Spooks Week: Mary King's Close

The Old Tolbooth

Once upon a time, when I was writing a lot of drama for BBC Radio 4, my late and much missed friend and producer Marilyn Imrie and I decided to book a tour of Mary King's Close in Edinburgh, with a view to a possible production. This was long before it became a visitor attraction. To see it, you had to organise personal tours through a volunteer guide who, as far as I remember, had some connection to the Royal Exchange building that sits above this strange and spooky place. 

Our interest was triggered by research that I'd been doing for my novel The Curiosity Cabinet. Although that book is largely set on a fictional Hebridean island, it was originally inspired by the story of Lady Grange, who was kidnapped from her house in Edinburgh's Old Town, at the behest of her husband. He wanted to get rid of her without actually committing murder, so he had her transported to - among other places - St Kilda. I was fascinated by the notion of how a younger woman might cope with a similar challenging situation, and The Curiosity Cabinet was the result, albeit with a happier ending! If you want to read more about the real Lady Grange, I can highly recommend The Prisoner of St Kilda, by the late Margaret Macaulay who was a fine historian. It appears to be available only as a second hand hardback at the moment which is a pity. 

It was in reading accounts of Lady Grange that I became curious about Edinburgh's Old Town. I had lived in Edinburgh for five years, and knew the area well, but what I hadn't known, until I went looking, was that part of Mary King's Close and its warren of linked rooms, had effectively been buried below the newer Royal Exchange building on the Royal Mile. If you walk up Cockburn Street towards the Royal Mile, and look up to your right, you'll spy a door, high up in the building. That door marks the lower end of what survives of the close. 

Edinburgh can probably claim the first skyscrapers in with world, with its impossibly tall 16th and 17th century tenement buildings, with narrow lanes running between them. There are plenty of these 'closes' still in existence. Mary herself, after whom the close was named, was an affluent widow, who lived here c1635. When the tenements were first built, the rich lived high up in the buildings, to avoid the stench of sewage and other refuse clogging up the alleys below. The poor lived down below, and many of the rooms in the labyrinths between closes never saw daylight at all. Contrary to popular belief, plague victims were not 'walled up' here, but this place would certainly have seen its fair share of sickness and horrible death when bubonic plague came to the city in 1645. However, the close survived, with people living there until 1753, when it was adapted to form the foundations of the grand Royal Exchange building on the site. In 1853 the lower end of the close was demolished to make way for Cockburn Street - but a large chunk of the old street and its adjoining warren of rooms survived, buried under the newer building. 

Marilyn and I followed our guide down numerous steps, through rooms that were clearly used as storage for the Royal Exchange above, rooms full of quantities of filing cabinets, old files and documents. At one point, we heard somebody rattling down the stairs, whistling loudly as he came. 

Our guide grinned. 'They don't much like coming down here, even though they have to from time to time!' he told us.

There were lights but only up to a point. As far as I remember, there was some illumination in the original, steeply cobbled close. The shops were still there. We saw open doors and windows, that would never look out on daylight again. But once we left the close and moved inwards, there was only darkness, our guide and his lantern. It was probably the single most disconcertingly spooky experience I have ever had. Rooms led off rooms. There were passageways, stone stairs and more rooms. His lantern showed us ancient wallpaper peeling off the walls. Fireplaces with the ash still in the grates. A few abandoned pieces of furniture. A cupboard in the wall with the door hanging off. Sad, sad little rooms reflecting the impossibly difficult lives of those who had once lived here.  I chiefly remember the smell of it. It smelled of damp plaster, rot, neglect, a miserable past. We went further down, all sense of direction lost, until at one point it seemed as though we were among the very bones of the city. 

'You know something,' Marilyn whispered in my ear. 'If he were to take his lamp and leave us here, we would never find our way out again!' 

Somewhere online, you will find the PDF of an intriguing book, published in 1800, and titled the History of  Witches, Ghosts and Highland Seers, including, among much else to intrigue and entertain, a chapter about an 'Apparition seen in a dwelling house in Mary King's Close in Edinburgh.' 

The account starts enticingly with somebody meeting a maidservant carrying some light items of furniture into the close in the middle of a 'flitting' or house removal. The friend asks if she intends to stay there, and on being told that she has been 'hired for half a year', tells her that she will 'have more company than yourselves'. As is usual in these cases, maid tells mistress, and mistress tells husband but he, 'with natural courage and fortitude of mind' (i.e. stubborn) decides that they should give it a try. Wisely, the servant heads off to the kirk, but 'came no more to the family.' 

The wife sees the first apparition - the head of an old man, which seems to emerge from a small adjacent room, hovering in the air, gazing at her. Predictably, her husband, who has slept through the whole thing, doesn't believe her. 

They make up a large fire for warmth and comfort, and go back to bed. Whereupon the drowsy husband sees the same old man's head, hovering in the same part of the room. His wife isn't at all happy, but they commend themselves to the Lord, like the good Christian souls they are, and go to bed again. An hour later, they see a vision of a young child 'with a coat upon it' suspended in the air near the old man. 

Tom, the husband, leaps out of bed with his wife not far behind. They are both terrified and try to wake the neighbours, who don't respond. Perhaps they are used to disturbed tenants and prefer to ignore them. The couple light more candles and do a whole lot of praying, but to no avail. 

A naked, disembodied arm appears, flexing as though in salute, and approaches so close to the husband that it seems as though it wishes to shake hands with him. Unsurprisingly, he prefers not to return the gesture. The couple retreat into the bed, whereupon - rather horribly - the hand and arm appear through the opening in the bed-curtains. They try prayers and exhortations, but the persistent arm still approaches them 'in a courteous manner, as though wishing to make their acquaintance.' 

Soon a small dog appears from the same adjacent room, jumps up on a chair and 'composes itself as it were with its nose in its tail to sleep.' They have no dog. Nor do they have a cat, although a cat follows the dog, and begins to 'play some little tricks' as cats do. Soon, the place seems to be full of leaping, dancing creatures. When they are at breaking point, they hear a series of 'deep dreadful groans' whereupon all the apparitions vanish. The narrator reports that they went 'hand in hand to the little room where the drink stood and refreshed themselves.' I'll bet they did. Oddly enough, they then assumed that the worst was over, as in fact it seemed to be, because they remained lodging in Mary King's Close thereafter. Perhaps the welcoming party had tired of the game. 

Fortunately, our 20th century guide didn't abandon us.  Nor did we see any disembodied arms. We staggered into daylight, and went in search of another 'place where the drink stood'. We never did make the programme, and now Mary King's Close is a successful visitor attraction. We went back, my husband and I, many years later. It was very good. We enjoyed it. But it wasn't half as spooky as that original strange voyage into the unknown. 

Spooks Week: Meeting Great Grandad?

 

My paviour great grandfather, wearing a waistcoat & moustache,
next to the bearded man with the tar barrel. 

One of my more recent projects was a book called A Proper Person to be Detained, about the murder of my grandmother's uncle, John Manley, on Christmas Day 1881. It describes the milieu in which these people lived and worked, but it also examines the way in which that single shocking act of violence changed the lives of those who witnessed it and those who came after. 'Like a pebble dropped in a still pool' a friend described it to me afterwards. 

Like my book about Jean Armour, it involved intensive immersion in a time and place and I thought about little else for almost two years. Just as now, when I'm writing about my Polish grandfather and wishing I had known him, I found myself wishing I could have met my Irish great grandfather, but he died before I was born. 

He was born in County Roscommon in Ireland, he had come to England as an adult, to work on the roads, he was a skilled paviour and a kindly man who loved children. He sang, making the traditional 'mouth music' and he had a fund of old songs and stories. 

He was also, in many ways, the saviour of the family. He was my great grandmother's second husband after her first one died tragically young, leaving her and her children in penury. He was a person who managed to haul the family out of the extreme poverty into which they had been born. Yet he was so generous that if he saw a beggar in the street and he was wearing a good coat, he was as likely as not to hand it over to the more needy man. 'He couldn't keep anything,' said my aunt Nora, who remembered him. 'He would give things away when the family could ill afford it.' 

So what's spooky about that, you may ask? 

None of it, except that I think I may have met him in Morrison's car park, one morning when I had just finished writing the book, but was still, somehow, immersed in it. 

It happened like this. I had parked my car, and was heading towards the store. It was a chilly, misty morning, but there was a low winter sun shining in my eyes, dazzling me. I lifted my head and was surprised to see a man standing in front of me. 'Excuse me, madam,' he said. I hadn't seen him coming at all and, surprised, I stopped on the lane between parked cars. 'Oh, be careful, madam!'  He reached out and very gently ushered me onto the pavement. 

He was dressed in working men's clothes, with an old wool coat over them,  and he was covered in mud or dust or some combination of both. 'You see I'm very hungry,' he said. 'But I have no money for breakfast. Do you think you could give me just a little money for my breakfast?' His voice was soft, his accent was unmistakeable. Not Dublin, not Cork, but the soft rural accent of Mayo or Roscommon. I should add that the sudden appearance of Irish labourers isn't particularly common here - or not nowadays anyway. The Belfast ferry is some miles down the coast, and we are more likely to meet summer visitors with Northern Irish accents. 

Even before Covid, I didn't carry much cash, but I took out my purse and gave him a £5 note which was all I had in there. 'Thank-you so much,' he said. 'And God bless you!' 

He walked away. The sunlight and mist seemed to swallow him. It was my own response that surprised me. My legs felt suddenly weak. I had to go into the supermarket cafe, sit down and drink coffee till reality resumed. I still remember the feeling - a weird combination of excitement, exultation, disbelief and the inevitable 'don't be daft' rationality that always intrudes sooner or later.

Still, it's one of those things that has stayed with me. I can see him still, emerging from a glorious combination of light and mist, can feel his gentle touch on my arm. 'God bless you!' he said. 

I hope he managed to get some breakfast. 

Spooks Week: The Real Jean Armour

 

19th century ivory miniature of Robert Burns

I've written so much about Robert Burns that you'd think I'd have seen his ghost by now, but I never have. I suspect if I did see him, he would look nothing like the above romanticised image, although as a young man he was described as very dark and 'spare' - slim without being skinny - with fine dark eyes. He liked to dress fashionably when he could, so I reckon he'd have been an attractive young man. His wife Jean Armour certainly thought so.

Even before I knew much about her, I had a soft spot for Jean. I thought she had been hugely neglected over the years by later commentators. Catherine Carswell, in her biographical novel of Burns described her outrageously as a 'young heifer' while even the present day Burns organisations never seem to make much of a connection between the wee song bird on his self designed seal, with the motto 'wood notes wild' - a phrase he always associated with the wife he loved. She had the finest singing voice in the district. 

I've never seen Jean's ghost either, although I would have been very happy to meet her. I think she was a woman of great character, with a wonderful sense of humour. However, something happened when I was researching my novel about her, The Jewel, that certainly gave me pause for thought.

I had been researching Jean, her milieu, her marriage, her life story, for a long time before I ever plunged into writing The Jewel. That's the way it works for me. I try to immerse myself in a time and place for as much as a year beforehand (sometimes more) and then when I get down to telling the story, I'll find out even more things that I didn't know I didn't know, and have to research those too. It's absorbing but exhausting. 

For a time, it seemed as though there was nothing but Jean Armour in this old house which, when you think about it, would have been built while Jean was still alive. She died in 1834.

One night, my husband had got up to go to the loo. It adjoins the room I use as my office, just off our bedroom. I woke up too, as you do, so I saw him come back through the bedroom door, halt for a moment or two, say 'oh!' in a puzzled tone of voice, and then get back into bed. 

'What's the matter?' I asked. 

'I could have sworn I saw a woman standing in the doorway,' he said. 'At first I thought it might be you, but she was wearing strange clothes, a long skirt, a shawl, a cap on her head.' 

'The following morning, I showed him a picture of Jean Armour. 'That's her' he said.

I must admit I was a bit sad that I hadn't seen her myself. But we were immersed in her, so perhaps it's not surprising that my 'thought forms' had suddenly become visible to my poor husband! It's maybe just as well I don't write horror stories ... yet. 

Jean and I

Spooks Week: A Haunted Road

 

Culzean Castle 

This isn't my story, but it was told to us by the friend involved, a man of profound common sense, not to say scepticism, which made it all the more impressive. 

He and a couple of colleagues had taken a party of scouts to camp at Culzean Castle for the weekend. This was a local event and they were pretty close to home, which was just as well, because the wife of one of them was in the advanced stages of pregnancy. They had, however, hiked there, carrying backpacks, and had no other means of transport. 

In the early hours of the morning, a message came through to the Castle that she had gone into the early stages of labour. This was before the days of mobile phones, so it was a landline message. Not wanting to inconvenience anyone further, the husband decided that since it was a fine summer night, he could easily walk the few miles back to the town of Maybole, to pick up his car. Our friend said that since there was still a supervisor left behind for the youngsters he would keep him company along the road and come back to the campsite in the morning. 

If you don't know this part of the world, there is a road running to the west of the A77, closer to the sea.  Head south and it will go to Maidens and will ultimately rejoin the main road south at Turnberry where Mr Trump has his hotel. Northwards, it will take you to Ayr, but a few miles north of Culzean, at a place called Pennyglen, you can branch off towards Maybole. At night, it's a quiet rural road, and certainly the quickest way back to the town. 

Remember, this is an old road, with a violent history. Or at least the surrounding countryside has a violent history. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were two factions of the Kennedy family, the Earls of Cassilis and the Lairds of Bargany, holding sway north and south of here, and sometimes they came to blows. The feud had been long and bitter. Most notably they came to much more than blows when young Gilbert Kennedy, the Bargany heir, fell victim to an attack by the powerful Earl of Cassilis on 11th December 1601, as he rode from Ayr to Girvan, a journey of some twenty two miles. 

'He was the brawest manne that was to be gotten in ony land,' says a contemporary chronicler, in the old Scots of the time. 'of hich stataur and weel maid, his hair blakk, bott of ane cumlie feace'.  In other words, he was tall, dark and handsome. Even though he was 'feerse and feirry and wander nemble' (fierce and fiery and wondrous nimble) this was a deliberate ambush, the odds were stacked against him and he and his travelling companions were wounded or murdered. Astonishingly, he was carried to Maybole, mortally wounded but still alive, where Cassilis, in his role of 'Judge Ordinar' of the county threatened to kill him if he showed any signs of recovery. He was further transported to Ayr and died there a day later. 

If you're intrigued, you should seek out S R Crockett's The Grey Man, a novel that will tell you a lot more about that time and place. 

But - to resume our spooky tale. 

The two men were young and fit, and they were walking smartly along the road in the direction of Maybole, when they heard, somewhere in the distance, the distinctive clip clop of approaching horse's hooves. Summer nights are short in this part of the world, and the sky was already beginning to grow lighter with that liquid grey light of very early morning. The rider seemed to be coming closer. Now riders are not uncommon on these roads, although as our friend said, not usually at three in the morning. But they weren't unduly worried. They carried on walking. 

The expectant father, anxious to get home, had pulled some yards ahead. Our friend said that around the bend in the road, just ahead of him, came a tall black horse with a tall rider, swathed in what appeared to be a dark cloak. Surprisingly, he seemed to be wearing a 'slouch' hat - 'like the ones you see in the movies', he said. His first thought was to wonder what on earth somebody was doing riding in fancy dress along the back road from Maybole to Maidens. 

However, that thought quickly gave way to surprise when he saw his friend pause for a few seconds, and then quite suddenly take to his heels, run past the rider at a rate of knots and head off into the distance. He was standing stock still in astonishment as the rider calmly trotted past him. Who could it possibly be, to give his friend such a fright? 

He raised his eyes to the figure.

'As true as I'm sitting here,' he said, 'there was no face at all, no head even, between the hat and the cloak. Just a gap where it should be.'

'What did you do?' we asked.

'What do you think I did?' he said. 'I ran too. I don't think either of us stopped until we were back home in Maybole!' 

Spooks Week: Stone Tape Experiences.

 

I've titled today's blog 'Stone Tape Experiences'. A long time ago there was a scary and highly original  television drama called The Stone Tape. You can read all about it here, and I think you can even find a copy of the drama online. When I first watched it, it terrified me. I went back to it more recently, and found it very much of its time, and less riveting than it had once been. The original thesis of the programme is still a fascinating one: that the stones of which a building is constructed can somehow retain images, scents, sounds of events that have taken place there - and that certain people can, in the right circumstances, 'play them back'. The twist at the end of the play is a very good one that still gives me a little frisson of horror - so I won't spoil it here. But I've had a few experiences myself that have made me wonder about so called 'residual haunting.' 

When I was a very little girl, we lived in a tiny flat above my grandparents' two small shops in Leeds. You can see the shops in the picture above. That's me with my dad. One was a sweet and tobacconist shop that sold chocolate and cigarettes to nearby factory workers, and in the other my grandfather dealt in fishing tackle. My grandparents lived next door, just out of shot of that photograph, in a tall thin house with a back yard. You can find out a lot more about that time and place in my book A Proper Person to be Detained, about a murder in my family in 1881, and its aftermath. The story of the murder recently featured in A House Through Time. 

I was often ill with asthma as a young child because there was massive industrial pollution from the printing company next door. I spent a lot of time at home, in bed, wheezing. Treatments weren't nearly as effective as they are today. But I used to have vivid dreams, and one of my dreams was both recurring and oddly comforting. I used to dream about three people, sitting around a table in the window of what was effectively our living room and kitchen combined, playing cards. The flat was cramped and we seldom had visitors. Any family get-togethers were held in my grandparents' house next door. 

As far as I remember, there were two women and a man. I was vaguely aware that they were dressed in dark, very plain clothes. But they were my talisman. I often had bizarre and disturbing fever-induced dreams, but even in my dreams, I knew that if I could see the 'people at the table', the nightmares would fade and normality would resume. I could and did deliberately invoke them. They were never aware of my presence. They were just there, enjoying a quiet time together. And whenever I saw them, any nightmare simply faded away. 

I thought nothing of this, assuming that it was part of my very active imagination, until many years later, when I told my mum about it. She looked taken aback. 'But they were real,' she said. She went on to explain that when she was a child, back in the 1920s, and even earlier than that, the small flat had been rented to a family of two sisters and a brother, who had habitually sat at the table in the window and played cards. She barely remembered them herself, working people of my grandmother's generation, and she had certainly never mentioned them to me - but I still think about them affectionately, even now.  

Two more stone tape experiences occur to me. One was during a holiday with friends in an old castle in beautiful West Cork, where we had an apartment divided from the rest of the castle by a solid partition, with no door through.  One of our party - quite young at the time - came down for breakfast in the morning and wondered 'who was the man standing in the corridor in the night?' We were in an adjoining bedroom, and had seen her get up to cross to the bathroom, pause, and gaze along the corridor. There was nobody there. Or nobody that we could see, anyway...

Finally, another friend went back to her childhood home in a small Scottish town, and, invited in by the current owners, was delighted to be able to have a look around. 'We love the house' they said. 'But tell me, when you lived here, did you ever hear the sound of a musical box playing and a dog howling? Because we sometimes hear it at the bend in the stairs.'

She had to confess, somewhat shamefacedly, that during her childhood, there had been an old musical box just at the bend in the stairs. It made the dog howl. So, kids being what they are, they had occasionally played it, just to upset the poor dog. No ghosts were involved, unless you count the dog - but it did seem very much as though the old stones of the house had somehow absorbed the sounds and in certain atmospheric conditions, played them back for the current residents. 

Spooks Week: The Creature in the Field

 

My dad, as a little boy, in Poland.

This story really belongs to my lovely late dad. With a different setting and date I've used it in a novel called The Amber Heart, which is available in eBook form, and is about to be published as a paperback. It formed a very useful background to a major turning point in the book. 

But it happened to my father and my grandfather, Wladyslaw, when dad was just about the age in the picture above, so here it is. 

Dad came from what was then Eastern Poland and is now Ukraine. He was born and spent his childhood on the family estate in a place called Dziedzilow, now Didyliv. You can look at the village on Google's street view and find that it isn't much changed. It's rural, rolling agricultural countryside. Winters were hard with plenty of snow, and the family used sleighs to get about. But this story happened in late autumn, when the hard frosts had started, but the snow hadn't yet fallen in any quantity.

The two of them were coming back from a visit to a neighbouring house, in a pony trap, a 'droshky' to use the English spelling of a Polish word.  It was a very cold night, darkness had fallen, but there was a full moon. It must have been about 1933 or 34. Dad would have been seven or eight, and my grandfather, twenty nine or thirty. I never knew him, but I know that he was funny, warm, slightly autocratic, and definitely had a wild streak. I'm currently writing a new book about him called The Last Lancer.

They were passing a lonely field in which there were big heaps of manure, left there for the frosts of winter to break them up, when in the moonlight, they spotted what can only be described as a creature, on the other side of the field. It was child sized, dad said, but somehow it didn't have the look of a child. 

Not at all. 

Wladyslaw drew the trap to a halt and they watched, fascinated. The creature was leaping up onto each heap of manure and - as my dad described it - bending backwards and forwards like a coiled spring. He said it looked like an impossible contortion. Worse, as it bent backwards, it cried out 'hehee!' and as it bent forwards, it called 'hahaa!'. The sound, comical and sinister at the same time, echoed through the night. 

Wladyslaw - and this seems like exactly the kind of thing the man I have come to know and love would have done - stood up in his seat, cupped his hands, and shouted 'hehee, hahaa' in the general direction of the creature. 

It heard. It paused and turned its head in their direction. It looked, said my dad later, horribly grotesque and uncanny. Especially when it began to head rapidly towards them, leaping on manure heaps, coiling and uncoiling itself as it came.

'What happened?' I asked.

'My father sat down, whipped up the horse and we never stopped or looked back till we were safe and sound at home,' he said, with a grin. 

Nothing followed them. My dad was a scientist who didn't really believe in the supernatural. But he remembered exactly what they had seen, and could never find a wholly satisfactory explanation. Can you? 

Spooks Week: A Village Ghost

 

The Glebe in spring

This is the first of a few spooky - and mostly TRUE - stories, for the week before Hallowe'en. Feel free to add your own true ghost stories in the comments. 

Many years ago - although it seems like yesterday - we looked after my parents' dog while they were away in Vienna. Dad spent a couple of years working at the International Atomic Energy Commission there, before his retirement. I would walk the dog in the morning and afternoon, usually taking her up one of the roads out of the village. She had a particular tree that she liked to get to before turning for home again. 

It was autumn, just about this time of year, and not-quite-twilight when we were heading for home together, passing the field that you can just see in the photograph above, the Glebe, that used to belong to the old manse. It's very much a part of the village, with a low wall, and a driveway leading into old and new manses. The dog was a rescue dog with a very sweet nature. 

We were walking along the pavement and a fine drizzle had started, when I saw an elderly gentleman on the other side of the road, standing up against the wall in the picture. He wasn't unwell or anything. Just standing looking over the wall. 

Because this is a village where people are friendly and the road was empty and quiet,  I began to cross over, to speak to him. The odd thing was that the dog crossed over before I did. She tugged me across in his direction, pulling on her lead, so she clearly saw him too. 

When I got there - seconds later - he disappeared. 

He disappeared as swiftly and suddenly as a picture disappears when you switch off the television. It was so odd and so unexpected that I found myself looking over the wall, which was ridiculous, because it's not a high wall, and even walking the few yards back to the manse entrance, peering around the length of the wall, just to make sure nobody had bobbed down on the other side. The dog looked confused as well. She wagged her tail and looked up at me. 

There was nobody there at all. 

When I got home, slightly bemused, I told my husband, describing what I'd seen. 

'I think you've seen Jock,' he said.

Jock McBlane was the village chimney-sweep, general handyman and elder of the kirk. My husband remembered him well although I had never known him. But he knew all there was to know about all the houses in the village, where the drains ran, how the old houses were constructed. A useful person. He always wore white gloves in the kirk. And he liked to walk about the village in the evening, checking that all was well. He once told my husband that ours was one of the most soundly constructed houses in the village. It was built back in 1808, but Jock had definitely done some work here in the intervening period. 

The cafe in our village shop is called Jock's Cafe in his memory. It's situated in the village hall now, but it used to be in the old building that had once been Jock's workshop, over the road. Back when it was a restaurant, one of the previous owners told me that she would often come in in the morning to set up for the day and turn on the radio so that she could hear it in the kitchen, only to have somebody turn it down again. She assumed Jock didn't approve of loud music!

Why I love reading fiction on my Kindle ...

 

Since I publish most of my fiction on paper, as well as in eBook form, it feels a bit heretical to write this, but I read pretty much all of the fiction I read purely for pleasure on my Kindle these days. It's an old, bog standard Paperwhite and it has been going for years now. It is a bit slower than it once was, although switching it on and off again tends to remedy that, but I'm considering asking for a new one for Christmas. 

I don't want anything too complicated though. An upgrade of this one will be fine. I don't really want to browse the internet or get onto social media while I'm reading. In fact it's one of the big attractions of my old Kindle that I can't do that. I can, of course, download a new book as soon as I've finished the most recent one, which is very handy when it comes to those series you gallop through voraciously, desperate to start the next one. Fred Vargas and her brilliant Commissaire Adamsberg novels, for example. I can look up words and even place names, which comes in handy. And I can take and save notes and juggle with the settings to suit myself. But that's really all I need.

I do a lot of my fiction reading late at night. I'm something of an insomniac. I can wake up at 4am, so wide awake that I know it will be impossible to go back to sleep. That's when I pick up my Kindle, set its light very low, and read for an hour or two before eventually falling asleep, and all this without waking my slumbering husband. Not only that but the Kindle will quietly switch itself off when I fall asleep, and it will keep my place for me. Although it does sometimes slide off the bed and wake me up again when it lands with a thud on the carpet. 

But all this involves practical details, and my love for my Kindle involves far more than that. Years ago, when radio drama was in its heyday, somebody pointed out that they loved listening to plays on radio because the pictures were better. And I love reading on my Kindle, especially in the dark, in the middle of the night, because the pictures are definitely better. 

One of the complaints made about eBooks (especially from people with a vested interest in selling paper books, oddly enough) is that people don't remember what they read on an e-reader. I find that the opposite is true. Although I'd admit that it depends on the quality of the book. NVG fiction will just slide away from you, but NVG fiction on paper will do the same thing. 

There is something magical about entering the world of a good book in the middle of the night, in the dark, just you and the words and the world that the writer has created. The pictures are so much better. Sometimes, a book can be so entrancing that I find myself falling asleep and continuing the story in my dreams. You should try it. It's magic. 

Apples - and a Recipe.

 

These are Golden Noble apples from the very old tree at the bottom of our garden. They're cooking apples, but much sweeter than Bramleys, so you don't need to add much sugar. The tree is so old that it's now on a two year cycle. It has a massive crop one year, and then rests up and has only a few the following year. The variety is old as well. As they ripen and mature, they turn a lovely golden colour. 

This year was an apple year. We have made apple pies, apple crumbles and apple scones. We've frozen some for winter. We've given a lot of them away to friends. You're not allowed to leave the house without taking some apples. We've given the small windfalls to a friend with horses - they love them, seemingly. We don't spray the tree, so there are no chemicals on them. The wasps have had a good go at the remaining windfalls, and the birds are doing the same thing. 

Now, most of them are gone, winter's on its way and I'm going to cook the last few. This isn't my favourite time of year. I love the colours that I can see from the window of the room where I work, but I hate the fading light, the way the nights draw in. The only positive thing is that it's easier to batten down the hatches and write. This year, in the sad old UK, with our energy prices rising to crazy levels, I'll be writing all wrapped up in woollies and socks and blankets, and hoping for a less chilly winter. I've got my fiction to keep me warm.

Meanwhile, I make my scones with about 500 grams of self raising flour, a couple of teaspoons of baking powder, a walnut sized lump of butter rubbed in, as many peeled apples as you like chopped into the mixture (lots) and a tablespoonful of sugar. I mix them with home made kefir, but if you haven't got that, buttermilk, or a big dollop of Greek yoghurt mixed with milk, or sour milk - all these will do. I like to add some vanilla essence, but you might prefer cinnamon. Your scone dough should be very soft - just not quite sticky. Better sticky than too dry though. Form into two rounds on a well greased baking tray, make a cross in the middle so that you can pull them apart later, and bake in a medium to hot oven, (about 200C) until well risen, and cooked all through. If you're baking them in big rounds like this, it's about half an hour. If you're making nice little scones, it'll be more like 15 minutes. Cool on a baking tray and eat while they're still warm with lots of butter. They freeze well too. 

Telling Tales

All my writing life, people have been giving me advice. Some of it was solicited, and some of it wasn't. Some was useful and some wasn't.  I once asked an established artist friend if people routinely told her that she ought to make drastic changes to her work, and she looked at me as though I had gone mad. 'No' she said. 'No, they don't!' 

I don't mean skilled editing. A good editor can help you to see the whole wood when you're obsessing about individual trees. I mean the person who tells you to turn your book into the kind of book they would have written themselves, if only they could write. Two different people once told me to cut a third of a novel. The trouble was that one wanted me to cut the first third and one wanted me to cut the last third. 

Neither of them was right, although the book in question certainly needed a lot of pruning. In fact when I did prune it, here there and everywhere, I probably deleted just as much as they had been recommending. But they had gone for the easy option which said more about them than it did about the book. 

Beta Readers worry me. I don't have them, but I worry about other people's reliance on them. Most (although not all) writers want to be read. We're in the business of communicating. And we often have some hypothetical reader in mind. But most of the time, we're writing the kind of book we want to read ourselves, telling the stories that gnaw at us till we put them into words, the ideas we feel passionate about. 

Which is why when somebody says 'I've got this great idea for a book!' our hearts sink. We may smile politely, but what we're really thinking is, 'well go and write it then.' Other people's ideas for books are just like other people's dreams. Only our own are interesting to us. We may like to chat to our readers once the book is published. I know I do. We may like to hear from them, and answer questions and even debate with them. But I don't want any random reader critiquing my work before the event. 

Which leads me, in this rambling post, to note that I've just finished reading Kingfishers Catch Fire and I'm wondering as I do with all her novels, why it has taken me so long to discover Rumer Godden's work. Why didn't it feature as part of my course work all those years ago when I did a degree in English Language and Literature and when the first two years consisted of a quick gallop through 'the canon'. Mind you, the canon was mostly male, dead and English (even in Edinburgh) so it isn't too surprising. 

If you haven't read it, do. Immediately. It's magical. And very relevant indeed at a time when, as the Covid threat begins to recede a bit, so many people seem to be deciding to move to rural communities in order to 'find themselves' and finding mostly that they don't know how to live in rural communities. Or they make television programmes about 'finding themselves' in rural communities where people have already found themselves, thank-you very much.

Godden tells wonderful tales. And that brings me back to the thorny problem of advice. I'd lay bets that if a beta reader had got their hands on Godden's extraordinary work they would have told her everything that was wrong with it, just because it is so strange and so different from anything they might have read before. 

Then it struck me that the one piece of advice I wish somebody, anybody, had given me when I was just starting out, was this: Tell your story and tell it well. But first and foremost tell it for yourself. If you're bored with it, everyone else will be. If you're engrossed in it, passionate about it, and if you truly know what you're writing about, there will certainly be somebody out there who loves it too. 

Men Writing Women

My novel with a male narrator

I was doomscrolling through Twitter, first thing this morning, as you do, even though you know it's bad for you, when I came across a thread by a writer who had started a novel by a gender neutral sounding author, only to realise on the second page that it was written by a man. How did she know, she asked. The answers, mostly from women, were many and varied, although all of them were accurate. 

There were a few dead giveaways.

Someone neatly summarised them as (1) female protagonist young enough to be ugly male protagonist's daughter or grand-daughter, but still fancies him. Instantly. Hops into bed with him at the first opportunity.  (2) Female protagonist has no idea how beautiful she is. (3) Answers her door wearing next to nothing.(4) Gazes at herself in the mirror and (5) Always, always fondles her boobs. 

Even more accurately summed up as 'she breasted boobily down the stairs'. Young women, as written by men seem curiously aware of, not to say obsessed with, their own chests. Also, they absentmindedly caress them with the back of their hands. Not easy. Try it. There are many examples, and male critics never notice.

Mind you, the other dead giveaway is when the female protagonist casually puts her hands in her pockets. I put a perfectly good pair of trousers in the charity shop bag only the other day, because it had the abomination that is MOCK POCKETS. Sometimes the pockets are only stitched up. I had a jacket like this for about a year before I realised that it really did have beautiful, useful deep pockets - once I had unpicked the stitches! 

A few things occurred to me about all this though.

It works the other way. When I read a book by Fred Vargas, my best discovery of lockdown, thanks to a recommendation from a friend, my first thought was - wow, what an interesting and perceptive writer this is. What believable characters. Then, I realised that Fred is female. I began in the middle of the series with The Ghost Riders of Ordebec. There is one particularly wonderful passage in one of the later novels where a big, brilliant female character hides the hero in a very unusual way. You'll know it when you read it. 

Do men feel the same about these novels? Do they read them without a second thought assuming that Fred is male? Does that predispose them to enjoy them? I have no answers to these questions. 

All I know is, I read more fiction by women than by men these days. There are plenty of exceptions. I think Winston Graham writes absolutely believable female characters for instance.  But my tendency is always to enjoy female fiction more. I can't help it. Recently, seeking to escape from the doomscrolling and the gratuitous violence, I went back to Mary Stewart and Rumer Godden for the sheer pleasure, the recognition, the comfort of the female perspective. It's why I love Barbara Pym too. And Jane Austen. And the Brontes. 

You do, though, as a writer, start to wonder if you're writing believable men yourself. I wrote a whole novel in the voice of an elderly Scottish narrator remembering his youth in late 1700s Glasgow. (The Physic Garden) I think he was credible. But how would I know? He was a grumpy old bugger, and I liked him a lot. 

If men won't read books by women, and women don't much like books by men, where does that leave any of us?  

Loving Ayrshire

 

It's no secret that I love Ayrshire. We moved from Leeds, years ago, when I was twelve, and my biochemist father got a job in a research institute here. I never enjoyed school much, even though I did quite well academically - but I adored the countryside and history of this lush, green and, let's face it, rainy county. If you can put up with the rain, it's considerably warmer than the rest of Scotland, and warmer than much of Northern England. Winters are much milder than in my native Leeds. 

Holidaymakers tend to pass it by in the mad rush for the Highlands, but the scenery is spectacular and the history is fascinating. Not surprisingly then, it has featured in at least some of my fiction, in novels such as The Jewel and Ice Dancing, as well as in many of the radio plays I used to write, notably a couple of series: The Peggers and the Creelers and Running Before the Wind. I'm planning a new series of novels even as I write this, and guess where they are mostly going to be set? 

I was happy to be asked to record a reading for this year's Tidelines Festival and chose a passage from the Jewel, about an early encounter between our very own Robert Burns and the woman who was destined to become his wife, and who was quite clearly the love of his life: Jean Armour. I didn't much want to record myself just sitting on a rock reading and my tech skills weren't up to recording myself walking and reading on a smartphone - so I included a sheaf of my own pictures of Ayrshire, as well as some lovely watercolour images from a Victorian artist called Janet Muir, who lived in Mauchline. Nice to see that the person putting the video together worked a bit of magic on them all. 

Anyway - here it is. Grab yourself a cup of coffee and watch the whole Love Ayrshire video. You'll find me, and a sheaf of other Ayrshire writers too. 

Superior Spoilsports and Rotten Reviews

Straight from the horse's mouth! 

Way back in the days when newspapers had reasonable circulations, and therefore paid - albeit not much - for reviews, I used to do some professional reviewing. It was never really my thing, and I mostly did it for the money. Like all writers, we do what we can to survive. Sometimes I enjoyed it, and sometimes I didn't. I always took time and trouble with my reviews. 

Once or twice, I'm sorry to say, I indulged in what I now think were fairly   mean spirited reviews of books I hadn't liked. I cringe now, when I think   of it and I'm sorry about it. My excuse is that I was young, and hadn't had   my fair share of mean spirited reviews myself!

 I still, occasionally, review a book on Amazon, but only if I've liked it or   at the very least appreciated something about it. Then, I can   honestly say nice things about it. The better the book, the more I enjoy trying to   analyse why I've liked it so much. If I've hated it, or read 50 pages on   my Kindle and asked for my money back - as I've done a few times - I   won't review it at all, even though I will be pretty certain about   why I've   disliked it. 

We all get bad reviews from time to time. Sadly, a single bad review will stick in our minds and keep us awake being indignant for far longer than ten good ones. I don't mean mixed reviews, or thoughtful reviews that analyse a piece of work on its own terms. Those can be incredibly helpful. It means somebody is taking us seriously, debating with the piece of work, if you like. But they don't have to like everything about it. 

I mean those one star, bald and bold 'I hated this' kind of reviews that you look at and wonder if they've actually read the book, or seen the play or film. 

One of the wisest things somebody wrote about these occasional terrible reviews was to try not to take them to heart, but to simply imagine yourself saying to the reviewer, preferably with a shrug, 'then it's not for you. And that's fine.' And then mentally walk away.

You have to practise doing it, but honestly, it works.

Social media, however, seems to have encouraged the phenomenon of the superior spoilsport, especially where a popular book or film or TV show is concerned.

Here's how it goes. 

A group of people will be on, say, Facebook, happily discussing something they've enjoyed. Let's avoid getting embroiled in book critiques by using an example from the world of music. I've seen it happening twice recently, once with Abba and once with the Beatles. In both cases, people were having a good time sharing what these bands and their music meant to them, debating songs and memories, disagreeing a little, but enjoying the chat no end. 

And then along comes somebody who posts 'I hate Abba.' Or 'The Beatles were rubbish.' 

I wouldn't mind if they ever gave a valid reason why they think this. But they hardly ever do. I can give you dozens of reasons why I love the Beatles, and Abba too. Some of them are extremely personal, but some of them are to do with my appreciation of the music itself. If you try to pin them down, ask them why they think this - which they're perfectly entitled to do - they just dig their heels in. 'I hate them because they're rubbish' they say. Which doesn't make a lot of sense. 

There have been a couple of widely praised TV shows that I've disliked recently, but I know why, would be happy to say so, and equally happy to acknowledge that this may be down to me, and not necessarily a fault of the programme itself, which I know other people have enjoyed. If pushed, I could analyse this further, point out faults in the writing and direction. But in my experience, you can forgive a whole lot of faults if you find something entertaining. 

I've encountered the spoilsports so often now, that I'm forced to the conclusion that there's a kind of superiority about it. They don't ever want to be seen appreciating something that lots of other people like. So they'll pretend that they, and only they can see through it. 

They are spoilsports. What I really want to say to them is just leave us to our enjoyment. It's not for you, and that's fine. But you don't have to be here right now, telling us how much you loathe the thing we love. We don't care. It's not going to change our opinion.

So just for once, go play on your own page, write an online one star review if you like -but leave us alone to wallow in our fandom.  

Agents and Publishing - Some Further Thoughts

That last post about my disappearing agents was so popular, that I thought a few more random reflections  might be helpful. 

1: I would never want to deter new writers from going down the traditional route, or trying to. Once you've got a good portfolio of work under your belt, there's no harm in sending out query letters if that's what you want to do. Just don't be persuaded that an agent is the only way to publication. I've known people with fantastic agents, who have been instrumental in their success. I've known people who have got onboard with agents in the wake of success. And I've known plenty of people who have secured the services of an agent, only to realise that they spend too much time writing to the demands of their agent, who is often looking to predicate the next big success in terms of the last big success.

2: In the interests of balance, remember that agents and publishers all get horrible submissions all the time. Not just bad writing, but badly presented bad writing. Cobwebby documents that have sat in folders for years. Manuscripts printed out on two sides of pink paper, with single line spacing and coffee rings all over them. Entitled authors who want an immediate response and don't like it when they get it. So DO have a little patience and respect and - above all things - professionalism. 

3: Back when I was starting out on this long hard road, a good agent didn't expect to edit. That was the job of the publisher. If the manuscript was good enough, then the donkey work would be done between writer and publisher's editor, with some payment changing hands in advance, facilitated by the agent. This is not the way it works now. 

4: Now, the publisher expects the agent to submit an 'oven ready product' so in general, your agent is going to keep telling you to go back to the drawing board, in an effort to second guess the publisher and the 'market'. But those requirements will change over the course of the time it takes you to do rewrites. Also, many big publishers seem to have an informal 'three strikes and you're out' policy, so if an agent has three (possibly fewer now) projects by the same author turned down, they won't look at a fourth. To prevent this, the agent may keep sending you back to the drawing board. And this may mean that you finish up with several projects that you like and can self publish. (Like the nicely reviewed Ice Dancing above!) On the other hand, it can mean that you get stuck rewriting the same book over and over again. 

5: Finally, read Stephen King's On Writing. Best 'how to' book ever, although it's more of a memoir than anything else. Briefly, his advice is to read a lot and write a lot. I couldn't agree more. 

Disappearing Agents

 

'Just an old man, telling his story.'

As I've posted on here before, I've given up looking for an agent. I've done better without one over the past decade or more since last I had one. Although if somebody came along asking if they might try to sell my foreign and/or translation rights for me, I'd give it a go. 

It pains me when I see writers just starting out on their careers, firmly believing that once they've secured an agent, success will be practically guaranteed. The only people I know who continue to propagate this myth are agents. And in the immortal words of Mandy Rice Davies, they would, wouldn't they? 

However, a recent online conversation with a friend prompted me to remember my 'disappearing agents'. Because I had three of them. I had more agents than that, and a couple of them were good. But I changed what and how I wrote over a long career, which meant that a change of agent wasn't entirely out of the question. 

Disappearing Agent Number One

My first disappearing agent head-hunted me from a previous agency, by promising me the earth. Actually, not quite the earth. But she did promise to kick start my career as a playwright all over again. I was doing rather well with stage plays at the time and with some television and plenty of radio thrown in for good measure. My previous agent, although very efficient in terms of increasing my rates of pay, was London based (as are most agencies). This new one had travelled from London to open an office in Glasgow, and promised to liaise with various theatres south of the border, facilitate introductions, find opportunities and so on. 

I liked my previous agent a lot, but the relationship seemed to have grown a bit stale. I think the tipping point was when I spent the best part of a year working on a proposal for and with a large Scottish media company, only to have them reject the project entirely. This wasn't an unsolicited submission. I had worked for them before, they had expressed interest in it, and had me working with a (paid) script editor for months on end. But they had paid me no development money at all, not a bean, and no kill fee either. It struck me quite forcefully that a new agent might at least widen my horizons. So I left my old agent, amicably enough, and waited.

She disappeared. So did the office. She wrote to me later to apologise. I sometimes think I have had more apologies for incompetence than rejection slips.

Disappearing Agent Number Two 

This involves a situation far too complicated and boring to go into in a blog post. In short, there was a great schism in the agenting world and a plaintive request to stick with her personally as she moved on. So I did. Unfortunately, within months, her situation changed to the extent that she inherited a number of starry (and lucrative) clients and guess who fell off the bottom of her list? My last submission to her was The Physic Garden, which an intern read and dismissed out of hand as 'just an old man, telling his story'. After that, as the saying goes here in Scotland, my bum was well and truly 'oot the windae'. 

Disappearing Agent Number Three

This one really did disappear. I signed up to a reputable small agency where he worked, only to have him leave to set up on his own account within the year. Nobody asked me if I wanted to leave with him. They just assumed I would. Eventually, he set up an office in Glasgow (Is Glasgow a sort of black hole for agencies, I wonder?) and I went along to a laughably named launch event, which involved a plastic cup of warm white wine in a chaotic little room, with one other person. Soon after that, he went completely incommunicado. There was no response to phonecalls or emails. Since the office was part of a complex of offices for rent, I eventually managed to call the main desk where somebody confirmed that nobody had been in for weeks, and the mail was piling up. I still have no idea what became of him. 

Going It Alone

After that, I decided to go it alone, and guess what? With a mixture of traditional and self publishing, I started to do rather well. The excellent Saraband published the 'old man telling his story' aka the Physic Garden, and went on to publish more of my fiction and non-fiction. 

Surprisingly enough, I have very occasionally thought it might be nice to have an agent. I even went so far as to send a couple of query letters. I got one or two nibbles, but nothing more. I'm too old for them now - they don't think they'll make enough money out of me and that's understandable. But in any case, perhaps because I am so much older and wiser, I'd want a different kind of relationship. A business partnership which doesn't cast me in the role of humble supplicant. Which is why I still think it might be good to find somebody who would undertake the specialised business of trying to sell the foreign and translation rights to the work I already have out there. I'm not holding my breath. 

Finally - why am I writing this? 

I remember chatting to another client of one of these disappearing agents, a new, young writer, whose hopes had been raised by all the promises, only to have them dashed by the grim reality. What really bugged me was that she was strung along for a couple of years. I was in touch with her and advised her to cut her losses, send a formal letter dispensing with the agent's (non existent) services,  and get on with writing something new. I don't know if she ever did it, but I do remember her disappointment. I was fine. I had a body of work, and options. But she had been counting on promises that were never going to be fulfilled. 

I only hope she picked herself up, dusted herself off, and carried on writing. 

Vegetables No More

 

One of my very few successes.

Anyone who has followed this blog in its various incarnations over the years will know that I'm quite a keen gardener, albeit not so keen that my garden could ever be described as 'manicured'. It's a nice old cottage garden, with lots of wildlife. I don't use sprays and pesticides, I tend to let things grow more than they should, and there's plenty of cover for the forty or so sparrows, among many other birds, beasts and insects that call this place their home.

This year, inspired partly by friends proudly displaying all their sumptuous home grown produce on Facebook, and partly by the likelihood of Brexit related food shortages (I'll say the bloody B word, even if the wretched BBC won't) we thought we would grow some veg this year. 

It hasn't been what you would call an unqualified success.

Crunch time came at the weekend, when we dug up two potato pots and harvested what looked like a pretty good crop of nice pink potatoes. Reader, I cleaned them and cooked them. What emerged was a large pan containing a small amount of wallpaper paste, in which were floating a few pieces of tough skin. I cried out of pure rage and frustration. 

There are times, plenty of them these days, when I wish I was Deborah Meaden. Quite apart from the fact that she always comes across as such a lovely lady, I remember her saying that she 'never cooks'. I too would love to be somebody who never cooks. A little light baking would be nice but that's all. 

Back to the veg. The garden is organised to make it easier to look after. We're neither of us getting any younger, or any richer, we're still working more or less full time and Alan's severe mobility problems make it all a challenge. So I thought I'd try growing vegetables, salad stuff etc in containers. We had plenty of good rich compost from the compost heap at the bottom of the garden.

It started off pretty well: tatties, spinach, chard, runner beans, courgettes, dill, salad leaves and, indoors, chilis and aubergines. The young spinach and salad leaves (especially something called senape) were very nice for about three weeks. The dill was good too and it's still growing out there. I've been using it all summer on the excellent Ayrshire tatties bought in one of our local farm shops, about a hundred yards along the road from there they grow them. We have mint and thyme and chives too. I'm actually quite good with herbs. 

I'm not so good with vegetables.

I've had three courgettes of which one was so small that it hardly counted. Lots of flowers, no courgettes. The beans got eaten, but not by me. The field mice got to a lot of the young plants in the cold frame, before ever they could be planted out. The chard bolted before it really looked like chard. The compost turned out to have a lot of weed seeds in it, so I've lost count of the number of nettle stings I've had from pulling out young nettles while trying to get at the spinach and salad. And if anyone tells you young nettle leaves don't sting, they're havering. As you can see from the picture, I have more chilis than any human being would use, or want to freeze, so I'll give many of them away. I also have two, count them, two tiny aubergines. 

Do not ask about tomatoes. We used to try to grow tomatoes until a couple of years ago when a nunber of lovingly tended, fed and watered plants yielded two tiny tomatoes. 

As a consolation prize, the old apple tree at the bottom of the garden is having a very good year, so there will be lots of apples, and a few apple pies and crumbles if I can bring myself to make them. 

As for the potatoes: well  after I had drained the pan, fished out the bits of skin and added a large quantity of butter to the miniscule amount of tasteless paste that remained, Alan said it was OK. I ate a few oven chips instead. 

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Two tiny aubergines

Identity Crisis

It was the Facebook ad for the supplements company that started it.

It bugged me all the following week. Which is why I'm writing about it. I suppose that's what writers always do. Try to get some perspective on disturbing things by writing about them. 

I thought at first glance that it was a spoof. It consisted of a Union flag, accompanied by a cartoon British Bulldog.  And essentially, it was advertising 'British supplements' made without all those 'nasty' foreign additives, of which it included a full list, most of which were harmless components of various herbal supplements. It only just stopped short of telling us that foreign supplements were (as my nana used to tell me about chewing gum, in an effort to deter me from wanting it) made of monkey bones. 

It had to be a spoof, hadn't it? 

Sadly, it wasn't. It was a jingoistic little ad from a jingoistic little country, and the comments were full of jingoistic little people saying how wonderful it was to have these unpolluted British supplements. It's out there, and I'm not going to link to it. Its strapline, unpolluted by commas, is 'clean strong no nasties'. It aims to promote 'British values' but it wants to 'open up a manufacturing branch in the USA'! 

This has been fermenting away in my mind, coupled with all those headlines about the EU supposedly 'blockading' poor little Britain, when in fact it's just about to enforce rules for non EU members that we helped to formulate back in those good old days when we were still in the club. The only country that might have been blockaded was Ireland, by England, but having bought some nice new ferries from Korea and opened up new routes, Ireland is doing just fine. 

Today, I saw a bunch of older people, on a Facebook group, making nasty, mean spirited, jingoistic comments about refugees from Afghanistan. It reminded me of those people who used to tell my mum that the 'Poles should go back where they came from', right after she had married my Polish refugee dad. 

The sad fact is that I'm a mongrel, a citizen of nowhere, and since 2016, although I was born in England, I've hardly felt British at all. I've lived in Scotland on and off since I was twelve and love this country very much. It's been good to me as it was good to my dear dad. Even now, people who used to know him will be at pains to tell me how much they liked him and, in some cases, how much he changed their lives for the better. 

But from time to time, I still feel like a foreigner here. More and more often, these days. And when I do, I find myself wondering if my dad felt the same - sometimes, often, never? He never spoke about it. I wish I could ask him now, when everything I thought I knew and felt about this disunited kingdom is open to question. 

Artwork: Free to a Good Home. (Or Else ...)

 

My husband, Alan Lees, painted this extraordinary crucifixion scene a few years ago. It's huge and heavy and the frame is hand made of Scottish driftwood. He titled it 'the Execution' and by any standards, it is an amazing piece of work.

He is now talking about chopping it up for firewood. He means it. 

It has been in his studio for so long, and is simply taking up too much space. Dear reader, we have tried to find a good home for it, and so far, we have been unsuccessful. 

The truth is that it took some six months to paint, but now, he would either be willing to accept any reasonable offer for it, or simply to give it away to a good home, a church, a religious foundation or similar. The only proviso is that the recipient has to be able to pick it up themselves. It is large and heavy, but it would fit into the back of a biggish hatchback, the kind of vehicle where you can tip the back seats down. Or a small van. By the same token, we can't parcel it up for sending overseas. If you or your organisation wants to do that, then it's down to you to arrange it. 

But if you'd like to save the picture, it would surely be a small price to pay. 

A couple of years ago we offered it to Christian Aid. They said they would look into it - but they can't have looked very hard, since nobody got back to us. 

Now, Alan has given it till Christmas. Then he'll get the axe out. He is, I have to say, perfectly capable of destroying this. More likely (if we twist his arm because it seems such a shame) is that he may just paint over it. Either way, a somewhat stunning piece of art will be gone, through sheer lack of interest. 

Is there anyone out there who can help?

Dear Emily: A Previously Undiscovered Piece of Literary Correspondence.

Top Withens near Haworth. That isn't Cathy on the right. It's my mum. 

 

I'm reblogging this piece again, for various reasons. It was one of my most popular blog posts ever (this and the post on an older blog about how much I hated my memory foam mattress, which fortunately has gone the way of all useless things, the mattress, not the post.) 

I recently heard a little tale about one of Scotland's finest writers. I'd better not name him, but take it from me, he is - albeit not in an obvious blockbuster way - one of the UK's finest, most readable and thought provoking writers of fiction. He had had a submission turned down by a young intern who clearly didn't know enough to know how little they knew. I was gobsmacked. I thought 'what hope is there for the rest of us?' And then I went back to this. Hope it cheers you up too. 

My novel Bird of Passage, which was inspired by my love of Wuthering Heights, is now out in paperback, as well as being available as an eBook. 

The Humongous Book Group 

'Our mission is to be market focused above all things.'

Dear Emily,

Thank-you for letting us see the completed draft of your novel, Wuthering Heights. I must apologise for the delay in getting back to you, but as you will see, your manuscript was involved in a process which takes some considerable time.

First of all, can I say that I enjoyed your book. Unfortunately, I was not, at this stage, able to carry our sales department with me. We have therefore sent it to our in-house team of ‘beta readers’. This is a new concept even for us here at Humongous Publishing. It involves a team of interns who act as a kind of focus group. They read new fiction for us in their free time, and offer helpful suggestions. We call them ‘The Beta Bunch’ or sometimes ‘The Critters’. You don’t have to take any of these ideas on board, but if you can put your natural ego to one side for a while, and think of the good of the novel as a whole, you may start to see things our way.

Below is a list of editorial suggestions collated from the Beta Bunch, Sales & Marketing and my own feedback. As I’m sure you realise, in the current publishing climate, sales predictions must be exceedingly optimistic for Marketing to allow us to take any risk. With your lovely novel, they don’t see how they can sell it to a wider public, which was why they suggested some input from the Beta Bunch. Between us, we have come up with a few edits which may help to turn your fine novel into a more marketable proposition.

1 The title presents significant problems. Wuthering is clearly a part of your Yorkshire vernacular, but potential readers in the south have no understanding of this term. As you pointed out in an email to your agent, it is a description of a particular kind of wind. We think Windy Hilltop would be a much better title both for the house and the novel. And while I’m on the subject of dialect, we are all in agreement that Joseph is (a) incomprehensible to the average reader and (b) a boring old man. We think he could definitely go. Nobody would miss him. He just holds up the forward thrust of the plot.

2 The narrative framework of the novel is confusing. We don’t really think the dual narration involving Mr Lockwood and Nelly Dean works. One of our beta readers suggested that it may be possible to dispense with the narrator altogether and simply tell the story from a third person point of view. Perhaps an objective omniscient narrative voice or deep third person subjective point of view might suit?

3 You have clearly ‘written yourself into’ the story. You need to delete the first few chapters. Instead, we might begin with Mr Earnshaw bringing the young Heathcliff to Windy Hilltop. But we need far more back story for Heathcliff. Perhaps he was Mr Earnshaw’s ‘natural’ child. Perhaps we might see Mr Earnshaw bidding a sad farewell to his dying mistress in Liverpool, realising that he must take the child home with him and wondering how his family will react?

4 There are some problems with characterisation. Heathcliff and Cathy in particular seemed inconsistent and irrational to our editorial team. Ems, darling, nobody can fall in love with characters like this, and we have to love these people! And while we’re on this topic, one of our readers suggested another name change, this time for Heathcliff. Perhaps Cliff Heath or something similar: rugged but somehow more of a real name.

5 We think you might usefully reconsider your heroine’s character. Readers find it hard to engage fully with a thoroughly unlikeable person and Cathy is – forgive me – in danger of coming across as a bit of a bully – all that pinching and slapping. She is very pretty - but perhaps a tad too pretty? She needs some faults: a big mouth, a snub nose, unruly hair. Perhaps she gazes into her mirror in dissatisfaction at herself. It’s fine that she’s feisty and spirited. But there are times when her character verges on the psychotic and her tears and tantrums may provoke the wrong response. Nobody likes a watering pot, do they? And a watering pot with serious food and anger issues is quite hard to love. The reader must be able to sympathise with her predicament in choosing between poor but handsome Cliff and rich but wet Edgar. They must be able to put themselves in her shoes. At the moment, who would?

6 You may also need to reconsider Cliff. He does seem to have seriously sadistic tendencies. BDSM is fine, (in fact we could do with a little more of it here in view of other publishing successes) but cruelty to animals on the part of the hero is a definite no-no and the scene where we learn that he has hanged his wife’s dog MUST GO. Actually, we all reckon his wife should go too. Cliff HAS to marry Cathy. You can’t cheat reader expectations like this and besides, Isabella is SUCH a wuss. You should be aiming for a powerful hero with whom the reader can sympathise, even when he’s behaving badly: sexy and brave but with a certain underlying vulnerability and a hidden sorrow. Likewise, we really think you must reconsider the scenes where Cliff indulges in what can only be described as necrophilia. We feel quite strongly that horror is not your genre.

7 We would like to suggest that you ‘big up’ the supernatural elements. Several of our ’critters’ suggested that you should begin the tale in the present day, with a young couple – Londoners who have moved to Yorkshire perhaps - buying Windy Hilltop with a view to renovating it. Inexplicable things start to happen to them. The house is haunted! The husband refuses to believe in the supernatural but the wife starts to research the story and unearths the whole sorry tale: Mr Earnshaw and his tragic mistress, Cliff and Cath growing up, followed by Cliff’s desertion. Cath’s unwise marriage, Cliff’s return and most important of all, the resumption of the love affair. 

8 Forgive me, Emily, but you do tend to cop out of the erotic scenes. None of our beta readers could believe that – when Cliff finally comes back – he and Cathy wouldn’t be making mad, passionate love all the time, out on those windy moors. We have to be there and feel it with them. Where is her inner goddess? Wouldn’t he want to punish her for making him suffer all these years? The only time they seem to get it on is when she is dying and even then it’s only a few kisses and Cliff gnashing his teeth a lot. (More borderline necrophilia.) We need more sensuous wuthering in the heather!

9 Overall, the consensus was that you should definitely consider deleting the last third of the novel. Remember the old adage, kill your darlings? Well, we all agree that a bit of a massacre is in order. At present, the passages with young Cathy and Hareton read like an extended coda to the main event which is clearly the wild and wonderful relationship between the principle protagonists. You pointed out in your last (somewhat forthright) email, that you visualise this as a necessary resolution to the disorder of the first two thirds of the novel, without which the whole thing makes no sense. We take your point, but none of the beta readers cared for your ending, with the exception of one who thought Hareton was ‘quite fit’.

10 The whole of the Beta Bunch felt very strongly that you needed to come up with a happy ending for the hero and heroine. One suggestion was that Edgar Linton might fall down a pothole. You have a lot of potholes in Yorkshire, don't you? Cliff finds his conscience at last and tries to rescue him. Edgar dies, Cliff survives. He’s wounded (we all love wounded heroes) but at least he has done the brave thing. He marries a pregnant Cathy and they move to Windy Hilltop. Although they live happily every after, they have to spend their whole lives pretending that the baby isn’t Cliff’s, just to keep Cathy’s reputation intact. Which is the reason for the haunting. The truth must be told!

So there it is. We feel that with a little more work you could really turn this into a stonking great story. You never know, it may even be a ‘breakthrough’ book for you. We look forward to hearing from you with your rewritten manuscript just as soon as you can manage it. I’m sure you can do it. After all, time is on your side.

Very best wishes

Verucca Havering-Gently

For Humongous Publishing, London and New York.