naively? - I was about 12 - mentioned J R R Tolkien, I got a very dusty response. Still, it taught me a lesson about being nice to people who contact me about my own work, and I hope I still am. 

Anyway, it didn't put me off the Owl Service, which I still reread from time to time. But an indirect result was that I spent a miserable few weeks working in Wales. Not that it had anything to do with Wales as a country, which I'm sure is a fine place. 

It was the job.

If you are going to work in hospitality, do not, if you can possibly help it, work in a small hotel. You will work long split shifts, but worse, you will do everything, all the time. There were three or four of us girls, packed into a small, dark, stuffy bedroom, and we were worked into the ground. Worse, the owner shouted at us and sometimes threw a massive tantrum which involved screaming, while tossing pots and pans into the sink, filling it with a hellish mixture of caustic fluids and ordering us to clean them. We changed beds, we cleaned rooms, we cooked, we waited at table, we washed up, we mopped floors, we cleaned toilets, did laundry, we washed windows, we hoovered carpets, we poured drinks, we ran from pillar to post and we had very little free time. Besides that, the dust had triggered my asthma and I was wheezing a lot. 

Friends who have worked in big hotels tell me that although the work is equally hard, the hours equally long, the rooms even more filthy (I gather that the rich are filthiest of all) - you at least do your own job and that's that. In good hotels, there's a lot more organisation, and usually enough staff for the job in hand. Also management tends not to scream at the staff in public, because it upsets the punters. 

Anyway, I came home a bit early. The only thing I got from those weeks was a knowledge of how to make sherry trifle on a grand scale and a compliment from an elderly guest in a wheelchair who, I gather, was a photographer of some distinction, and who stopped me before I left to say that he would have liked to photograph me. I still thought of myself very much as an ugly duckling at that stage, so it stayed with me. 

What I should have learned, and didn't, was that small isn't always as beautiful as you think it might be - and - later -  that the lesson applies as much to publishing as it does to working in hotels. Big publishers have their drawbacks too as I would find to my cost a few years later when I signed with an excellent, reputable, nurturing, medium sized publisher, only for the company to be taken over in mid project by a mega corporation who were after beach bonkbusters and not much else.

Small publishers, like small hotels, can be well meaning, full of ideas and ideals, praised and admired, and they often produce lovely books. At their best, they are hands on and caring. That's the good side. The media will love them. The reading public who, on the whole, don't care who publishes anything, will see elegant swans, gliding along, but not the many wee feet paddling like blazes below the surface, i.e. the writers. And sometimes they'll be drowning.

Small publishers, like small hotels, simply don't have enough time or money or staff, don't have the bandwidth, to make things run smoothly for their writers. Much of the time, you're on your own. They certainly don't have time to do publicity. Or even, sometimes, to send out review copies. Mind you, big publishers don't have the inclination to do publicity for any except the starry, celebrity few - who don't really need it. So there's that. 

The only thing to do is decide what works best for you, but - if it isn't working - don't stick with it. Whatever doesn't kill you, doesn't always make you stronger. Sometimes it breaks you. These days, there are always other options.

Like jacking in a job where the boss is a bully, and hopping on the first train home. 

Thinking about Finland

A huge folder full of my letters from Finland

Many years ago, after my parents died, we cleared their house. Fortunately, we could take our time over the task. We kept what we wanted, gave things away to their and our friends, and sold what we didn't need. Among the things we treasured were several boxes of 'keepsakes'. Some of them had been stored in their loft since I came home from university. 

I didn't settle anywhere for very long, till 1980, when I moved in with Alan, who would become my husband. First I went to Leeds University to do a Postgraduate Masters in Folk Life Studies, but then, instead of looking for museum work (the obvious choice) I did a summer school in teaching English as a Foreign Language and in 1975, I set off for Tampere in Finland, to teach English to adults. This sometimes involved business English, often conversation with groups, occasionally complete beginners (challenging when I didn't speak Finnish!) and quite a lot of one to one sessions. 

A few weeks ago, when I was searching these keepsake boxes for something else altogether, I found a great bundle of letters I had written to my parents, starting with my arrival in Finland in the autumn of 1975. I worked there for two years, but for some reason, my parents had only kept the letters from my first year in Tampere and a few from my return to Finland in autumn 76. 

I spent hours sorting them into date order and reading through them. I was an enthusiastic correspondent back then, and it was clear that mum and dad wrote back, although sadly, all their letters are missing. Sometimes, I would write two or three letters a week, but post them all at once, so some of the envelopes were very fat. I would add little drawings to some of them, to illustrate what I was writing about. 

It makes me a little sad that this kind of correspondence no longer exists for most of us, although I suppose blogs like this one fulfil the same purpose - but without the spontaneity, the immediacy and intimacy. 

It astonished me how many things I didn't remember till reminded by these letters. Memory is very strange and very fluid. I had certain events fixed in my mind, the 'stories' I told myself. But as I read through this long and detailed correspondence, it struck me that over time, I had edited my own memories. Well, some of the correspondence was edited as well, given that I was writing to my parents, but not in quite the same way. Most of it was written in longhand, spontaneously, late at night, and I seldom crossed anything out. 

I was working long hours, having the time of my life (most of us teachers were young, footloose and fancy free) and just loving the country, the people and the landscape. I was writing about it because of course I was also writing my own work: poems, stories, plays and the first draft of a novel. I'm not sure where I found the time, but I did. 

Among the keepsakes was the typescript of a novel which I seem to remember one of my students typing up for me. I had filed it away as 'not very good' but now, I think that judgment came from UK publishing's reluctance at that time to publish anything with a remotely 'foreign' setting. Rereading the first couple of chapters, I reckon it's worth revisiting - a curious little story set in Finland, that I'll probably retype, rework and publish for my own satisfaction. As for the letters - well, I'll type those up as well, immersing myself in that time and place. I may even publish an edited version of them. 

Meanwhile, there's a certain symmetry in the notion that our video game designer son is currently so much at home in Scandinavia.