How Not To Be A Writer - Part Twelve: Happy Days In Fife

The upper flat here was my home for almost two years.

 For a couple of years, in the late 70s, I worked for an organisation called The Arts In Fife, as a 'community writer'. I was part of a small group of writers and artists working in the community to 'facilitate' various creative events - writing groups, art projects etc. Fife is a big place and I needed to be able to drive, so I took my test in a hurry. Those were the dear dead days when you didn't have to wait years for a test. It was the most nerve-racking exam I've ever taken. Twice the same dog trotted over the road in front of me. It was the only time the stern examiner said anything apart from test related stuff. 'Suicidal dog,' he said. But I didn't run the dog over, and I must have looked in the mirror, because I passed first time. Then with my parents' help, I acquired a very elderly green Morris Minor, the only car I've ever truly loved. 

After a couple of months spent lodging with the kind parents of one of my old flatmates in Broughty Ferry (a home from home for a while) and commuting to Cupar where we were based, I managed to rent an upper flat in an old cottage in Kingskettle. It was pretty and comfortable but as so many houses back then, without central heating. As far as I remember there was a coal fire in the living room, and I carted a couple of electric fires back from Ayrshire. 

The job was huge fun.

Two incidents from that time stick in my mind. One was when my boss suggested that it would be a good idea if I put a notice up at RAF Leuchars, to see if any of the Air Force wives in particular might be interested in coming along to a daytime writing group. A little while later, I had a visit from Special Branch in the shape of a polite young man in a white mac, who had been told to 'investigate' me. 

It was the name that did it, of course. Although why any spy worth her salt would use such an obviously central European surname, I don't know. Surely Blunt or Philby would have been better.

On another occasion, myself and the community artist, Rozanne, pottered down to the East Neuk in my wee green Morris, to visit a National Trust property, at their request, to see if there was anything we could do for them. We were, as far as I remember, given coffee. But throughout the meeting, we were driven mad by the appetising scent of cooking. Eventually, we were shown out, politely enough. They were expecting a visit from the high heidyins in Edinburgh. As we ate fish and chips in Anstruther, we reflected that lowly artists and writers didn't merit such lunch invitations. They were only for 'those and such as those' - a status which I have seldom if ever achieved. 

Most writers will have tales of being decanted into the night in a strange town or city, having given a talk or similar, and heading back to some hotel or B&B to eat a packet of M&S sandwiches (if lucky) and drink one of those grim miniature bottles of wine, if you've remembered to buy one in advance. The very worst was an unpaid event for a big bookshop that hadn't even given me expenses, and being wished a cheerful goodnight, as I headed back to a horrible economy room in a hall of residence, with a narrow bed, a desk, a chair and a spider in the corner. 'Never again,' you say. Until the next time. 

I loved Fife and I still do - a beautiful place with friendly people. The job, as it was intended to do, left me some time to write. I was working on short fiction and poetry, as well as the occasional freelance piece for the Scotsman. I visited St Kilda, by helicopter, to write a piece about the island, and later drove to Fort William to interview one of the last people to leave the island. He still had his St Kilda spinning wheel, and showed me how to use it. Then I drove all the way back to Kingskettle, because I was working in Fife the next day.

Mostly though, my own work at that time involved radio plays, first with the late, much missed Marilyn Imrie, and following that with the equally missed Hamish Wilson. Of which more soon. 

When the job came to an end, I was on the verge of moving to Huddersfield, where I had just been accepted for a writer in residence post but was yet to make up my mind about it. Then an Ayrshire based friend decided to stop off in Kingskettle on his way to a fencing tournament. He never got to the tournament, and soon after that, I moved back to Ayrshire, got married and became a more or less full time writer. 

An Unexpected Use for AI

 

Image, courtesy of hotpot.ai/art-generator 

 He's rather nice, isn't he? 

I have to admit, up front, that I'm not a big fan of AI. I never use it for writing (I can do that all by myself.), I don't like the way it harvests the work of genuine creatives, and I keep seeing these appalling AI images drifting past my eyes on social media, most of them ridiculous or inaccurate or both. 

My book covers so far - the ones I source myself - are supplied by my artist husband, Alan Lees, my own collection of very old photographs, or more recently, some spectacularly beautiful photographs by our friend Michal Piasecki  licenced only for this single use. The cover designs are made from these images by Lumphanan Press who also format the books for me.

But here's a thing. Like many writers, when I'm working on a book, whether it's fiction or non-fiction, I do like to surround myself with images of all kinds. They can be photographs, postcards, paintings, landscapes, houses, maps, and characters that reflect whoever or whatever I'm writing about - a whole miscellany of images that will never appear in the book as themselves, but will feed into the inspiration behind it. It's one of the pleasures of creating. My work-space becomes a kind of mega mood board. 

I do the same thing on Pinterest as well, making a board for each project. 

My latest project is going to be a trilogy. I've written two books in the series, and hope to publish them either before Christmas, or soon after: Hera's Orchard and Bitter Oranges. I'll be tackling the third in 2025. The books are set mostly on the Canary Isles, and they are about the challenges and joys of a cross cultural relationship. 

I'm going back to an old project here that has had several incarnations, including a radio play, a short story, and a novel that was so skewed by my then publisher that it bore only a faint resemblance to the book I had written. 'You wrote a sensitive exploration of a marriage and we turned it into a beach bonk buster' said my editor, regretfully, many years later. She wasn't wrong. What I really wanted to do was get back to my original idea, and see where it took me.

I wrote the first book, published it briefly on Amazon as Orange Blossoms, unpublished it quite quickly, because I wasn't happy with it, and then revised it drastically, while working flat out on the sequel. It has taken a while, but I'm finalising edits of both books. 

My husband used to be a charter yacht skipper, so we spent a couple of winters in the Canaries, aboard a 50 foot catamaran. It was probably where my love of all things Spanish began. I'm looking at some of my old photographs as I type this, as well as maps, and a little heap of reference books. 

So - where does AI come in? Well, in an idle moment, last night, I found a site called hotpot.ai, and even more idly typed into the little box the simple line  'handsome Spanish man sitting under an orange tree.' Within a couple of seconds, the site had generated the picture at the top of this post. I was surprised. I mean, not only is he handsome, but he genuinely looks Spanish. (Where was this 'harvested' from, I wonder?) The oranges are a bit OTT  in the way of so much AI, but for a book called Hera's Orchard in which the oranges themselves take on a kind of magical quality, it's fine by me.

Today, I had another go, because my 'hero' for want of a better word, plays the guitar. But it has to be a Spanish guitar. And so it is. Not sure about the beard, but it's still a pretty good image. 

As I say, I won't be using this in any commercial sense. My husband has already supplied me with three lovely cover images. But many writers like to play about with visual images as additional sources of inspiration ...  which these are. Thanks, hotpot!

Guitarrista - hotpot.ai/art-generator

A True Tale For Hallowe'en

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what about my Hallowe'en story?

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

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

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

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

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

I've never met one since. 

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

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

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

What do you think? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Amber Heart: Free for Three Days Only!

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great granny Anna

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

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

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

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

What do I remember about it? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lady Chatterley's Lover

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

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

My parents bought a copy. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plotters and Pantsers Revisited.

This is a revised version of a post from 2022, because the question of different writing processes has arisen again, this time on Facebook. The other night, we were debating whether children should be made to plan out their writing in advance - or just work it out as they went along. Opinion was, of course, divided. 

A friend inspired that original post and I'm grateful to her. She observed that she had been taken by surprise by the ending of one of my novels called Ice Dancing and my immediate thought was 'so was I!' I had no idea how it was going to end, until I started writing the last couple of chapters, and suddenly saw what should have been staring me in the face at the same time as the narrator herself discovered it. The odd thing was that it didn't involve any manipulation of the story. No careful plotting. No subtle planting of clues. No planning at all. When I looked back, the clues were all there. I just realised what had been happening at the same time as my narrator. 

Which in turn led me to think about a couple of other novels where the ending had taken me by surprise. Without any spoilers, in Bird of Passage, I discovered the trauma that the 'hero' (if he can be called that) Finn was trying to remember at about the same time that he realised it himself. Until that moment, all I knew was that there was something that he was struggling to remember, a memory that - as an act of self preservation - he had buried deep inside. As I wrote what turned out to be a pretty long book, I didn't have a clue what it was. It's a precarious position to find yourself in - but it's exciting. 

Then, towards the end of the process, I literally woke up in the middle of the night saying 'So that was what happened!' But I had never, not once, plotted it. 

Similarly, in The Physic Garden, I knew that the ending involved a shocking betrayal because that's how it begins. The narrator mentions it, without going into detail, so we, the readers, don't know what it is. Again, I realised the nature of that betrayal and its consequence much later on in the story. This time, the narrator knew what it was, but had been reluctant to write about it until he was ready to confront it, and in some sense heal the memory. 

I am what is known as a 'pantser'.. I write by the seat of my pants. I write to find out. I always know the beginning, and I sometimes have a very vague idea of the ending, sometimes as little as the last few lines - but I never know how to get there. 

If I did plot everything out in advance, I would get so bored that I would never finish writing the book at all. And it's no use telling me that 'lots of people do'. I know they do. But I don't. 

Outlines were always anathema to me, because I could write them (with difficulty) while knowing full well that the finished book or play would be nothing like the outline. How could it be when I just didn't know? Plotters need to know. They plan everything out meticulously, including detailed character sketches. I never do that either, because I've only just met these people so how can I? It doesn't feel precarious. It feels uncannily as though the story is already there, waiting to be uncovered.

All the same, for many writers, plotting works well. I don't write crime fiction or the kind of thrillers that depend upon intricate plots that must fit together but I know that they do need to be pretty well plotted in advance. Otherwise you might find yourself desperately trying to tie up too many loose ends in the last chapter. 

The problems arise when we try to enforce one method on people for whom it doesn't come naturally. There is no right or wrong way - only the way that works well for you. The trick, as with so much creative writing, is to find out what suits you best.

The Facebook debate was originally about children. It's certainly helpful to teach them about the basic structure of an essay (or 'composition' as it used to be called, in the olden days) and how to plan it out. I spent four years as Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow in a university, helping students to do just that: how to structure their academic writing, how to follow a line through an essay, how to frame an argument.

But where creative writing is concerned - stories, making things up, fiction  - I don't think it's nearly so important. In fact for children, it may inhibit them. 

Many years ago, I was asked to judge a local schools creative writing competition. When the prize-giving came around, it became clear that I had chosen the 'wrong' child. He had written a chaotic but gloriously imaginative tale that no teacher or parent had ever had a hand in. He was surprised and delighted to win but I sensed an air of disapproval in the room. The parents of the usual suspects, the kids who always win prizes, were not amused. The following year, I was presented with a small pre-selected set of pedestrian, perfectly planned and phrased stories, littered with unnecessary adjectives, fronted adverbials* and all.

I said I couldn't possibly judge them under these circumstances.

Later, when I was working as Royal Literary Fund Fellow, a student asked me to look at a drama script. This was unusual, because most of my work involved helping with academic essays and dissertations. It was a good piece of work. I pointed out a few things and then told her to 'go away and play with it.' She looked at me in dismay and said 'But we're not supposed to play with it. We're supposed to get it right!' 

It encapsulated everything that I find troubling about Creative Writing as an academic subject. No writer ever really believes they have got something right. The most you can hope for is 'good enough'. Or 'I'd better stop now'! The real joy of writing involves playing with the material, exploring, finding out, experimenting, drafting and polishing and cutting and polishing again, until the piece - more or less - says what you want it to say. 

If planning it out helps you, go for it. If it doesn't, don't worry about it. You don't have to 'get it right'. Only as good as you think it can be. 

* I have an honours degree in English Language and Literature, with a fair amount of Linguistics in the mix. I taught English as a Foreign Language for three years. I have never, not once, come across the term Fronted Adverbial. I still don't know what it is. Did Michael Gove make it up? 

Reclaiming our Individual Creativity - the disaster that is Creative Scotland.

Tanya and Stefan from my play Wormwood, about Chernobyl

It came like a bolt from the blue last week, while I was on a Zoom meeting with three fellow arts practitioners. Creative Scotland announced that they were closing the Open Fund, with almost immediate effect. That's the fund to which individual artists, writers etc can apply for a modicum of funding to support new and often experimental projects. Creative Scotland is the body set up to administer funds for the arts in Scotland, replacing the old Scottish Arts Council (a classic case of 'if it ain't broke, why are you fixing it?') The old Arts Council was smallish, responsive and largely responsible. It was also mostly run by arts practitioners, rather than highly paid arts administrators. 

Whether or not the closure of the Open Fund is aimed at prompting the government to come up with more cash, it is just one more example of the way in which support for the arts in Scotland (and to a great extent in England as well) has become focussed on larger groups, production companies, or those facilitating participation, rather than individual creators: artists, writers and other practitioners. There seems to be no acknowledgment that the creative arts are worth supporting for their own sake, and not as some hypothetical means to a fashionable end: wellbeing, community cohesion, inclusion and all the other buzz words and phrases demanded of applicants. Laudable aims for sure, but the fact that CS saw fit to cancel the only fund open to individual practitioners should tell us how little we’re valued.

Under the old SAC I was the recipient of a couple of awards as a young writer – small but very welcome sums that allowed me to work on particular writing projects. Before applying, I could and did contact the Literature Officer, a serious, mature writer who was incredibly helpful in allowing me to assess the focus and aims of my own work. Later, I sat on the literature committee myself, and saw just how effectively that committee – composed entirely of fellow practitioners - made what was essentially a small sum of money go a very long way in supporting individuals to develop their careers, without ever feeling that something extraneous to their creative practice was demanded of them in return. In short, they were never expected to be unqualified but cheap therapists. Committee members like myself did come cheap, because we felt that we were giving something back to an organisation that had supported us. We were paid expenses and had a great spread of interests from popular to literary, from urban to rural.  I sometimes saw myself as the 'rugged populist', willing to defend applicants from the less esoteric end of the arts spectrum.

Creativity was valued in and of itself. Not as a means to an end. 

The Literature Officer could also interact with applicants as a bridge between committee and applicant, telling them why a proposal might have been rejected, advising them about possible future applications.The sums of money were tiny in the grand scheme of things, but a struggling writer, probably doing another job or two to keep the wolf from the door, can make a little money go a very long way. I know I did. In fact I still do.

All that changed with CS and in the process we lost something precious. Badly done, Scottish government. The old SAC wasn’t perfect, and some wrong decisions were made. I remember them well. But it was a damn sight better than what we’re stuck with now. I applied to CS for one small grant to assist with a complicated book project over the ensuing years, at the request of my publisher. The whole process was a nightmare of unanswerable questions about timescales and budgets for a research and writing process that simply doesn’t work like that. I almost gave up, would certainly have done so if my then publisher hadn’t prompted me to keep going. 

I would never do it again. 

The Open Fund has had other problems. Earlier this year, it emerged that a huge sum of £84,555 had been awarded to a theatre director from the Open Fund for development of a show called Rein which - as it turned out - involved not just 'simulated sex' but the real thing. In her statement, the director said that the project was going to be an artistic film exploring themes of sexuality set in the Scottish landscape. 'The sexual elements were an integral part of the project's artistic vision. They would have challenged regressive and exploitative attitudes towards women and queer people.'All of which makes the addition of the Scottish landscape to the proposal seem like a particularly cynical box ticking exercise. 

Following public outcry, most of the money was taken back, but the subsequent stooshie, to use a good Scots word, involved mind boggling discussions about genital contact (presumably and uncomfortably in a Scottish landscape) and whether STI tests were 'industry standard'. Just what industry were they talking about? And if it's the one that instantly springs to mind, why the hell were they applying for public money? 

Call me a curmudgeon but I can't see any of my professional writer colleagues on any of those old Scottish Arts Council committees touching any such project with the proverbial bargepole. And frankly, they would have been right. I don't hold with censorship, but if you want to embark on such a project, why not find other sources of funding. It shouldn't be too difficult. 

Finally, I can see just how much practitioners at the start of their careers are let down by CS. But later career artists and writers like myself are also unsupported and I don't mean financially. I’ve had many conversations with fellow artists and writers about this. You hit a certain age and you suddenly become the unwilling recipient of patronising ‘wellbeing’ projects aimed at fending off your ‘loneliness’, even though you’re still a seasoned professional who might be looking for useful discussion about your work as much as, or even more than, financial support. 

Certainly, in its current incarnation, CS isn’t fit for purpose. It spends a vast amount of money on  salaries such as the Head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, earning £48 - £52K, with the Literature Officer considerably less at £25,000 per year. This again should tell you something about the value Scotland puts on its literature.* Not a lot. Perhaps our government should start again, and build something where the practitioners themselves are central to the system. And where people who seem to have a modicum of understanding and experience are in charge of steering through our current choppy creative waters, without falling over so far backwards in an effort to be seen as inclusive that their brains fall out. Not holding my breath, though. Are you?

* Just checked online. The Lit Officer is a part time position. (Why?) So yet again, salaries of which full time practitioners could only dream. 

How Not To Be A Writer - Part Nine: Poland

 

Aunty Wanda

I'd visited Poland when I was a student, but working there was different. I had to surrender my passport to the police. An odd feeling - that you couldn't just leave if you wanted to - even though with British Council sponsorship I had a certain amount of protection. 

The country was still under soviet sway, although slowly but surely things were changing. This was the late 1970s and communist rule wouldn't end until 1989, so there was a long way to go. But everything 'felt' subversive - especially art and theatre. There was a constant undercurrent of what can best be described as defiant dissatisfaction. 

In 1970s Poland, the Roman Catholic church was particularly subversive and so were many of the people I met whenever I visited my father's cousin Teresa Kossak in Warsaw. They knew what they were risking. They had lived through it all before, again and again. If you want to read more about what had happened to my father's family before and during WW2, you can read about it in my book The Last Lancer. I wrote this quite recently, but I had spent half a lifetime researching it, and much of the material came from my father, from Teresa and Wanda and her husband Karol, people who were still living with the aftermath of those times.

My students were a lovely bunch: three classes of around 30 each. I had to attempt to teach them 'English conversation.' There were two hurdles to this. One was the size of each class. Foreign language conversation classes are usually smaller. The other was a certain uncharacteristic reticence, not normally found among voluble Poles. I soon discovered, however, courtesy of a couple of older and more confident class members, that this was mostly the result of the teaching methods they were used to. It took them a while to adjust to a lecturer who expected them to participate. Once I had given them enough encouragement, asking them what they were interested in, we got along just fine. 

I was given an apartment of my own in central Wroclaw overlooking a pretty square where a flower seller sat. It was comfortable and warm, although the old German 'Junkers' boiler in the bathroom would occasionally throw a wobbly and indulge in a small explosion that covered the bathroom with soot. This had been Breslau before the war, until all borders shifted. I suffered with a certain low key illness for some of that year - something that I was told happened to all visiting lecturers. Afterwards, I wondered if it was down to the boiler emitting just enough carbon monoxide to make us all a bit sick, but not enough to finish us off. A worrying thought. 

I quickly learned that if I didn't keep all my kitchen surfaces scrupulously clean, little processions of red ants would come in and hoover up my crumbs. One day I bought a bunch of sweet violets from the flower seller and put them in a glass beside my bed. I woke in the morning to a procession of ants, making their stately way up to the flowers and down the other side. They were inoffensive creatures, and my students told me that the apartments that had ants tended not to have cockroaches. I saw this as a bonus, and it proved to be true, at least where my apartment was concerned. 

Winters in Wroclaw were a bit milder than in Warsaw. I visited my relatives there for Christmas, but not before I was persuaded to sing White Christmas for about 90 students, my three classes all joined together. In Warsaw, I had to dig out my Finnish woolly underwear and sheepskin coat.  

I was zloty rich and had some sterling too. In fact I've never been so cash rich since. I had a drawer full of notes that had to be spent because I was never going to be able to bring them home or exchange them if I did. There were special shops where you could spend sterling or dollars and buy imported goods. These were frequented not just by visitors like myself, but by Communist Party members, some animals being more equal than others. 

I was always looking for ways to spend my zloties. I remember finding gorgeous long red leather boots, a lovely, stylish, wool gaberdine raincoat, chocolate plums, flavoured vodka. I lived on rye bread with caraway seeds, plum butter or blueberry jam and soft white cheese or smoked mountain cheese as well as big apples, irregularly shaped, with specks on them, but sweet and delicious. 

The communist regime had distribution problems. This meant that a huge consignment of some random item would arrive, but instead of being distributed around the country, they would go to one city only. If you saw a queue, you joined it and asked what you were queueing for later on. Shortages and empty shelves were frequent and commonplace. You didn't so much go food shopping as foraging. That was OK when you were young and single and had recourse to sterling - not much fun if you were trying to feed a family on low wages.

I was lonelier than in Finland, mainly because my students, friendly as they were, were younger, whereas my Finnish students had all been the same age or older, and had been very keen to entertain me. It was good to escape to Warsaw occasionally, to visit my relatives who had survived the war. I went to Krakow and saw the sights there. At the same time, I was trying to keep up a long distance and (as it turned out) extremely unwise romantic relationship back home in Scotland. We ran up huge phone bills. On one occasion, I heard a Polish voice on the line saying 'Good evening, English girl'. As the British Council had warned us, my phone was routinely tapped. I said nothing subversive, but I sometimes wonder what on earth they made of those conversations. 

I went home to Scotland in February, when the university had a break, and flew back with a suitcase full of toilet rolls, the Polish variety being rather worse than our old Izal, if anyone remembers that. Polish loo paper back then was grey-brown, elasticated, and still had sharp bits of tree attached to it. The customs officer who checked my case grinned and waved me through. 

Meanwhile, in my free time, of which I had quite a lot, I wrote. People ask me, as they have always asked me 'Are you still writing' and I want to shout at them 'YES, OF COURSE I'M BLOODY WRITING. IT'S WHAT I DO, YOU WALLY.' But I don't, of course. Too nice for my own good, me.

So even though I was 'being' a lecturer, I wrote.

I wrote plays for radio, poems about Poland, and the occasional freelance article. I planned a novel. And I began to think about the possibility of a stage play about Poland, about the sense of subversion and unease about what might come next. It would be called Heroes and Others. It would be, as it turned out, the worst theatrical experience of my life. 

Please Don't Kill Our Darlings

 

David Suchet as Hercule Poirot, courtesy ITV

I have a confession to make. I have never, not once, watched those 'final episodes' of long running series where the main character dies. I was thinking about this earlier this week when I switched on the TV in the kitchen, as I often do to alleviate the sheer boredom of cooking, only to find that it was showing the Remorseful Day, in which Morse pops his clogs. I've never watched it and I never will.

I feel the same about that appalling episode where Hercule Poirot dies. Not only have I never watched that, but I avoid those episodes where he ages, episodes that I notice tend to be accompanied by doom laden background music. Poirot is the original cosy crime series. Christie herself may have been fed up of being lumbered with her wildly successful creation, but in his David Suchet incarnation at least, I love him. I don't care if he's a perjink little man. I don't care if his denouement speeches might be unbearable in real life. This is patently not real life, and I love him to bits. In my mind, he goes on forever, and I'm never ever going to be persuaded to watch his final moments.

I should perhaps also confess that I've killed off more than enough darlings of my own. And mourned them too, mourned with those who are left behind. But that's different, because I'm not writing cosy crime. Sometimes I'm writing grown up love stories, literary fiction, explorations of real life, whether historical or contemporary. And for the writer, in an odd sort of way, even though you may have killed them off, those characters live on in your internal world. I'm thinking of two novels in particular: Bird of Passage and The Amber Heart. Without going into much detail, in case you haven't read them and want to, some darlings didn't quite make it. But don't worry. They're here, living their best lives in my head and heart. 

That phrase 'killing your darlings' was attributed to William Faulkner, but was used earlier by Arthur Quiller-Couch who wrote of murdering one's darlings. Essentially it means that as a writer, you may well find yourself having to delete the passages that you love best, the parts of a book that don't really advance the story. I used to think they were right. Now, as I'm reading swathes of tremendous classic fiction where people didn't feel the need to edit out all the best bits, I suspect they were probably wrong anyway. Imagine Dickens or Emily Bronte killing their darlings. Well, of course, she did. But just imagine (as I did here in this blog post!) if she had had an editor who told her to make radical changes. 

But I digress. Along with a sizeable chunk of the older female population, I loved Mamma Mia. We didn't get to see the sequel in the cinema so my husband bought the DVD for me. I got only a little way into it to realise that - horrors- they had killed off Donna. (Presumably because Streep didn't want to do it.) 

I donated the video to somebody who wanted it, but I still feel cheated. I wish somebody had warned me beforehand. The songs may have been great but it meant that the whole thing shifted from being a joyful film about wonderful middle aged men and women to focusing yet again upon the young. Not only that, but removing that brilliant central character was like chopping down a mast on a sailing boat. It took a whole lot of rigging with it, and crippled the vessel. 

The point of these ongoing characters is that in our minds, they don't die. They just are. Which is, now that I think about it, very like the way writers feel about their characters, even if we may have killed them off. They don't die. They are still there, popping up from time to time to remind us of their existence.

Can you imagine a grown up William Brown, struggling with mortgage payments and divorce? Can you imagine him ill and lonely? William - whom I love quite as much as Poirot - changed with the changing times, but he never grew old. That wasn't a tragedy. Peter Pan this isn't. Richmal Crompton created a world into which we all, from time to time, need to escape - hilariously funny, wise, wicked, badly behaved (he'd definitely have been hit with an ASBO now) and completely outside time and its sorrows. That's why I still feel the need to read those stories all over again from time to time, and why I still, all these years later, take so much pleasure from them. 

Bird of Passage is available on Kindle at the bargain price of 99p until 31st July.

How Not To Be A Writer - Part Eight: High Hopes

During the late 1970s, and after the death of my first radio drama producer, Gordon Emslie, I was introduced to another fine producer/director: Marilyn Imrie. It would be the start of a long and productive professional relationship and friendship during which we would work on a string of original radio plays, as well as a number of major dramatisations, for the much missed Classic Serial slot. 

Those were wonderful radio days, with a wealth of talent - acting, production, technical. This was talent that the BBC would deliberately throw away some years later, in pursuit of cost cutting at the expense of quality, and by imposing an 'internal market' strategy that successful creative industries were already realising didn't work. To quote just one minor example: when I first wrote for radio, well before digital was a thing, there was a record library for background sound effects, staffed by knowledgeable people. Later, the internal market dictated that the production budget had to cover a significant fee for this service - in effect, the BBC paying itself for a service it was already providing. It was, of course, much cheaper to pop along the road and buy whatever CD you needed, which was what most producers did back then. 

All the same, I would learn so much from so many people, over the following 25 years. 

Much as I loved Finland, I had decided that the work was never going to pay me enough to live on and besides, some of my writing was beginning to be successful. I spent some time at home in Ayrshire with my parents, writing, submitting work here there and everywhere, and wondering what to do next to make some money. 

Several things had happened over that decade that gave me hope that I might be able to forge a successful career as a writer. The radio commissions continued to trickle in and I just loved working on them, loved the whole experience of being in the studio, sometimes rewriting on the hoof, because time was always of the essence, working collaboratively with groups of committed people. 

A meeting with Robert Love of STV led to commissions for three short television plays: Ugly Sisters, the Showground Collection and the Shore Skipper. From this distance in time, I remember nothing about the first two, but I certainly remember the last one, because much later, I used it as the basis, albeit very loosely, for a successful stage play called The Price of a Fish Supper. 

Television - even regional television - was well paid. All the same it struck me that it might not be my favourite medium. In radio, writers are an essential part of the process, expected to attend at least some rehearsals and parts of the production. In television, with one or two glowing exceptions of which more later, I always got the sense that they preferred the writer to hand in a script, shut up and keep away. 

It was also becoming clear that I needed something a little less precarious from a financial point of view. I therefore applied for a position at Wroclaw University, to teach English Conversation to senior students. It was sponsored by the British Council. Poland was still under Soviet rule, although there were cracks appearing in that troubled relationship. 

An induction day in London for those heading beyond the Iron Curtain told us what to expect. I would be paid in zloties in Poland and in sterling back home in the UK - because Polish currency couldn't be exported. I would have to give up my passport while I was there. There would be a KGB informant in every classroom. We must avoid contentious subjects, especially political subjects. Our phones would probably be tapped. (Mine certainly was.) I seem to remember signing the Official Secrets Act. Could that really have happened? Well, maybe. 

With a mixture of trepidation and excitement, I packed my bags and headed for beautiful Wroclaw. 

How Not To Be A Writer - Part Seven: Finland

Teaching in Finland. I'm at the back, in red,
with short dark hair in the fashionable 'Purdie' cut.
Photograph by our fellow tutor, Wladyslaw Cieplinski

There I was, in the mid-seventies, back home in Ayrshire, with two degrees in - let's face it - pretty useless subjects where the job market was concerned and the urgent need to earn a living.  Don't get me wrong. Everything I've ever studied has been invaluable for my writing. I've used all of it, and still do. But was it ever going to help me to earn a living? Well, in a way, it did.

I'd been given a New Writing Award from the old Scottish Arts Council, more approachable and committed to the arts than its subsequent incarnation, Creative Scotland, but it wasn't enough to live on. I was always welcome at home, and I loved it there, but I was used to living independently. I'd published a poetry collection called a Book of Men, had a few radio plays under my belt, published some short stories here and there in literary magazines, and had written the occasional book review or freelance article, but none of these things paid very well, or at all. I needed a job that would bring in some income and allow me to write as well.

I did a summer school in teaching English as a Foreign Language, applied for and got a job at a private language school in Tampere in Finland and headed off to Turku, by cargo ship from Hull: much cheaper than flying, back then, and an experience in itself. 

I spent two tremendously happy years in central Finland. I loved it. The work was hard, with long hours and a not particularly high salary in a country where everyday living was expensive - but it was worth it. I taught adults, sometimes one to one lessons and sometimes groups. I travelled by bus to paper mills to teach executives and PAs there. I remember one very senior executive who had already rejected two teachers in quick succession. I was my boss's third and last attempt and I was nervous. As it turned out, his English was already very good. What he needed was recommendations for reading, books and newspapers, and a teacher who could discuss that reading with him. Thanks to my English Lit degree, we got along just fine.

It wasn't easy to begin with. Finnish people turned out to be warm and welcoming, but extremely shy and self contained. They were fine in one to one sessions, but groups were incredibly difficult. I soon discovered that the only way to cope was to make a fool of myself by - essentially - leaping about and making them laugh with daft examples. It worked. They soon relaxed and began to chat. This was an experience that would later prove invaluable when running writing groups where people may be understandably nervous of exposing their writing to other people. I've heard far too many tales of experienced writers humiliating beginners including people who were put off for years, before going on to ultimate success themselves. It's fine to make a fool of yourself - but never, ever of other people. 

Teaching in factories also taught me a lesson about the egalitarian nature of Scandinavian society. One of the CEOs I taught would turn up in his tracksuit, having cycled to work, and we'd have coffee in the staff canteen before starting. He knew everyone by name and there was no 'executive' dining room at all. This was back in the 1970s when the divisions between the workers and management in British companies was marked, and for all I know still is in some industries. 

I was invited out by my unmarried engineering students for meals, to ice hockey games, to try cross country ski-ing, or to watch car racing on frozen lakes. I learned how to walk on icy ground without falling over and admired the amazing skill of bus drivers who knew just when to put on the brakes, so that the bus would slide to a gentle stop at the head of the queue. I acquired lots of warm underwear, boots and hats. In Finland, at parties, a room is generally set aside not just for coats and hats and scarves but for the ladies to take off their obligatory woolly knickers. One or two of my older lady students took me under their wing and treated me to saunas and lake bathing, at their summer cottages. Another of my students flew me over the city in his little Cessna. In short, I had a ball. 

I also wrote. A lot.

In spite of working full time, I managed to finish a novel called Snow Baby, and a whole heap of poems. Most of the poems were published subsequently, and you can find them again in my new retrospective collection, Midnight Sun. The novel languishes in a bottom drawer, where perhaps it should stay, but I do occasionally look at it and think 'Hmm. Not half bad.' 

Celebrating Stella Gibbons and Avoiding Presentism.

I'm reading a novel called Enbury Heath, by Stella Gibbons. I'm working my way through the many excellent but largely neglected books that she wrote after Cold Comfort Farm, although I recently took a break to read some necessary political stuff, Marina Hyde in particular, to remind myself of just what shenanigans the government had got up to over the past few years.

Enbury Heath is a semi-autobiographical novel, published in 1935. It's an engrossing story about three young siblings in the early 30s, trying to come to terms with their troubled past, trying to make their way in the world as adults. As so often with Gibbons, I find myself engrossed in a book that paints a picture of everyday life at that time. A rarity, I realise. So much (but of course not all) fiction about that time is written from a present day perspective. It often focuses on the wars, concentrates heavily on the dramatic, the big events and how they affect the lives of those experiencing them. Enbury Heath, only 'historical' because we are reading it from a perspective of now, with all our knowledge of what will come next, is essentially about how family background affects future life and how individual, even loving, siblings will respond quite differently to the influence of that background. . 

It's also, in a more general sense, a novel about life in pre-war London - acutely observed as ever, and with the author's ability to creep inside the minds of her characters, observing their joys and sorrows, bringing them vividly to life for the reader. It's not 'dramatic' in the current cliffhanger sense, but it's certainly absorbing. 

1934, when this book was written, was ninety years ago. The author was writing about the world as she experienced it. Sometimes we may find attitudes disturbing. But just as, as writers, we shouldn't make our characters think thoughts they could never have thought, we probably should try hard not to project our own mindsets back onto books that are very much of their time - and criticise them for it. Who knows what readers in 2114 will make of our current attitudes and preoccupations? What will it be, I wonder, that will need 'trigger warnings' or suggested cancellations? 

The curse of presentism doesn't only make our own fiction unreal and anachronistic - it prevents us from learning more about the past.

At one point, in Enbury Heath, one of the characters waves in a satirical manner. It is an imitation of the Nazi salute, but one that is deliberately mocked, deprived of its menace. The author observes - in a book written in the early 1930s -  that this mockery of  Hitler, with a version of this gesture, had spread among young people throughout the UK and the US like wildfire. Much like goose stepping that was subject to the same treatment. I remember my father doing it to make his little daughter laugh, back in the fifties. But it was also, I now realise, a pleasure for him, a mockery, a way of reducing the very real monsters of the Nazi regime, monsters he had experienced for himself, to something banal and foolish. 

When I read that casual passage about the salute, light dawned. I suddenly thought of the picture of the young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret as children, supposedly 'giving the Nazi salute'. It was pounced upon by the tabloid press a few years ago, and spread far and wide on social media. What they were probably doing was using the gesture that - as Gibbons observes - had spread far and wide among young people. A gesture that deliberately mocked a perceived populist monster. She had probably used it herself.

There were plenty of Nazis in the upper echelons of British society - read about Edward and Mrs Simpson, read the Remains of the Day, to find out more. But I don't think the princesses or their parents were among them. 

There are populist monsters who walk among us today. To go back to where I started, read Gibbons to be entertained and enlightened. Read Marina Hyde when you find yourself trying to cope with statements like this: 'Britain would be in a far better state today had we taken Hitler up on his offer of neutrality, but oh no, Britain’s warped mindset values weird notions of international morality rather than looking after its own people.'

Predictably, this mindboggling statement comes from a Reform Candidate. Who wants his country back, but - like so many - seems blissfully unaware that he got it back in 2016, and hasn't known what the hell to do with it since. 

A Random Post About Violets.

Primroses and violets on Gigha

I've had violets on my mind for the past few weeks, and I blame Stella Gibbons for reminding me about them. I'm slowly but surely working my way through all of her superb (but largely unsung) novels, written after her youthful success with Cold Comfort Farm. If you love Barbara Pym as much as I do, you'll appreciate Stella Gibbons - perhaps even more. She's also as observant (and occasionally acid) as Austen, her work can be lyrical, and often surprising. It involves the female experience (yay!) it covers a period which from a present day perspective is historical and therefore very interesting, but without the preoccupations of so many male novelists of the time. Instead, she tells us a great deal about what ordinary life, especially for women, was like. She has been undeservedly neglected - but that's a post for a later date.

Back to the violets!

I was reading one of her novels set in Cornwall - The Weather at Tregulla, first published in 1962. I can recommend it. It's essentially a coming of age tale . The protagonist lives (unhappily) on a 'violet farm' in Cornwall. Which got me wondering, are there still such farms? A quick online search reveals farms with 'violet' in the name, but whether they still grow violets I'm not sure.

Now, I've moved on to an even more strange and brilliant novel called Starlight, set in 1960s London and - here we are again.A rather self conscious young curate always buys himself (much against his better judgement because he thinks it frivolous) a bunch of violets in the spring. Gibbons seems to have been fond of these flowers.

That reference to a bunch of violets, encountered late last night, when I was reading on my Kindle,  brought several memories crowding into my mind. One was of little posies of sweet violets on sale in Leeds market, during my childhood. My mum was fond of them, and my dad would buy them for her. Sometimes he would vary it with mimosa. Another disappearing flower. Eliza Doolittle would have sold them too, but who sees them now?

Then I was reminded of buying myself a bunch of sweetly scented violets from a street flower vendor when I was teaching English conversation at Wroclaw University, back in the 1970s. I put them in a glass beside my bed and woke in the morning to find a little trail of red ants (Pharoah's ants they are called in Poland, I believe) leading to and from the violets. I left them to it. By then, I'd got used to them, knew their ways, and as long as I didn't leave any sugar on my kitchen surfaces they didn't bother me. They liked the violets as much as I did. Me, Stella Gibbons and the ants.

It suddenly struck me that I haven't seen violets on sale for YEARS. Decades in fact. They still grow in the woodlands near this village although not as profusely as on the Isle of Gigha, where I was enchanted by carpets of primroses and violets when we visited one year in May.

Given my love of vintage perfumes, I hunted for a true violet scent. I have a bottle of Paco Rabanne's Ultraviolet, and I like it very much, but it's an acquired taste, and the actual violet scent doesn't quite have the freshness of the real thing. Violet essential oil is nice, and Lidl (somewhat unexpectedly) do a lovely delicately scented reed diffuser called Lush Meadow, where a gentle violet scent predominates. 

It made me realise that the flower offering in our stores is very limited these days. It's probably different in high end florists, but I haven't been in one of those for a long time. There are lots of roses, rather boring carnations in bud, alstroemeria which I dislike, for some reason, lilies which I love, and buy for their longevity, mixing them with flowers from the garden, daffodils and tulips in season but even they are not what they once were, in terms of size and variety. This year, I couldn't find a scented paperwhite narcissus anywhere. Is this yet another dubious 'Brexit benefit' I wonder? I had planted bulbs and even they didn't flower at all. 

But what I really want - even though the season is now past - is a fat little bunch of sweet violets with the flowers nestling among those glossy green leaves. I've planted some in the garden. Maybe next year ...

Nice to have the memory though! 

 

How Not To Be A Writer - Part Six: Back to Leeds

A Moonlit Lane by John Atkinson Grimshaw

Leeds was a very different place from the city I had left aged twelve but it still felt strangely like home. I had managed to secure a room in a student house at the end of Wood Lane, the same long, dark lane where I had gone for my piano lessons at Leeds College of Music, all those years ago. 

My teacher back then was Miss Ingram. She was nice enough, but I was a little afraid of her. She wore a black velvet jacket and massaged her hands with Nivea Cream. The scent of it still reminds me of her. I remember the head of the school remarking to my parents that she had 'an iron hand in a velvet glove' . I was seven when I began lessons and even though I dimly perceived that he didn't mean it literally, there was some part of me that wondered about her hands. Especially since - although she wore no velvet gloves - there was that velvet coat ...

I remember little about the student flat apart from the fact that I wasn't in it very often, due to the nature of the course, which involved research elsewhere. I do remember that on our first night, we went into the shared kitchen to be met with a great commotion as what seemed like an army of mice scattered from the cooker. Investigation proved that it had not been cleaned for years, not even over the summer vacation when the authorities knew that the rooms were to be re-let. It was covered in deeply embedded fat. The previous tenants had been male students, and we blamed them vociferously, although the truth was probably that females would have been just as bad at cleaning up. 

Because the lane was long and dark, with high stone walls enclosing the gardens of large houses - exactly like the atmospheric painting by J A Grimshaw, above - we tried to make sure that if we were coming home at night we didn't have to walk alone. There was one occasion, however, a midwinter evening, when I got off the bus and realised that I would have to negotiate the lane all by myself. Reader, adrenalin kicked in, I slung my bag across my body, took to my heels and ran, not stopping to draw breath till I reached the front door. Years later, I realised that Peter Sutcliffe had frequented that area. His earliest attack was in 1969. I was in Leeds in the early 70s. Sutcliffe murdered a student, Jacqueline Hill, in November 1980, as she walked home from her bus stop at around 9.15 at night. He attacked her in Alma Road, which runs parallel to Wood Lane, presumably another lonely lane. Which still gives me a frisson of disquiet, whenever I think about it.

What possessed university authorities to house female students at the end of dark lanes? A recent question, asking women what they would do if there were no men in the world for 24 hours, was revealing. A large percentage of us would go walking at night, without fear. I can do that in the small Scottish village where I live. Women - especially older women - can often do the same in city centres with significant camera coverage. But I think most men have no notion of the ways in which most women police and prepare themselves, thinking the unthinkable, judging distances, walking briskly, keys in hand, middle of the pavement, seeking the light. And just occasionally, when instinct takes over, running like the wind from the monster behind us. Not all men are predators, but most sexual predators are male. 

I loved my time in Leeds. We were taught by Stewart Sanderson and by a fine lecturer called Tony Green. Among much else I wrote a poem about him called Sudden Man. It was published back then by Akros publications in a collection called A Book of Men, and I included it in my own more recent collection, Midnight Sun. The title is - I'm both moved and honoured to say - on Tony's headstone. I didn't meet him throughout all the years after graduation, but somehow, the poem stayed with his family and after he died, his wife contacted me to ask if she could use it at his funeral. She explained how vividly it seemed to characterise him. And yet - even though I appreciated his teaching very much indeed - I would never have claimed to know him well. 

Like most writers, I was a keen observer, deeply interested in people, in what made them tick, in how it might feel to be them. Interested in what fired my own imagination. I still am. So perhaps I am a writer after all! A piece of advice I was given very early in my career still holds good. 'The way to be a writer is to write.' 

This is not something people want to hear. I doubt if I did, back then, although I certainly loved to write. People often want the magic formula that will transform them. There isn't one. And it certainly isn't AI. We learn by doing, not by being. As Miss Ingram with her iron hand in her velvet glove would have said 'Practise, Catherine. You must do your practice.'  

Where writing is concerned, I have. I still do. Every day without fail.