What Are You Writing Next?

My other (Polish) great great uncle was an artist.

The very first question that an audience member asked me, at the very first event I did for my new book about my murdered Leeds Irish great great uncle and what came after (in Blackwell's, in Edinburgh, as it happens) was 'What are you working on next?' I was tempted to say 'I don't have a scoobie' because that would have been the absolute truth.

It was a very hot night. Lovely friends had lent me their apartment, otherwise the event would have cost me a fortune. Edinburgh in July is not the cheapest place to stay. And because it was such a very hot night, only twelve people turned up to hear me speak about A Proper Person to be Detained.  Fortunately, if you click on the above link, you can read all about the book, since the Books From Scotland website very kindly asked me to do a question and answer piece about it.

The Ayrshire launch of the book, a couple of weeks later, was extremely well attended - many thanks to all those who ventured out on another very hot night! - and Waterstones sold out of copies, which was even better. There are more events to come. If you click on my events page, to the right of this post, you'll find a list and there may be a few more to add to that next year.

But ever since then, I've been pondering what to write next. So this post is partly to allow me to put some of those thoughts into words. Because I genuinely don't know. A friend asked me if I was 'looking for inspiration' today, but that isn't it. Besides, as most writers know, if you wait till inspiration comes along, you wouldn't write much at all. I'm never short of ideas or inspiration. In fact I probably have too many.

I've been planning another (factual, reflective) Robert Burns related project, and to tell the truth, I'm about half way through it. But it isn't exactly setting my heather on fire! Before I do anything else, I probably need to knuckle down and finish it and then let it lie fallow for a few months before I work on rewrites.

Recently, three different people have asked me when the sequel to The Posy Ring, which was always intended to be a trilogy, is coming out. It's going really cheap on Kindle for the summer, and the beautiful paperback is still available if you prefer solid books. But I don't know when The Marigold Child is coming out, if ever, because I haven't written it yet, although I do know what happens. And just occasionally, the characters, of whom I am very fond, walk into my head and ask me what I'm going to do about them. 'You can't just leave us in limbo like this!' they say.

There's a third possibility. Because at least some of A Proper Person involved writing about my much loved late father, Julian Czerkawski, and because I have been spending some time embarking on the process of applying to reinstate the dual Polish nationality I once had, I have also been considering researching and writing about the other side of the family, the Polish side. As different from the Leeds Irish side as it is possible to be.

So, I suppose the answer to the question 'what next?' is still, I don't have a scoobie. Because above all, I need to earn some money. Not for extras like holidays, but for money to live on. Money for groceries and house maintenance and electricity and central heating oil. That kind of money. And I suspect that the only way I'm going to achieve that (although it has taken me a lifetime of working in hope to be able to admit it) is not through writing.

It's to do something else altogether.

So I might just sell antiques for a bit, blog about them, and about various related things like gardening and country living on my 200 Year Old House blog, finish my Burns book in my free time, research more of my Polish family history, and see where all that takes me.

Or I might give up completely. For the first time in my whole writing life, since I was about ten years old, and wrote bad poems, madly and happily, I sometimes fantasise about stopping. I don't really believe I will. Sooner or later, the need to shape words into something more than fact will prompt me to start again. But all the same, there's a part of me that acknowledges the novelty of this. I've never felt this way before. Not once. Not ever.

And that worries me.

A Proper Person to be Detained - a Spooky Postscript.

James Flynn, paviour, seated, fourth from the right.

My new book, A Proper Person to be Detained, is highly factual. Although since it's also a very personal account of a family tragedy and its aftermath, it does contain a certain amount of reflection - and an attempt to bring the story into the twentieth century, at least. However, in the course of all the intensive research involved, something happened to me that spooked me a bit. Even though there's almost certainly a simple, rational explanation. But like not wanting to know how conjuring tricks are done, because then you destroy the magic, I don't want to know.

Here's what happened.

I was in the middle of edits and writes, checking all kinds of dates and relationships to make sure everything hung together properly, and deep into the story of what had happened to poor John Manley, who was murdered in 1881, in Leeds, and what happened afterwards to his surviving sisters - and what became of his eldest sister, my great grandmother Mary, who had eventually married a good man called James Flynn. He was remembered as a kindly, gentle, generous man by those who had known him, and he certainly helped to change for the better the fortunes of at least one member of my family, blighted by terrible events.

It was a very chilly, sunny morning and I was walking through - of all places - Morrison's car park, on my way to the store. The low sun was dazzling me, and the car park was faintly misty as the early frost dissipated. I was preoccupied, thinking about the book, as I was pretty much thinking about the book all the time back then, when I felt a touch on my arm, and raised my head to find myself confronted by a middle aged man. I stepped back off the kerb in surprise, and he very gently assisted me onto the pavement between cars. He called me 'Madam'. He told me, in a quiet, but unmistakably southern Irish voice - a soft, rural voice - that he was very hungry, that he had had no breakfast that morning, and nobody outside the store would help him. The sun was still dazzling my eyes, but he was dressed in working clothes and boots and he looked - as I described it to my husband afterwards - 'dusty'. He was dusty from head to toe. Not dirty, but dusty like a working man is dusty.

And he had a kind face.

I took my purse out and gave him the only note I had in there - a £5 note. If I'd had a tenner, I'd have given him that instead but it was probably enough to get him some breakfast. He shook my hand, and he said 'God bless you, God bless you, madam,' and then he headed off through the car park.

When I turned around to see which way he had gone, there was nobody in sight at all.

It's hard to describe how this meeting affected me - and let's face it, I make things up for a living! I could feel a lump in my throat and tears starting in my eyes. I felt shaken. I had to go and sit down in the cafe to pull myself together. I wanted to tell somebody about the encounter but there was nobody around that I knew, and besides, it would have sounded daft beyond belief, because I'd have said, 'I think I just met my great grandfather.'

But even now, many months later, I still think I did.

New Book News: A Proper Person to be Detained.

Me and my nana

There comes a moment in the gestation period of any new book when you see the text in its typeset form, and you think 'now it really looks like a book!' That happened to me a couple of weeks ago, when the first typeset draft of A Proper Person to be Detained dropped into my inbox. All this happens in digital form, of course, and this was still only text. There are some pictures, family tree charts and, most important of all, a cover, still to be decided upon. Nevertheless, it feels as though it really exists now.

The book is a true crime story that begins with a murder, but I hope and believe it's so much more than that. On Christmas night in 1881, John Manley, a poor son of Irish immigrants living in the slums of Leeds, was fatally stabbed in a foolish, drunken quarrel. John was my nana's uncle. That's her, holding me in the picture above. It's exactly as I remember her, plump and soft, with her hair always held back with a tortoiseshell slide, and wearing one of the fresh gingham pinafores she made for herself. She had never known John. He had died at the age of twenty one, some years before she was born. But she had certainly known about him. He was never forgotten. Stories were told about the murder in my family and I had always been intrigued, always wanted to know more.

I had no idea, when I set out on the search for the truth about the murder and its aftermath, just what a sad and harrowing story it would turn out to be. Because there were other victims in all this, not least the women in the family. Like so many people researching their family history, I uncovered a whole lot more than I bargained for. If I had known in advance how tragic, how terrible some of that story would turn out to be, I might have turned to a less harrowing project. But something urged me on, some need to give voice to people so often maligned by the society in which they found themselves - and still to a large extent maligned today.

It's a tale of poverty, tragedy and injustice, but also one of resilience, and changing fortunes. Publication is due in early July. Watch this space!

Long Silence = New Project

Me with the BIG bow in New Wortley, Leeds in the 1950s

I must apologise for the long silence, but my excuse is that I've been working on a new book, and it has proved to be so tricky, so time consuming, so all encompassing, that I haven't been able to think, let alone write about anything else for a long time. Now, my editor has said that she likes it very much and my publisher has started to speak about publication dates next year, even though I know that there is more work to do. But it means that I can begin to speak about it, and to wonder exactly what it is that I have created.

It will be called, I think, A Proper Person to be Detained, and it began with a murder that happened in my family, in Leeds, in 1881. I had always known about it, but only in the most general terms: a family story. 'Your great great Uncle John was stabbed in the street, in Leeds, at Christmas.' That was where I started, but not at all where I finished, because John's story led to a great many other revelations about the plight of 19th century Irish migrants in the industrial North of England, and elsewhere. It also involved the tragic story of what happened to John's younger sister, Elizabeth. 

It was a little like trying to do a vast jigsaw puzzle, without benefit of any picture to guide me, and - as it turned out - no edge pieces at all. Then when the picture emerged, it was heartrending and sad beyond belief. This is the most difficult, most harrowing, most alarming piece of writing I have ever done. But it was also oddly heartening. I began to admire that side of my family, especially the women of my family, more than ever. We survived. 

There will be more about all this as soon as I'm on top of edits and tweaks and all the other bits and pieces involved in publishing a book, especially a piece of non-fiction like this, which is still a long process. 

Quite apart from the sadness involved - and sometimes the story felt just plain unbearable - it made me angry.  Although it's good to be angry, if it prompts you to recognise rank injustice where you find it; if it leads you to you try to tell untold stories like this one. 

More about all this in due course. 

Antique of the Month: A Precious Reminder of My Polish Family History

A tiny silver and enamel mirror - a rare survival.

I might fit in more than one antique this month. After all, Christmas is a time when this old house really comes into its own and it's nice to reflect on the history of a few precious possessions - not particularly precious in terms of monetary value, but only in terms of the memories they hold for me, like my piano that I wrote about last month,

This month, it's a tiny mirror, no more than three inches long. It's in silver, although since it came from eastern Poland, there's no hallmark. The back has pale cream enamel in an intricate and pretty design that doesn't show up too well in the photograph, and I'm afraid the glass on the other side has been somewhat damaged, although you can still just about see through the centre of it.

My grandmother

It belonged to my Polish grandmother, Lucja Szapera and on the right is one of only two photographs I have of her. Looking at that rather pretty, vivacious face, you would never know that her story was not destined to be a happy one. Born into a reasonably wealthy Lwow family (and I don't even know if there were any siblings) she met and married my grandfather, Wladyslaw Czerkawski while they were both very young. She must have thought all her dreams had come true.

Wladyslaw was handsome, charming and potentially rich. He had inherited one large country estate while still a child, and stood to inherit another, the one where he was born. Many years later, my great uncle Karol Kossak, who had been one of his closest friends, having married into the family, told me that he had been 'fond of the ladies' as I'm sure he was.

I met Lucja once. My grandfather not at all. He died of typhus on the long march east and is buried in Bukhara on the Silk Road. Long after the war, the Red Cross found my grandmother and put my father in touch with her. By that time my refugee father had met and married my mother in Leeds, and made a life for himself. Everything the Polish side of the family had once possessed was deep behind the Iron Curtain. The English/Irish side of the family had very little to begin with, but that's another story.

Lucja came to visit us in Leeds while I was still a young child but I have almost no memory of her except as an old and complaining lady who didn't want to be in England and didn't want to be where she was in Poland either. She wanted the promised land of her past. Her health was poor, she had lost everything that mattered to her, and she never came to terms with it.

My father Julian, Wladyslaw and Lucja in happier times. 

Before the war, she had already left my grandfather and returned to the city. My father divided his time between the two. I think she had discovered that she hated living in the countryside. She disliked the mud and the flies in summer, the cold in winter. I sometimes picture her as a character in a Chekhov play, longing for something else. Besides, the marriage had not turned out at all as she expected. My sociable grandfather loved the countryside. He read. He liked music and painting. He loved horses. He was always planning some new venture, something to make money. Like so many he was property rich and ready cash poor.

Poor Lucja was discontented and when my father was born, she was fairly discontented with him too, although the picture above still portrays an idyllic existence. He always remembered his aunt Wanda, Wladyslaw's sister, with more affection, although being a very kindly man all his life, he never really elaborated on the reasons why. As for my grandfather - he was already conducting an affair with the wife of a local schoolteacher by the time war put an end to all such distractions and, ultimately, to him.

Nevertheless, my father brought this little mirror with him to Yorkshire, and thence to Scotland, via the battle at Monte Cassino in Italy, along with a handful of photographs and nothing else. I'm looking at it now. The older I've grown, the more I've come to sympathise with Lucja. Some can build a good life out of nothing. My father certainly did. But for others - and for all kinds of reasons we can only guess at - it becomes impossible, the hill much too steep to climb.

Who are we to judge?

Handsome Wladyslaw

Some years ago, I wrote a novel called The Amber Heart, based on my Polish family history. It's only available on Kindle at present, I'm afraid, but if you want to know more about the turbulent history of a family very similar to my own, in eastern Poland during the mid 19th century, then you could give it a try.

Historical Fiction Two: Family History Research as a Source of Inspiration.

I’ve written a number of plays set in the past and dramatised even more novels for radio, most of them classics such as Kidnapped and Catriona, Ben Hur, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Bride of Lammermoor. But The Amber Heart, the very first draft of which was written back in the 1990s, was my first attempt at a longer piece of historical fiction. I had been spending a lot of my free time researching my Polish family history and was becoming increasingly intrigued by it. 

Although I was born in Leeds and brought up in a working class family, my dad’s family had been the landed nobility, the szlachta. The Czerkawskis came complete with a couple of historic houses (lost in the war) and a coat of arms. From the handful of battered photographs my dad managed to bring out and the tiny silver hand mirror that had once belonged to his mother, obviously part of one of those beautiful dressing sets you sometimes see in country houses, it seemed like a world in a fairytale, something remote, long lost, as indeed it was. 

Meeting my great uncle Karol Kossak, an artist from a distinguished family of Polish artists, only served to reinforce the feeling. He was like a character from a Viennese operetta and just as charming. I started my research project back in the eighties, well before the internet could facilitate such enquiries. I think I always had it at the back of my mind that I wanted to write a novel, perhaps more than one, based on my Polish family history. 

One of Karol Kossak's watercolours.

I was suprised by how much I managed to discover. First of all, I got my dad to write down all that he could remember and I still have notebooks stuffed with memories and little sketches to illustrate them. Since dad died back in 1995, I’m very glad I have it now. The place where dad was born, in 1926, is now in the Ukraine although back then it was part of the Polish ‘wild east’. I sent a polite enquiry to the historical museum in the city of Lviv. This had been Lwow, or Lemberg under the Austro Hungarian Empire. This was the beautiful city where my grandmother was born and to which she and my father retreated when war threatened everything they knew and loved. A very kind researcher from the museum took it upon himself to head out to the village of Didyliv (the place my dad knew as Dziedzilow) and take some photographs, saying that people still remembered my grandfather and the family that had once lived in the ‘big house’. Actually the house itself wasn’t very big by that time. The old mansion had been burnt down in some uprising and the family lived in what had been the old steward’s house. The estate had once belonged to my grandfather’s great uncle Julian who had been a late nineteenth century politician, a Polish representative in the Austro Hungarian parliament. I have copies of newspaper articles about him. He was unmarried and my grandfather Wladyslaw – very much a favourite - inherited the estate from him. 

It turned out that Wladyslaw’s own father had died while still quite young and his widow, Anna, had married the Ukrainian estate manager. This had been something of a scandal at the time. It was only when I investigated dates that I realised that Wladyslaw had been only eight years old when he fell heir to Dziedzilow. This meant that his youngish widowed mother Anna, living on another family estate at Pszemyslany, had to secure the services of a manager and would probably have travelled between the two places to keep an eye on her son’s inheritance. It was hardly surprising that a relationship began, although my father, who could remember his father Wladyslaw talking about it, was aware that it wasn’t a particularly happy marriage. There was a child, a much younger half sister for Wladyslaw, and she was brought up alongside my dad, although she died in the war. Relative dates and ages are very important when researching historical topics. We often forget how much the youthfulness of the protagonists impinges on the story– especially in historical writing when people often died young and tended to leap right in and do things early. 

Dad as a (long haired) little boy, with Wladyslaw and my grandmother Lucja.

The whole Austro Hungarian milieu fascinated me. I found a Czerkawski forebear who had many wives and many children, lived a long life and died in a riding accident when he was in his eighties. There were the artists who had travelled to Lwow and Vienna and sometimes to Paris. These borderlands were extraordinarily dangerous and skirmishes were commonplace. Of my grandfather’s family, two older brothers were killed in small uprisings, my grandad died and is buried in Bukhara on the Silk Road, having fallen victim to Stalin and a forced march east, rather than the Nazis, and his younger sister Ludmilla died in a concentration camp. Her ‘crime’ seems to have been that her husband was an army officer. An aunt was shot. A half sister was hanged by the Nazis. Only my grandmother, my great aunt Wanda, and my dad survived. 

Grandad has one of the few cars in the district. Here's my dad at the wheel!

All of this factual background fed into the fairly hefty piece of work that eventually became The Amber Heart although that whole story is set in mid nineteenth century Poland. One of these days I may tackle a sequel. At the time, it was my third novel and my agent couldn’t sell it. The late lamented Pat Kavanagh was a good, even a great agent but the consolidation and corporatisation of the old publishing houses was well under way. We were being sold the idea that it would be good for writers. It wasn’t. For mid-listers like myself, it was disastrous. Pat told me repeatedly that she loved the book, and she did her very best for it. Somebody even called it a 'Polish Gone With The Wind'. But ultimately, nobody would touch it with the proverbial bargepole. The reason they all gave was that no matter how big, how ‘epic’, how sexy the story (and believe me, this is a very sexy story) Big Publishing simply would not touch anything that was set in Poland. Kiss of death, they all said. Nobody wants to read anything set in Eastern Europe.

I tried it again over the years, but became disillusioned, shelved it, but couldn’t leave it alone. I tinkered with it from time to time. Polished it, made it better. Then Amazon came along – thank Bezos - with Kindle Direct Publishing and gave me the wherewithall to get it out there myself. Sales go up and down, but on the whole, it sells very well. In some ways, I’m grateful for the delay. I knew a lot more, had done more research. It is, I think, a much better book than it might have been. It’s long, very long so I’ve published it as an eBook in two parts, The Sorrel Mare and Noon Ghosts. But the ‘box set’, The Amber Heart, is, I think, a better deal and that's the one I'd recommend. You can find it here in the UK, and here in the USA. This one, I'm also planning to publish to various other platforms before the end of the year. 

Needlework, Wise Women and Kindles

Ayrshire Whitework in magical detail.

Last night, I went to a neighbouring village to give a talk to a group of ladies from the church 'Guild'. They were all what you might call older ladies, the kind of people easily dismissed by the young and cool. The meeting - in a warm, light church hall - began with a hymn and a prayer and ended with a hymn and a prayer. I've done this talk often before. I take my collection of examples of Ayrshire embroidery - along with a few other bits and pieces of interesting old needlework - some of it dating from 1840, one or two other pieces from 1800 or even earlier, and talk about the history of this magical embroidery, where it came from, how it was made, who did it and why. Even mixed groups of men and women seem to enjoy handling this work. It is, it has to be said, so beautiful, so microscopically fine, that you do find yourself wondering, as this audience so clearly did, just how women working by candlelight or oil lamps in dark little cottages, in the early 1800s, could possibly have created something so amazing. They would gather in a single cottage to share expensive candles, or work outside, sitting on turf or straw covered stones, to take advantage of natural light. Their health suffered, eyes and lungs in particular. The work - as so much 'women's work' - was undervalued. And remains rather undervalued even to this day, locally, although collectors in America will pay high prices for fine examples. Embroidery is on my mind at the moment, because one of the characters in my new novel, The Physic Garden, is a talented needlewoman, and her needlework figures largely in the story.

The ladies of the Guild were, as they always are on these occasions, interested, kind, positive, cheerful and hospitable. They could give lessons in how to treat a visitor to some other groups I've spoken to. The 'Rural' are the same. I always come home feeling inexplicably happy, although slightly worried at the average age of these groups, wondering who will come along to take their places. Mind you, the Rural, in farming areas like this one, seems to have no shortage of new, younger members.

At the end of the evening, when we were chatting over the tea and biscuits, one of the ladies reminded me about a trilogy of radio plays I wrote some years ago. It was called The Peggers and The Creelers and it was set here in the West of Scotland, a series of plays about the fishing families of the coast, the inland boot and shoe makers, and the traditional tensions between these two groups of people. I had done some of the research for my Masters degree and then written a series of plays about it. There was a certain amount of mistrust between the two communities and it fascinated me. When the plays were broadcast, people would stop me in our nearby town, to talk about them. One farmer told me how he had been listening in the cab of his tractor, and realised that he was in the very field where the characters were standing.

Last night, the lady told me she still had the plays on tape and listened to them from time to time, because she had enjoyed them so much. Last year, when I was sorting through all my old manuscripts, I found a big box of flimsy typescript. It was The Peggers and The Creelers, written as a trilogy of novels. I had forgotten all about them. Back then, I still did daft things like that. Thousands and thousands of words, just for love. And I remembered that my agent at the time - we're talking many years ago - hadn't even read them because, so she remarked, 'nobody wants historical fiction at the moment.' Last night I found myself talking about all this with enthusiasm. 'I'd love to read them,' my questioner told me. Oddly enough, she isn't the only person to have reminded me about those plays, those stories, over the past few months. And although back then, I could see that this might have been a niche project and something no traditional publisher would want, I can also see now that with the advent of Kindle, and Print On Demand, things might be different. Because the diaspora of people with Ayrshire roots is a large one.

So, when The Physic Garden is finished, and a few other projects are under way, I may well dig out that box of flimsy typescript and - in the second half of this year - see what I can do with the Peggers and the Creelers as a series of eBooks, for Amazon's Kindle, in the first instance. As I packed up my lovely whitework, last night, and got ready to leave, the lady who liked my radio plays said 'I hope you do publish them as novels. I'll look forward to it.'

Thinking, in that company, that I might well be among people who favoured paper books over eBooks (the smell, the feel, the permanence) I said 'Well, they'll be on Kindle first and maybe as paperbacks after that. )
'Oh no, dear,' she said.'I have a Kindle now. Wouldn't be without it.'

Oven Bottom Cakes. Family Secrets, My Irish Nana and Me

The Irish Famine by George Frederick Watts

I recently spent some time rewriting the blurb for Bird of Passage before a forthcoming free promotion (16th, 17th and 18th August). It's one of the big advantages of Kindle publishing that you can go back and refine something in the light of reviews, reader feedback, or just general intuition. The novel is set in Scotland, but it's probably the most Irish thing I've ever written, with the exception of a sad little story called Civil Rights, first published in the Edinburgh Review some years ago, and scheduled for another airing during the Edinburgh eBook Festival. 

I was born in Leeds, and my nana was Irish. Her name was Honora Flynn. Anne Honora, to be precise, although everyone called her Nora. Her father, James Flynn, was registered in Liverpool although later records mention Ireland as the place of his birth - maybe he was just off the ferry! - in 1856 or thereabouts which means that the migration of the family was probably related to the after effects of the Irish famine. 

Family tradition puts their place of origin as Ballyhaunis in Mayo and Flynn is certainly a Mayo name. By 1887, though, James was living in Leeds. He was a 'paviour' as the records state - which means he built roads. At the age of thirty, he married one Mary Terran or Terens who was a widow with children. His father Timothy was dead by then, but the marriage was witnessed by Charles and Mary Flynn, (his brother and sister?) who couldn't write, so marked their names with an 'X'. My nana, Anne Honora was born the year before their marriage, but it's a fairly safe assumption that she was Mary Terran and James Flynn's child. They went on to have more children, Timothy, Michael and Thomas. 

Later, my nana met my auburn haired grandad, Joe Sunter, in Holbeck, in Leeds, but at some point, she went to Canada looking for work and a new life. She didn't find it and sailed back again, to find that Joe was home from a trip to Singapore with the Merchant Navy. They were married not long after and had five children of whom my mother, Kathleen Irene, was the youngest. 

My grandad's family had been dalesmen - of Norse descent in all probability - from the upper reaches of Swaledale, lead miners turned coal dealers and farriers, and they were staunch Methodists. My nana's family were Irish Catholics and there was always a certain Irish element to my upbringing. I think the Catholic Church is a bit like Hotel California in the song - you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. I went to a small Catholic school, although we weren't what you might call 'red hot' in our religious observance. But when, at the age of 16, I first went to Ireland, working for a family in West Cork, looking after their children for the summer, it felt strangely familiar. 

The extended family, two sisters, with their husbands and assorted children, were renting an apartment in a big, beautiful, tumbledown house. It was a farmhouse but it must once have belonged to some minor Anglo Irish gentry before the 'troubles' changed everything. There was a dusty ballroom, an overgrown fountain in the garden, and a fearsome sow who would come galloping through the undergrowth in pursuit of strangers. The big holiday apartment had once been the servants quarters and the mice partied in the attics all night long. I was one of two nannies, temporary nursemaids, mother's helps, whatever we were. I looked after eighteen month old triplets and three older children by day,but at night, when they were mercifully in bed, the other nanny and myself went dancing in the nearby villages escorted by various local boys. I fell in love, just a little bit, and walked back down the long drive in the moonlight with a good looking boy called Paddy (what else?) who kissed me beneath the damp buddleias. I can never smell that honey scent now without remembering it. 

Later, I worked in Dublin too and everything about that time and place fed into the fiction which would come after. But much as I loved Ireland - much as I still love the place and its people - I didn't realise until years later that the scandal of the Magdalene Laundries and the cruelty of the Industrial Schools was still going on, even while I had been innocently holding hands with Paddy on that moonlit lane. Which is a chilling thought, even now.

Tattie Howkers

Tied up with all that is the story of what happened to my beloved nana, and how we - my elderly aunt and I, because my own mother was dead by that time - came to find out something about Nora which she had kept secret her whole life - which she had taken with her to her grave. Nobody knew, until much later when somebody, ferreting through official records, found it out. Later still, I wondered if that had been why Anne Honora had decided to leave for Canada. Maybe she felt that she had no more to lose. But she had come back and married my grandfather anyway. 

I wrote about it when those most closely concerned with it were dead even my dear aunt, who had been deeply upset by it. I wrote the poem below, Oven Bottom Cakes, before ever I wrote Bird of Passage. But although it's quite different, and Anne Honora's story is nothing like Finn and Kirsty's story - I still feel those little connections and inspirations, nipping away at me like midges on a summer night. For Bird of Passage is a story about secrets and lies, about concealment and shame as well. 

And I think the inspiration for these two quite different pieces of work must come from the same beloved place. 

 OVEN BOTTOM CAKES

My Irish nana made oven bottom cakes

with the last of the dough,

furiously working the elastic on

cold marble, her hair thrust back

like a schoolgirl’s with a clip.

I see her print pinafore and her body

flex as she presses her thumb into

the middle of each cake then

leans across the rag rug to throw

deft flour into the oven to judge

if the temperature is right.

On a February morning in smoky Leeds

in 1910 my nana, a shirt maker,

gave birth to twin girls Gladys and Ethel.

She named no father and they died within days.

Later, she told nobody.

They were erased from our story

as surely as if they had never lived

until years after her death when

some  remote cousin gleefully

excavating the family tree,

sniffed them out and spilt the beans.

Toddling, I would nap with her

in the afternoons and she would

push me out of her bed for

fidgetting, my soft breasted nan.

Did she see in me those

babies she had buried?

My nana baked bread for me.

How she loved to feed me good things,

made oven bottom cakes and we’d

eat them with the best butter

and blackberry jam that

nipped your teeth with seeds.

Catherine Czerkawska.

Magdalenes

.