Rewilding: the genesis of a slightly spooky tale.

One source of inspiration: Dun Beag on Skye

A question writers are often asked, whenever they stand up in public and talk about their work, is 'Where do you get your ideas from?' The fact is that most of us are never short of ideas. We have ideas coming out of our ears. We spend more than half our lives inside our heads, with characters of our own creating. What we're sometimes short of is the time to write them so we learn to be selective.

This is the reason why, if you ever approach a writer saying, 'I have this great idea for a novel/story/play' (meaning that you'd quite like us to write it for you) you'll generally find us backing away from you at speed, unless we're in the business of ghost writing, a worthy profession all of its own. We're not being mean. It's just that it may well be a great idea for you, but not for us.

Sometimes ideas arrive fully formed, sometimes as a small seed that nags away at you.

All of which is a roundabout way of exploring the genesis of my most recent slightly spooky tale that saw me through the dreich and dreary November days. I called it Rewilding. And it all began with a book festival.

Actually, it began long before that. Years ago, following my graduation from Edinburgh University with a degree in Mediaeval Studies, I did a postgraduate Masters at Leeds University in Folk Life Studies with Scots folklorist Stewart Sanderson. Both courses resulted in a lifelong interest in folk custom and belief.

Sometimes those interests coincide with my fiction.

Back to the Book Festival. At the very end of October, I'd been invited to speak at the Tarbert Book Festival - Tarbert Loch Fyne that is, and I can recommend it. I've spoken there twice now and hope they invite me back again. Anyway, my talk on my new book, A Proper Person to be Detained, was on Sunday lunchtime. That meant that we could listen to a presentation by one of my fellow Saraband authors, Alan Brown, with his wonderful Overlander book. (Buy it!) I was captivated by his account of 'bikepacking coast to coast across the Scottish Highlands'. But as I listened to him, my fiction writer's imagination was beginning to work overtime, the way fresh yeast starts to bubble and grow when you add a teaspoon of sugar.

I started to imagine a youngish  - but not too young - woman determined to prove her mettle in a small way, for various reasons that emerged as I visualised her. I saw her undertaking a small autumn backpacking expedition through a remote part of the western highlands, sleeping in bothies over some three or four nights, keeping a diary as she went.

The Cuillins

From Tarbert, meanwhile, we headed north to stay with friends on the Isle of Skye. We were fortunate to have chosen one of the finest weeks of the year. The sun shone day after day and although it was chilly, the frosts only served to enhance the scenery. We were seeing the Highlands and then Skye itself, in all their terrible beauty.

There is nowhere as beautiful as Scotland. Nor, sometimes, as daunting.

Among the places I visited, was a broch: Dun Beag. My husband has serious mobility problems, so he stayed in the car while I laboured up the hill to bag what is fondly referred to by my family as 'another of mum's heaps of old stones'. As I did so, I thought again about my fictional woman, and about myself at that age, mid thirties perhaps. I had done quite a bit of travelling and considered myself to be competent and unafraid. I started to project myself back into that situation, the solo hiker, in what is essentially a very safe part of the world. And then I started to think about fear, irrational fear maybe, but fear all the same, and why it might happen. Fear of the dark. Fear of strangers. Fear of silence. Because some places are scary and you have no idea why that might be.

Liam Brennan as Robert Kirk

When we came back, I started to write. Somewhere along the way, I recollected my own play, produced at Glasgow's Oran Mor venue a few years ago. The Secret Commonwealth, directed by Jen Hainey, with Liam Brennan as Robert Kirk, was a play about the 17th century Gaelic speaking minister of Aberfoyle who wrote a treatise of that name, all about the dangerous supernatural world, the 'commonwealth of the fairies'. Kirk was presumed to have been carried away by them as a retaliation for revealing their secrets. When that play was produced, the talented Celine Donoghue did the music. She had studied the songs and melodies that were associated with the sidhe of the Celts, fairies for sure, but nothing like the small, twee creatures of Victorian imagination - and dangerous when crossed. Creatures neither of heaven nor of earth, but of somewhere in between.

Along the way, I refreshed my memory about the belief in the water horse, the each uisge. Not the reasonably friendly kelpie, but a much more challenging creature altogether.

Finally, I came upon a song, collected and sung by the incomparable Julie Fowlis, a heart rending song that - unusually - gives voice to the each uisge, the dangerous water horse himself.

I wrote throughout the month of November, while I listened to the song obsessively. The story took its course, as such things will. I wrote to find out. I always write to find out. If I know the whole story before I begin, I tend to get bored and give up.

By the end of that time, I had a short novella or a long short story, some 17,000 words, which I called Rewilding. My good friend read it and at first remarked that it was a love story. Which it is. No doubt about that.

Then, she messaged me the following day to say that she had woken up in the night, disturbed by it, wondering what was really happening, worried by it.

That too was just the kind of response I wanted. It's not a story that I can place anywhere traditional with any certainty or speed, and I just wanted to get it 'out there' in time for Christmas. So, it's on Kindle. I may turn it into a small paperback as well, for those who don't much like eBooks, but I've reread it a few times on my Kindle in the dark, and I think it works. Especially in the dark, now that I come to think of it. Each time, it both frightens me and entices me.

I wonder if it will do the same thing to you. The question you have to ask yourself at the end is, what would you have done, in her shoes? Because I know what I'd have done. Do you?

Oh and by the way - if this song doesn't send shivers down your spine, I don't know what will.

The Great Silence

Wormwood.

Last week, a good friend in a different area of creativity asked me why I had given up writing plays.

I suppose the answer is that I haven't, not completely, and if somebody asked me to write a play again I would certainly consider it, especially if it involved dramatising one of my own books. Still, the question gave me pause for thought.

Why did I give up?

Well, one of the main reasons was that I wanted to write fiction, and in fact I was writing fiction, lots of it. But because I was learning my craft, I didn't want to go back to dividing my time between the two. I wanted to live in the world of whatever book I was working on. So in a way, abandoning plays wasn't so much a conscious decision as a refocusing. And that was fine.


But there were other factors. Lots of women who were writing plays at the same time as me seem to have abandoned theatre as well, especially here in Scotland. Somebody speaking about women in theatre on a radio programme only the other week pointed out what a difficult place theatre was for women to get so much as a toehold in, back in the 1980s. Listening to her, I thought 'not just me then.'

It struck me that one of the other reasons why I gave up on theatre was that my life had changed significantly. I was living in the countryside, I had a child - and I couldn't any longer lurk in theatre bars making sure that those doing the commissioning remembered my existence. This may sound like a lame excuse - and the truth is that had I wanted it badly enough, I might well have done it - but the fact remains that I fell off their radar and at the time, I really didn't miss it.

Quartz

Back in the 80s, after writing 100+ hours of radio drama, some TV, community theatre, and a production at Edinburgh's Lyceum, I had two major and very well reviewed productions at the Traverse in Edinburgh: Wormwood (all about the Chernobyl disaster) and Quartz. I remember Michael Billington's complimentary review of Quartz and his hope that the theatre would go on to 'nurture' me.

Nurturing was never going to be on the agenda.

I had a brief resurgence with the wonderful David McLennan at Glasgow's Oran Mor, who produced three of my short plays, at least one of which - the Price of a Fish Supper - has gone on to have an excellent and successful life beyond its first production. But after David's sadly early death, I again entered what I have come to think of as The Great Silence.

I would send ideas, scripts, proposals to various theatre companies. Most of the time, they simply weren't acknowledged at all, although there was the occasional standard rejection. From that point on, nobody - except David, for that short time - treated me like a professional.

I was reminded of this recently, when I decided to explore the possibility of finding an agent. I have had agents in the past, including the late, great (but scary) Pat Kavanagh, who sold my first full length adult novel. It was sold to the Bodley Head, which was instantly taken over by one of the big publishing beasts and they tried to transform it into the fashionable beach bonkbuster it wasn't. My next novel had a Polish background. Pat loved it but couldn't sell it, and if she couldn't sell it, nobody could. We got a string of rejections saying that editors loved it but nobody was remotely interested in Poland. Nevertheless the single best piece of advice I have ever had about writing came from Pat.
'Only write something if you can't bear NOT to write it,' she told me.

My last agent disappeared without trace. I have no idea, not the foggiest notion, what became of him. He went AWOL and incommunicado and I've never heard from him since. Perhaps he too entered the Great Silence. Over the past year, with nine published novels under my belt, four of them still very much in print, and a brand new and well reviewed non-fiction book published in the summer, I contacted various agents who said they were looking for new clients, and who seemed like a good fit.

One responded pleasantly and personally. She was understandably too busy and told me so quite quickly, while also praising the work.
One turned me down immediately with a formal rejection letter. I doubt very much if my enquiry got beyond the intern employed to sift them.
One asked to see a PDF of a book and then - nothing.
The rest didn't respond at all. I had again entered the Great Silence.

Well -  I'm fine. I have an excellent publisher and exciting work to do, and I've given up on the notion of representation. In fact I've probably got enough interesting writing work to keep me busy for the next few years: work that I can't bear NOT to do. And that's a blessing in anybody's book.

But it does make me wonder about people just starting out. Apart from the lucky few, how do they get themselves noticed? How do they ever stand out from the crowd? And what about that old maxim that if you're 'good enough' you'll make it? So you just have to persevere? Because the successful people I know have persevered with the actual writing, for sure, but I suspect most of them have also taken matters into their own hands in some way.

I don't have any easy answers to this, but I do wonder what other writers, experienced or emerging, think about it.
How did you do it?
How do you plan to do it?

Food Parcels and Fags: My Polish Grandmother

Lucja Szapera 

This is a picture of my Polish grandmother. I met her very briefly when she came to spend a couple of weeks with us in Leeds. I can't even remember the exact year when she came, but I think it must have been when we had moved from my grandparents' house in Whitehall Road to a chilly flat in an old vicarage in Bellevue Road, which would place it some time in the late 1950s. You can read about some of this in my recent book, A Proper Person to be Detained, because although that book is about a murder in my family in 1881, I moved the story forward into my own childhood, in an effort to get some perspective on those long ago events.

What I didn't tackle though, was the troubled relationship between my father and his own mother, Lucja.

My middle name is Lucy. I was named for her.

One night last week, I woke up with a start and remembered the food parcels. It may have been because I had just said - not entirely in jest - that in the event of a no-deal Brexit, we might have to ask our son, working in the EU, to send us medicines. Perhaps that had triggered the memory, because I hadn't thought about Lucja's food parcels in more than forty years.

After the war, when my refugee dad was in a resettlement camp in Yorkshire, like so many displaced persons, he hadn't the foggiest idea whether any of his family had survived. For many years, we believed that his father, Wladyslaw, had been sent to Siberia and had died there. As it happened, that wasn't the case, but it took a great deal of research before we found out the true story. He didn't survive. He was never going to come knocking on our door. His tragic story is one for another day, another post. Maybe the book or books I seem to be edging towards writing if I can find a way into them.

Aunty Wanda

But in those post war years, the Red Cross did sterling work in trying to reunite families. Eventually, we found out that dad's beloved Aunty Wanda had survived and was still living in Poland with her husband, artist Karol Kossak, in a spa town called Ciechocinek. I visited them and their daughter Teresa in the  early 1970s, and immediately felt at home with them.

In the late 1950s, we also discovered that Lucja was alive, living in a town called Wałbrzych in the south west of Poland. She and my father corresponded, and because times were hard in communist Poland, especially for elderly ladies of very limited means, we sent food parcels to her. I remember the shopping, the careful wrapping, my dad filling in endless forms, taking them to the post office with my mother, hoping that the things actually got there, because pilfering at the borders was rife. As were food shortages.

And then Lucja came to visit.


It was not, on the whole, a success. I find myself digging around in my memory, trying to analyse the tensions that I, as a little girl, could only have been dimly aware of. The word that best describes it might be disappointment. I think she was disappointed, had been disappointed and angry for years - angry and unwell and disappointed. She had expected more from the visit. She had expected much more from life. And she had lost everything except her life.

She was, I believe, the child of a wealthy pharmacist, in the prosperous Polish city of Lwow, when she met and married my grandfather. You can see them together in the picture below, possibly taken in the summer of 1929 when my dad would be about three: handsome Wladyslaw, who always reminds me of Maxim in Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca and pretty, plump Lucja in her early 20s, with her summer dress, her pearls and her hat and her little son, Julian, still in his traditional girly baby clothes and haircut.

Spoilt Lucja who got her own way in everything.

She had always expected more from life. The picture at the very top of this post shows her at about the same time or just a little earlier - newly married, well made up, glossy in her fur coat. Uncannily, I recognise myself in her eyes, and her hair. She certainly gave me her hair.

The family were ostensibly Catholic, but the name Szapera suggests a Jewish heritage somewhere along the line. The family also claimed Hungarian forebears. Wladyslaw, who had a reputation for immense charm, must have met her socially in Lwow and swept her off her little feet. He was wealthy too - on paper at least, although not so much in hard cash.

The family were 'szlachta': the old, minor aristocracy. Wladyslaw's mother, Anna Brudzewska, had been from an even more distinguished family. Wladyslaw had inherited the estate from a wealthy uncle and stood to inherit another place in Prszemyslany.  He had a nice house, a ruined mansion, an ice house, the only car in the district, plenty of land, prospects - and a pet monkey. Lucja must have thought that all her dreams were coming true.

They were very young: Lucja was born in 1906, and Wladyslaw in 1904, which made her only twenty when her son was born. I'm sure for a while they were madly in love.

But she was a city girl, and I imagine that she soon found the countryside not at all to her liking. I suspect she didn't like the mud or the flies or the horses or the dogs or the guests that stayed for days on end. Besides, Wladyslaw was not quite as rich as she had believed. He was always thinking up ways of making money: growing mushrooms in the cellars of the old manor house at Dziedzilow that had been burned down in some previous conflict or inventing perpetual motion machines that - of course - didn't work.

She had probably been used to city life and entertainments, nice clothes, a little luxury, and here she was, marooned in the country, and then doubly marooned after my dad was born.

I suspect too that my grandfather found that he had fallen for a pretty face but, like Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, had found himself married to a rather foolish woman. This seems harsh, but my father once confessed, reluctantly, that he had always been much closer to his father and his aunt Wanda than he ever was to his mother. They seemed to have very little in common.

Pre war Lwow.

Nevertheless, my parents went through the complicated and stressful process of inviting Lucja for a visit. From the start, it was clear that she disliked postwar Leeds intensely. When I think about it now, I'm very sorry for her. She could speak no English and my mother no Polish, so communications were difficult. At home, she worked in one of those little kiosks that sell cigarettes and bus and tram tickets. She suffered badly from arthritis and lived with somebody we knew as Aunty Nusia. I think, although I can't be certain, that this was her sister but it may have been a cousin.

She had expected us to be rich. We were very far from that. She missed Nusia. She didn't like the food, she didn't like my mother, I'm not even sure that she liked me very much. She must have been very homesick, even though she didn't like her home much. Children bored her. The fortnight was spent mostly playing cards with assorted patient Leeds relatives, while she smoked cigarettes and grumbled. She went back with more food and more cigarettes, as many as she was allowed to take. The correspondence continued, as did the food parcels and the medicines for her arthritis that my dad managed to acquire. I believe she died in 1971, just before I went to Poland myself, and met my other surviving relatives.

Julian at Dziedzilow.

Many years later, dad told me all about his childhood, but said very little about his difficult relationship with Lucja.  I think it saddened him. He had been a country child, heart and soul, brought up among the trees and flower meadows of this part of Poland, loving dogs and horses, riding almost as soon as he could walk, ski-ing in winter. Reading a great deal.

He adored his father, but at some point in the 1930s, Wladyslaw began an affair with the wife of a local schoolteacher. I think my dad saw this as a betrayal, naturally enough, although he was too young to articulate it properly.

Just on the verge of war, Wladyslaw and Lucja separated, and Lucja took my dad, Julian, back to Lwow. He didn't want to go. I recently found the address among his old papers and looked it up online. The apartments are still there, and seem quite smart. Wladyslaw visited them there as often as he could and as a boy Julian would often travel back to Dziedzilow to spend holidays there. He was always happier in the countryside than in the city. Always happier with his father or with his Aunt Wanda and Uncle Karol and other family members who lived nearby.

Later, more precariously, when the city of Lwow and the house at Dziedzilow were under occupation and his father was in the army and then in a Stalinist prison, Julian would travel back to the village to stay with his beloved nanny. She was a Polish girl married to a Ukrainian so he might have been in extreme danger, but he was never betrayed. Instead, the local Ukrainians sheltered him.

In due course, he would come back to the city with eggs, apples, meat.

More food parcels for Lucja.

Opening Pandora's Box - Brexit, Xenophobia, My Polish Father and Me

The day after the Brexit referendum I remember my husband saying 'they have no idea what they've unleashed.' To be fair, I don't think any of us realised what had been unleashed, although by now, many of us have a fair understanding.

I was born to a Polish father and an English /Irish mother, in smoky post war Leeds. A couple of weeks ago, I travelled to the Polish consulate in Edinburgh, carrying a sheaf of papers, including copies of my birth certificate, my parents' marriage certificate and dad's naturalization papers, as well as my own application for the restitution of the dual nationality I once had. The consul was polite and helpful; the process was fiddly but reasonably straightforward. It remains to be seen whether the application is successful and it could take some time - but the process is under way.

I had been thinking about doing this ever since the referendum, but it seemed wrong to undertake it purely to retain my freedom of movement in a post Brexit world, even though it was bound to be a consideration. In retrospect, I think I delayed for so long because I wanted to be sure that there were other, better reasons.

My dad came to Yorkshire with General Anders' army at the end of the war. He spent some time in a Polish resettlement camp, and then worked as a textile presser in a woollen mill, learning English and studying at night school. He didn't apply to become a naturalized Brit till the mid 1960s. By that time, we had moved to Scotland, where he was working as a senior research scientist. Because he would occasionally have to travel to the Eastern Bloc and they wouldn't be able to offer him protection there, the Home Office advised him to renounce his Polish citizenship. It meant that both my mother and I lost our dual nationality as well.

I don't know what dad felt about it, because I was young and didn't ask him. It was one of those questions that you only think about later. I still felt very Polish and can only assume he did too. We celebrated Christmas in the Polish way, and he would become a little emotional over old Polish Christmas carols, something I don't think my mother, who loved him dearly, ever fully understood. Later, it struck me that she simply wanted him to be happy, and because he was usually a cheerful, kindly man, any intimation of despondency upset her too. I visited Poland several times, met long lost relatives and eventually spent a year working at Wroclaw University, teaching English under the auspices of the British Council.

Back when my mum and dad were first married, there had been the odd instance of xenophobia. I wrote about these in my recent book, A Proper Person to be Detained: somebody remarking to my newly married mum that she 'thought they should send all these Poles back now'. The fact that throughout the early years of their marriage, whenever a crime was committed by anyone vaguely foreign sounding, the police would come calling, until my mum, tired of the midnight hammering on the door, went down and told them in no uncertain terms where they could go.

But as time passed, these seemed like increasingly isolated incidents.

Now that I reflect on it from a Brexit perspective, I can see that we weren't immune. My surname caused me problems at school and as a writer, and still does. I was told it would have been better if I had done as some Poles did, and changed it, but I defiantly refused to do it - and probably still would refuse to do it. When I occasionally suggested that I'd like to write about Poland in my fiction, I was invariably told that 'nobody would be interested'. Much worse though, was that my father - a biochemist - was repeatedly refused promotion. Repeatedly turned down for the headship of his department in the government research institute where he worked. This would have been acceptable if there had been no evidence of his expertise, but some years after his PhD, he was awarded a Doctor of Science degree. This is a higher doctorate whose fundamental purpose is to recognise excellence in academic scholarship. He was, in effect, a double doctor. He was popular with the staff and he had become an expert in his field, working in particular on ways of helping to set up sustainable third world agricultural projects.

He was the only person in his research institute with such a senior qualification not to be given promotion. In fact few of his peers had that qualification or international recognition at all. They were too busy working on commercial projects for inventing 'spreadable butter'.

He should have moved, but he loved this part of Scotland, loved his work and his quality of life, so he elected to stay. Nevertheless it rankled. Fortunately, before retirement, he was offered a prestigious attachment to UNO City in Vienna, where he and my mum spent two very happy years, and from where he travelled the world, working as a special scientific adviser. I still have correspondence from that time, from researchers worldwide who clearly admired him as much as we did. It was long after dad's death, that I finally understood, or perhaps admitted, what had been going on.

What had been going on was nasty, low key xenophobia. Impossible to prove or challenge. But present all the same.

Along with many other people, I've spent our years within the EU blithely supposing that suspicion of foreigners was a thing of the past. Or that at the very least it was dying out. I wonder now how I can have been so ridiculously naive. It hadn't died out at all. It had just gone underground. Temporarily. People may have found it socially unacceptable to admit to it, but many of them felt it all the same.

When I look back now, I remember the odd occasion where I heard tourists or migrants, speaking in their own languages in public places. Fascinated, I would try to figure out where they were from. But how could I not have noticed the hostile glances? Now I remember the young men emerging from the Polish shop in town, being accosted by a vitriolic old woman, shouting at them to 'get back where they came from.' Nobody intervening on their behalf except me. The English woman on a Spanish service bus, saying angrily 'You'd think they'd speak the language' to her companion. She expected the driver, in Spain, to speak English. The hideous exclamatory headlines in all the tabloid newspapers, the newspapers I didn't buy or read, and tried to ignore. The fact that my dad would occasionally say that fascism could happen at any time and in any place. All that it needed was for the conditions to be right.

You know, Pandora's Box wasn't really a box. It was a large storage jar. And in this case, the lid had been tipped for a long time. We just didn't notice. Every now and then, some right wing bloviator would give it a nudge. With his Brexit referendum, David Cameron lifted the lid clean off and out they all tumbled: xenophobia, prejudice, racism, hatred, bigotry and a host of other evils. Why did we imagine, even for a moment, that they had gone away?

I feel European because I am. For years, in response to 'where do you come from?' I've listed the complications of being English, Irish and Polish with a bit of Hungarian thrown in for good measure. But I've lived in Scotland for more years than I've lived anywhere else. Like so many much younger people, I'm happy being a citizen of nowhere, but if I can't have that, I'll settle for becoming a citizen of the places with which I feel most affinity: Poland and - with a bit of luck - a future independent Scotland.

As for my dad - I miss him more than I can say. I need his wisdom and his affection to guide me. But I'm very glad that he's no longer around to find himself on the shifting sands of prejudice all over again, to hear the alarming tales that I hear every single day now from EU citizens living in the UK: the jubilation over the ending of  free movement, the refusal of settled status to people who have lived and worked and paid their taxes here for forty or more years, the daily acts of bigotry, the lack of any recognition that when you characterise migrants as foreign invaders or - worse - as vermin, you are also talking about the neighbour who gives you fruit and veg from their garden, who feeds your cat when you're away, who chats to you in the street, whose child is friendly with your child.

It's no good saying 'oh but we didn't mean you.' I'm afraid you did. You did.

Over the past three years the cracks in what was once the United Kingdom have become gaping fissures. We're governed by men and women who lie as the birds sing. And the divisions in our society are now so deep that I doubt if they will be healed in my lifetime.

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.

Robert Burns's Funeral, 25th July 1796.

On this day, in 1796, Scottish poet Robert Burns, who had died only a few days earlier in his Dumfries home, was buried. He had struggled to return from Brow Well on the Solway, where he had been taking a 'water cure' that can only have hastened his end from acute endocarditis. Once home, he had to be 'oxtered' into the house, where he took to his bed and never left it again.

The funeral was a very grand affair at mid-day at St Michael's Kirkyard, in Dumfries. As a member of the Royal Dumfries Volunteers, he was given a military funeral, thus ignoring one of his last wishes. 'Don't let the awkward squad fire over me,' he had said, but they did it anyway.

While her husband was being buried, his wife Jean was giving birth to his last child, Maxwell.

I wrote about it in my novel: The Jewel, published by Saraband.


'On the morning of the funeral, before she could even dress, her pains began. It was clear that she could not leave the house. An hour after they had come to carry Rab away, her waters broke, streaming onto the stone floor. She went into labour and gave birth to his last son, Maxwell, on the same day. Few people perceived or even cared how terrible that was for her: to be in such pain and distress at that time. Jessie perhaps, although Jessie had no weans of her own yet. Mary Armour might have offered her some comfort, but Mary was in Fife and word had only just reached her. Rab's heartbroken mother would know what she was feeling. Nobody else. No man would have fully understood the darkness that engulfed her during the hours that she laboured for love of him on such a day. 

Jean told only a few people that the night after the funeral, as she lay in their bed, wrapped up in blankets, aching for the warmth of her husband's body beside her, with the shape of his head in the pillow still, and a few dark hairs attached to it, he had come to her. The whole house was quiet, Maxwell swaddled in her arms. She had been singing to the new wean until he slept, and she saw Rab coming into the room. He was as bold and clear as though he had still been in life and, she thought, rather more healthy than the last time she had laid eyes on him, a gleam in his eye and a flush of sunlight on his cheek. 

She was not afraid.

When had she ever been afraid of him except just that one time, in the stable, in the Back Causeway? Rather she felt the wee bubble of laughter that she had so often felt with him, laughter even in the most serious of situations, at the general absurdity of everything, even the very worst of things. She looked up at him while he gazed down at her and, in particular she thought, at the  baby. Well, why not? He had aye loved the weans best, loved the curve of their cheeks, the soft, vulnerable place at the back of the neck, their perfect wee fingers and toes. Then he shook his head sadly, as though regretting that he could not stay, and disappeared, so suddenly that it seemed like a snowflake, melting away in your hand.'

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.

Xenophobia, Bad Behaviour and the Blame Game

I don't normally blog about politics, even though I have strong opinions (don't we all?) but sometimes politics and events in your home country overlap with the kind of character analysis you find yourself doing all the time as a writer and sometimes you just have to say something.

Way back in 1983, the Russians were accused of shooting down a passenger airliner, with great loss of life. It was one of those terrible incidents that could be attributed to a horrific set of coincidences - always much more likely to occur at times of international tension. The aircraft had strayed off course, and the Russian fighter planes claimed that they couldn't identify it as a civilian aircraft. Disaster ensued.

Our tabloids, of course, had a field day. I had only moved to this village some three years previously. And I had an Eastern European surname. It's my dad's name and I'm proud of it, so I always tended to use it professionally, even after I got married. But of course all Eastern European names sound the same to many people, and - going about my business on the quiet street where I live - I found myself the target for name calling and jeering from a group of young lads.

My husband happened to know and like the father of the chief culprits. He had a quiet word and it all stopped, as if by magic. And that was that.

The interesting thing though, is that those 'culprits' were not the chief culprits at all. They were invariably the fall guys. They are all grown up now, and they never really got up to any more than minor mischief. This is still a rural area, where farmers don't stand for any nonsense and everyone knows their neighbours. But the more I kept an eye on the dynamics of that group of lads, back then, the more obvious it became that the real villain, in a small way, was the neat, clever, good-looking, middle class boy whom everyone praised as being 'such a nice boy'. He would set up situations but when retribution struck, he was nowhere to be seen.

One example will suffice. From a distance, I saw him kick a football at a martin's nest, on the eaves of one of the old cottages, deliberately dislodging it and bringing it down into the street. A moment or two later, an irate householder emerged, to find the usual suspects, still hanging about looking guilty, while the real culprit had - as if by magic - melted into the scenery. He always contrived to do it, and for all I know, he may be doing it still.

He may have gone into politics, where he is still destroying lives, and then melting into the scenery, leaving those less cunning to take the blame.

Chernobyl

Wormwood, the Traverse, 1996:
Liam Brennan and Ann Marie Timoney .

If you haven't been watching Chernobyl, the TV series - the fifth and final episode was last night on Sky Atlantic - you must. If you're a writer or a would-be writer or, let's face it,  a human being - you have to find a way of watching it. It is  the best television drama I have seen for years, decades, possibly for ever.

I'm not exaggerating.


Everything about it is perfect: the performances, the camerawork, the authenticity, but above all, the incomparable writing. I've been enthusing about it on social media ever since it started, five weeks ago, and people keep saying to me 'but I don't have Sky' and I keep saying, 'well get it. Or find somebody who does. Or find a way to catch up with it. But whatever you do, just watch it.'

Every minute of every episode counted. Every line of the script was both subtle and meaningful. Nothing was superfluous but nothing was over dramatized either. Craig Mazin didn't need to over dramatize. The subject matter was dramatic enough. Instead, the writer needed to be in control, and Mazin was. There are moments in this series that are more genuinely terrifying than anything I have ever seen in any kind of media in my whole life. And all the better for being oddly low key as well. Just like the truth of horrific events.

'Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth,' said one of the characters last night. 'Sooner or later, that debt is paid.' Since the character was a scientist, a real person, these may have been his own words. But practically every line of ever scene counted in this way. Every scene had a dozen lessons to teach us about political lies, about a commonplace but disastrous inability to admit to the truth, about the way in which sooner or later, our complacency will lead nature to teach us a terrible lesson by doing exactly what it does, without reference to us, and certainly without regard or pity.

This production was close to my heart for various reasons. I was in the early stages of pregnancy in 1986 when the disaster happened. Fortuitously (although it didn't seem so at the time) I had flu. Genuine, full blown, horrible flu. I had been in the Canaries where my husband was working aboard a charter yacht at the time, and had flown home to Scotland on my own while he sailed the yacht back. I may well have contracted it on the plane. Fortunately, my parents lived close by and I went to their house, so that they could look after me. I stayed indoors for several weeks, and those weeks just happened to coincide with the weeks when the Chernobyl cloud passed over the UK. Flu is pretty dangerous during pregnancy, but I was OK. Maybe I'd have been fine anyway. But it was reassuring to know that I hadn't been outside at all.

Ten years later, my play Wormwood, about the Chernobyl disaster, was developed and given a full scale and incredibly well reviewed production at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre, with Philip Howard directing. Later, the play was one of the recommended texts for the Scottish Higher Drama syllabus, so I still meet quite a lot of people who studied it at school. It was published, first of all in an anthology called Scotland Plays, and then as an individual eBook text, Wormwood, both of which are still available, if you fancy reading it. Wormwood is another name for the plant artemisia after which Chernobyl is named, because it grows in profusion in the region. It is, coincidentally, mentioned in the bible in connection with a terrible disaster.

My father, a distinguished biochemist, had actually spent two years on secondment to the Atomic Energy Commission in Vienna in the early 80s, so he was able to help me with the science. And of course, with ten years having elapsed, there was considerably more material 'out there'. All the same, watching Mazin's outstanding production, I did find myself wondering how much I might have got wrong. As it turns out I had got it pretty much right, except that, of course, time, political changes and expert analysis had added more precise details.

I would love to read the scripts. For now, though, I can only repeat. If you haven't already seen the television series - do, please, move heaven and earth to watch it. You'll be frightened and moved and saddened, but you won't be disappointed.

A Proper Person to be Detained

My new book is up for pre-order on various sites, including Waterstones so do have a browse - especially if you're interested in all kinds of things, including family history in general, the Irish migrants who fled hunger and privation to become 'hands' in industrial cities, the treatment of women in Victorian Britain, discrimination and poverty, prison conditions, law and order - and murder.

When I began this project a couple of years ago, I didn't intend for it to be quite as relevant as it seems to have become. I simply set out to research and write about a family mystery: who murdered my Irish great great uncle John in Leeds, on Christmas Day in 1881; did the murderer really, as some family members believed, get away with it - and what happened afterwards?

It wasn't simple at all though. It was difficult and complicated and harrowing and tragic, especially for those left behind. I made unexpected discoveries, and sometimes it seemed as though each one was more distressing than the last.

If you love researching your family history, and are the kind of researcher who wants to know more than the bald names and dates - if you are fascinated by the stories that lie beneath the surface - then this is the book for you. I think almost all of us, embarking on this kind of research, will uncover more than we bargained for and often, those discoveries will be profoundly distressing.

This book also stands alone as an exploration of a true crime: what led up to it, how and why the murder came about - and what happened afterwards in terms of justice and imprisonment.

And finally, it is a very personal reflection on the part that migration, poverty and prejudice have played in my personal history: the extraordinary confluence of the varied influences and experiences that have helped to make me what I am today.

Celebrating Creative Change and Transition, Whatever Your Age.

Wordsworth's couch. Doesn't look too comfy, does it?

From time to time, I meet up with a good friend, an artist, and we set the world - and ourselves - to rights over coffee and scones. (Wordsworth liked to lie on his couch, in vacant or in pensive mood, but we like to chat.) A few things strike us about these meetings: how nice it is to meet up with a like minded person, and how helpful it can be to talk about work and motivation, why and how we do what we do, and what we feel about it. It helps that we're both creative but work in different areas of creativity. It's amazing how often insights emerge from these conversations as we explore the differences and similarities between our respective practices. My friend has been doing serious research into ageing and creativity and as we grow older, but still remain creative, we inevitably find ourselves thinking and talking about the challenges the years bring.

It's all useful, but just occasionally, a vital insight seems to emerge.

Ageing, when you're working in the so called 'creative industries' can be a demoralising business. Especially, I suspect, when you're female, although men don't have it easy either. At a time when you might be reaping the rewards of a lifetime of creative practice you can suddenly find that professionally, you've disappeared. Women, especially find this.  You feel more confident, wiser and, in many ways, at the peak of your game. And yet, that's not how the world sees you, not even the world in which you may have lived and worked hard for years.

Read this long and intensely interesting interview with Anjelica Houston for example. She's of an age when she can say exactly what she thinks. I love it when she says 'I’m looking for movies that ... aren’t apologetically humble or humiliating like, “Band of cheerleaders gets back together for one last hurrah,” you know.'

Only this week I found myself facing the realisation that a decent amount of successful work in a particular field - not, fortunately, the one which means most to me right now - counted for absolutely nothing. I had become invisible. But this isn't a rant. Not this week, anyway! And all it did was confirm for me that I'm heading in the right direction. That I don't have to be apologetically humble. That I don't even have to try to go back to a part of my creativity that no longer serves me well.

Throughout my creative career, I've encountered periods of quite radical change and development, periods of transition, where the kind of work I once did, the work that once satisfied me, no longer suited me. So I moved on. Sometimes that was a slow process, and sometimes it happened almost overnight. Occasionally, I looked back to themes or ways of working that had once excited me and picked them up again with the benefit of experience. In fact that's what happened with my latest book, A Proper Person To Be Detained, the true story of a murder in my own Leeds Irish family, in 1881. I had often thought of writing about it, but it was only a couple of years ago that the time suddenly seemed right, that I felt myself capable of undertaking the project.

When I was young, or even middle aged, these periods of change and transition didn't feel wrong. They may have been challenging but they were exciting. And one of the reasons why they were exciting was that they always felt like a part of some kind of creative cycle. One way of working no longer suited, but another one did. So I took what I needed from the old, shrugged off the rest, and moved on. There was work to be done, and wasn't that good?

As older writers or artists or musicians, though, we have to contend with the almost constant brainwashing about ageing, failure and diminishing powers that surrounds us. Our media, whether it's television, radio, social media or newspapers, constantly bombard us with negativity about ageing. It could be 'Parsnip Man' and June, rabbiting on about funeral plans, or those hideous headless pictures of very old people trudging along with their walkers: you know, the ones that they always show over headlines about bed blockers or elderly abuse. See enough of them, and you do start to wonder whether it wouldn't be better to head off into the wilderness now, before they get to you.

The other thing that happens to you is that if and when you find yourself in one of these inevitable and hitherto quite exciting transitional periods, you may put it all down to ageing. When for most of us, it's nothing of the kind.

Think about it. Much more likely is that it's just one more phase of a long career in creativity. Change is inevitable, but often it can be wonderfully empowering. And that should be welcomed and celebrated. Shouldn't it?

However young or old you are.

As A Writer: Five Things I Would Do Differently Now

Whether you are in the early stages or in the middle of a career in writing, but struggling, you may find this post helpful. It arose from a conversation I had recently with an artist friend. We often compare notes about our respective professions and it's always illuminating for both of us.

'Would you do anything differently?' she asked me. 'Knowing what you know now?' 

It struck a chord with me, because it's something I think about quite often these days - how I might have done things differently; how I might have approached things, so that I ended up struggling less and enjoying the process more. Opportunities are very different from when I was starting out: it was better in some ways, much worse in others, so I realise that hindsight is a great thing. Nevertheless, here are some thoughts on where I went wrong. 

1 I would pay a lot less attention to advice about what I should and shouldn't write. 

Practically every single piece of advice I've been given about what to write as opposed to how to write it, has turned out to be wrong. I don't mean technical development advice. All of us need some of that, and if you can find a good editor or mentor  - somebody who is willing to work with you and whose advice you know you can trust - then seize it with both hands.
We all need to learn our craft.
But I mean the casual, throwaway advice, often from people who are in 'the business' in some way.

Write this, don't write that. 

There's a market for this or this but not for that. 

Don't turn this radio play into a stage play. It won't work.  

Don't write non fiction. 

There's no market for the supernatural.
There's no market for ... just about anything you fancy writing.

When I felt in my bones that I wanted to write something, I was right and they were wrong. Often, I was simply ahead of the game.
Read William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade and then write what you want because he was right. Nobody knows anything.  

2 I would do a postgraduate business studies or marketing course.

I've only learned about the business side of writing and publishing as the years have gone by. I'm still not great at it, if the truth be told, but I'm better than I was. The 'creative industries' are full of writers who don't know nearly enough about the business side of writing and publishing, about being self employed and running your own business.

This means knowing your responsibilities as well as your rights. Being professional. Meeting deadlines. Writing for love but publishing for money and treating it as a business at the same time. Knowing what the cost of running that business involves, even if you're working from home.

All those years ago, when I started out, a knowledge of business wasn't deemed important for people working in the arts, on the creative side at least. We left all that to the middle men and women. Silly us. Because suddenly, we found that we were working in something called the Creative Industries, while still being advised not to worry our little heads about such things. I suspect even now, many university creative writing courses do little to address the business and marketing side of creative practice.

Understanding the business side of things is vital for anyone hoping to build a career as a writer - and it would have been so much easier if I had known more about it earlier.

3 I would never work for any big company on the promise of exposure or jam tomorrow or a  future commission.  

This is closely linked to 2 , above. I've done this two or three times, mostly with television proposals. I don't mean a basic proposal or submission. Getting a foothold in any area of creative practice means actually doing it. When a fellow writer told me, a long time ago, that the only way to learn how to write was to write, he was absolutely right and most writers do an awful lot of writing on spec before publication or production.

This was something different. I already had a track record, but this involved months of unpaid work, encouraged by a script editor. When I look back on the waste of time, I could scream, and yet it was my fault. I was a willing volunteer. I went along with it in pursuit of all that lovely jam tomorrow. Eventually, it occurred to me that the script editor was being paid - not handsomely, but a whole lot more than me - to work with a number of different proposals, most of which would never be made. This would have been fine if they paid development money for the work involved. But they never did. There was 'no money in the budget'.

Whenever anyone says this to you, bear in mind that it means that there is, in fact, a budget. They have just never included the writer in it.  There should be a fee for this kind of speculative work that they are asking you to do. And if they decide not to use it after all, there should be a kill fee - a sum of money to give you some compensation for your time and effort. 

4 I wouldn't write radio drama at all. 

This is a big - and quite emotional - issue for me. I began my writing career as a poet and short story writer (with a decent publication record by the time I was thirty) and in parallel with that as a radio playwright. I loved the medium. But with hindsight, radio drama was a dead end for me.
I worked with some fine producers, people I still admire and they taught me plenty.
I used to say that radio taught me how to write dialogue, but I was pretty good at that anyway and I could have learned.

As a career pathway, it was useless.

After a while, radio drama that had once been exciting and experimental for me, became something of a treadmill, albeit an enticing one. It was hard work, but it was fun to do. It was difficult to turn down commissions, because it paid some of the bills, but it wasn't nearly as well paid as a 'proper' job would have been, and yet it was equally time consuming and tricky. While I was writing for radio - sometimes ten part serials for the Classic Serial slot - I wasn't writing other things. And yet I was always a single commission away from financial disaster.

There was only one real outlet for an experienced radio dramatist, and that was via the BBC. If the work dried up, as mine did, almost overnight, there was nowhere else to go, no other outlet for a very singular set of skills. Just at the point of commission, there was a change of personnel and the plug was pulled on a major series. I did a bit of audio work for various visitor attractions. I turned to theatre for a while, and enjoyed the experience, but eventually I returned to the work I should have been doing twenty years earlier: writing fiction and popular non-fiction. I'm glad I did, but I wish I'd done it much sooner. Radio allowed me to feel that I was making a living as a writer, but the reality was that I was going nowhere and had relinquished control over my future to a single editor.

5 I wouldn't be ever so humble.
The truth is that now, writers do have options, self publishing, blogging and podcasts to name a few. As I said at the start of this small rant, hindsight is a great thing and most of us find it hard to plan out a creative career. Life takes us where it will. Perhaps all of us should - with the provisos of being polite, businesslike and responsible - learn to be a little less accommodating.

As with every single area of life and work - and the creative industries are no exception - people will want to look after their own interests. This doesn't make them bad people. It just makes them human. But the 'creatives' working at the sharp end tend to get into the habit of seeing themselves as supplicants, of being scared to rock the boat, of assuming Uriah Heap levels of humility. Actually even this isn't always true, and I'm told by publisher friends that those with the least talent are invariably the most entitled and rude. So don't let's get carried away with ourselves!

All the same, what we are looking for is a modicum of professionalism in the way we are treated, with the proviso that we behave professionally in return.

To that end, we need to be aware of our own agency, aware that we are sole traders, navigating difficult and precarious waters for the sake of ourselves and the work that is so important to us. In the words of Bill and Ted, we should at least try to 'be excellent to each other.'

That shouldn't be too much to ask for, should it?

Starting out. 

Remembering Olenka - The Story of a Friendship

Strawberry Street where Sandra lived.

I've never written about this before but because I've been writing about my childhood in Leeds for my new book, A Proper Person to be Detained, it has become very fresh in my memory. Even though I didn't include it in that book, now, in Easter week, I think the time has come to remember Olenka. This is a long post but it seems like a long story.

When I first knew her, she wasn't Olenka. She was Sandra. Her Polish name was Aleksandra, Olenka for short, but at school she was Sandra Jankowski, just as I was Catherine Lucy Czerkawski. It was only later that we both had the confidence to insist on the female 'a' ending for our respective surnames. I carried on using the English/Irish version of my first names but Sandra became Olenka.

I don't have a picture of her. Not even a school photograph. I wish I had. She was a pretty little girl, with very dark hair and an almost translucent complexion with a rosy spot of colour on her high cheekbones, like a doll. We both had fancy clothes: mine because my mother was a talented seamstress whose sisters worked in tailoring, and Sandra because her mother, Irene, spent all her spare cash - of which there wasn't much - on good clothes for her much loved daughter.

We started school more or less at the same time in 1955. Holy Family Primary School in Armley was a small, very ordinary Roman Catholic school in a not-very-well-off part of Leeds. I don't think we were best friends from the start. My friend at that time was a girl called Christine Danby, but a year or so after we started school, she and her family moved to Drighlington - not too far away, as it turned out, although it could have been Mars for all two six year olds knew about it. Then Sandra arrived. I have a feeling she started school later than I did, but it may have been because there were two 'intakes' at that time, depending on age. While I started in the autumn, Sandra may have started just after Christmas.

Sandra's mother was a widow: Irene (presumably Irena) Jankowski. I never knew what had happened to her father, but only that he had died, possibly as a result of injuries sustained in the war, so Irena was left to bring up Sandra on her own. We were two 'only' children - not lonely, but certainly a little spoilt, precious, and a bit precocious too. Also, we knew that we were Polish and proud of it. In my case, I knew that I was Irish too. And English.

We became friends. Neither of us quite fitted in at school but I think I fared better. I had a strong Leeds Irish mother and a father who was respected (and quite possibly indulged) by the teachers because of his academic prowess coupled with his typically Polish charm. I was seriously asthmatic, and I spent plenty of time at home. There was always somebody to look after me: my grandparents were on hand and my mother helped out in their little sweet shop. It didn't do me any harm. I read avidly and my father taught me the rest. Sandra couldn't skip school. Her mother worked long hours in Armley Mill, and there was nobody else to look after her, so come hell or high water, she had to go, even when she wasn't very well. She had, I think, the reputation for being a 'nervous' child although I didn't find her so. She just wasn't very robust. I was often ill but as strong as a horse.

We spent a great deal of time together, Sandra and I. She lived on Strawberry Street, which sounds prettier than it was. I lived in a tiny two roomed flat on Whitehall Road, next to my grandparents' house, until we moved across the city to a big, chilly, council flat in Bellevue Road. She loved Cliff Richard. I didn't. When we walked down the hill from school past the big cemetery, she would make up stories about the ghosts she had seen there. I half believed her. We shared hopes and dreams.

One of our teachers was notorious for having almost daily tantrums and throwing the furniture - and herself - about, at the risk of her pupils' life and limb. I can still remember the terrible noises, the shrieks and roars that emanated from her classroom. At the end of one school year, just before I was due to go into her class, my dad paid a visit to the school, and - miraculously it seemed to me - I skipped a year and went straight into the next class. Sandra, with no father to fight her corner and a shy, struggling mother, had to face the gorgon. Then my dad got a temporary placement at a scientific research institute in Mill Hill and we moved to be with him. At some point during that year, a rumour from relatives in Leeds reached our ears that quiet, well behaved Sandra had stood up in the middle of the classroom during one of the teacher's all too frequent crazy spells, thrown her books and her chair on the floor, put her hands over her ears, closed her eyes and screamed and screamed and screamed, bringing the other teachers running.

So she moved classes as well, but with far more trauma than me.

When we came back to Leeds, we moved into another chilly flat in Rosemont Road in Bramley to discover that Sandra was living just around the corner in Hough Lane. When we started secondary school, we made the journey to Notre Dame Grammar School, a walk and two bus-rides, together. Irene had remarried a man called Stanislaw Wilk and Sandra had gained a stepfather. Mr Wilk - Mr Wolf in English - was quiet and kindly: a good man who loved his new wife and his stepdaughter and his garden.

We slid back into friendship again. Sandra came on all our expeditions, My dad was keen on expeditions: hill-walking on the moors, blackberry picking, museum visits. We  went to cricket matches at Headingley, and played tennis on the public court in the nearby park. I celebrated various Polish festivals in her house, but most particularly Easter.

Irene Wilk always cooked an Easter feast: feather light yeast cakes with crumble or apple or plum toppings that filled the whole house with their scent, dense and delicious baked cheesecakes, rye bread and frankfurters and sauerkraut, boiled eggs and gherkins and salads of all kinds. There would be pisanki, hand painted eggs that my dad made as well, and the grownups, friends of Irene and Stashek, would drink vodka. These parties were memorably hilarious, warm and foreign, and I loved them.

Sandra and I found ourselves in different classes at Notre Dame which meant that the steady drift apart had  - although we didn't know it or acknowledge it - already begun. I was academic; she was a little less so, but intensely artistic and creative. We both loved to draw and paint and read. Then, when I was twelve, my father, with his new, hard-won PhD in biochemistry, got the offer of a position at a government research institute just outside Ayr. We moved to Scotland and went back to Leeds only a handful of times. Once, in the year following our move, I stayed with the Wilks for a week. It might even have been during the Easter holidays. We wrote to each other, but then the letters stopped.

In the mid seventies, when I was doing my Masters at Leeds University, we met again, just once. Olenka, as she liked to be known now, was living with her boyfriend, while I was still fancy free. She cooked a meal for the three of us. She didn't want to talk about the past at all. We made no arrangements to meet again. I wondered if we even liked each other very much. Now, I chiefly remember how her childish prettiness had turned to a truly exquisite beauty, stunning in its intensity, and how she was planning to pursue an artistic career.

I stayed in touch with her mother, more than with Olenka. Looking back, I can see that Irene loved me very much, but I was young and busy with my life and thoughtlessly selfish. We sent Christmas cards and Easter cards too, in memory of those Easter feasts. I can see Irene now: small, energetic, always cooking or cleaning, always cheerfully, volubly Polish when she was at ease with you as she was always at her ease with me. I've wondered since if she was - at that time anyway - slightly overawed by her own daughter, or perhaps by her daughter's singular beauty.

And then one day, in the early 1980s, I and my partner returned from a weekend away to the dreadful news that Sandra had died, taken ill, quite suddenly, with a bleed on her brain. Worse, her mother and stepfather had been away too, on a long anticipated trip back to Poland. Her funeral was the first I had ever been to involving somebody so young, a contemporary. She had been my first close friendship.

Irene and Stashek are long gone, although somewhere in my box of Easter decorations, painted eggs, fluffy chicks, there are one or two Polish Easter cards with greetings in Irene's familiar, spidery handwriting. Mr Wilk died first, leaving her alone. One year, there was no card from Irene. There was nobody left to tell me what had happened to her.  Their house is still there. I've walked past it, virtually, on Google Maps and given myself a frisson of sadness.

I find myself wondering if, had Olenka still been alive, we might have reconnected on Facebook, shared notes and lives, remembered the terrible teacher, or the expeditions to Bolton Abbey, the cricket matches, the clumsy, giggling tennis, the picnics at Adel Crag and Ilkley, the bonfire nights with parkin pigs and treacle toffee  - or Mrs Wilk's spectacular Easter feasts that every year I think of replicating - and every year, without fail, find that I can't.

Sitting on top of my piano, the piano I've had since I was thirteen years old, is a small, nicely modelled plaster head of a young girl, with her long, thick hair in plaits. It was the last gift Sandra gave me. Before I left Leeds, we were old enough to spend time painting our nails and experimenting with face packs. We pretended to be grown up, but we were still little girls. On Saturdays, we would sometimes go into Leeds, to the shops, more often than not with our parents or my aunts, but we were allowed to browse the shopping arcades by ourselves. Sandra always had plans for the things she was going to buy. She would save up her pocket money, although I think her mother and stepfather would give her whatever she asked for. One Christmas or birthday, when I was eleven or twelve years old, this figurine was her gift to me.

'I bought it because it looks like you,' she said.

And it did.

I've treasured it ever since. I still play the piano and whenever I look up and see this young girl with her plaits, I remember Sandra - Olenka - and the story of our friendship.

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