First Date Ensemble

(Still working on this...)

Pure white wool blanket
straight out of
the asylum, and

cut with sharp scissors
shaped, Singer-sewn, the lining
carved from red silk off-cuts

long roll collar, Raglan sleeves
blue scarf shoulder-draped  -
all knotted fringes

I wear the whole ensemble-
complete with corsair swagger -
cracking image in the mirror

The tall boy smiles,
lifts a hand towards me -
tucks in the naughty fringes
curbing their message
of madness.

Listen Again to Sylvia's Story

Sylvia's Autobiography

We had a fabulous response to Sunday's Writing Game Programme where Sylvia Hurst, aged 90,  tells us how she arrived here on the
Kindertransport from Germany - on one of the trains which rescued threatened children from Nazi Europe.To listen again click HERE
Hope you  like it
w
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Paulie Smith Gets a New Cover!

On Amazon For You

One of the small pleasures of Kindling for yourself is the fact that you can design and develop your own covers and also your can if you wish, go back into the manuscript and improve things. When she downloaded my my kindled novel LIZZA, my eagle-eyed writing friend Avril spotted a dreaded typo on the second page and  - this being a Bank Holiday - once the new plants were planted in the garden, I went back into my manuscript, made the changes and there is LIZZA, even more perfect in my eyes especially with the new cover designed with me by my friend artist Fiona Naughton.

This crossover novel is A  Rights of Passage  story  framed in the strong characters of Lizza, her loose-living sister Ivy, their stern mother and their principled brother Bernard. It was very well received when it was first published in hardback and softback versions in 1980 and for years after.  Its message of self-belief, growth and survival is as relevant today as it has ever been.

She is selling well  - If you read LIZZA and enjoy it I would be very touched if you would take a moment to make a comment on Amazon. I am finding that getting the word out there is crucial to this process. Learning all the time!

On Amazon For You

Then my eye strayed down the Amazon column to PAULIE'S WEB,  So - it still being Bank Holiday -  I decided to brighten up her cover, because although this novel has some serious themes, Paulie and her  prison friends have bright optimistic, sometimes comic personalities, so I thought I would give her a brighter cover. It's nice to know that this novel is getting out there to  some appreciative readers. I think Paulie likes the new cover.  Gave me the thumbs up! I hope you give it the thumbs up too.

On Amazon by the end of the week.

And now this coming week I am about to put my novel CRUELTY GAMES on Kindle. Fiona has come up with a beautifully unique cover design. What do you think?  This is a strong story about a teacher and her pupil and savage events that have a profound impact on both their lives. It should be up by the end of the week and I will post more about it then. I suppose I should say Watch This Space...

My long time publisher Headline are putting books from my backlist on Kindle so it is all a glorious mixture for interested readers to enjoy.


I hope you enjoyed your Bank Holiday as much as I did...wx

I

WIP : A Daughter's Tale

 My father Billy died when I was nine years old and, it seems to me now, has permeated my life ever since, as my memoir The Romancer (see right) probably demonstrated. I miss him even now.

This is a poem about him which I have worked on for some time now

                            

                           Billy: A Daughter’s Tale

We walked along, your  giant’s hand in mine,  

long fingers up inside my woollen sleeve -

I remember nights she left the house

when you read the paper and I scaled your knee

settling, birdlike
into that rustling space.

I remember how we cut out pictures

for the Panjandrum book. And you read us stories -

your voice going up and down

What would you think of our young one?

Tall in Tai Kwan Do gear

white clad and obliquely oriental -

Or ready for cricket

complete with pads and faceguard,

grave and somewhat pedantic – a family trait

When I passed the age of thirty seven

- a lifetime since -

it dawned on me how young you were -  

yet at that dying time

you seemed to me so very old -

it did not feel too terrible.

wr

Endgame: The Eight Day Novel

For me,  researching and writing a novel can take anywhere from eighteen months to two years. More! If you take all the inklings and stirrings and brainstorms that precede a novel you can add another three years to that.
My new novel AOR* was just a twinkle in my eye about five years ago and it's a couple of years since I started to write sketches - actual sequences that could end up on a page in the final novel; dialogue (ditto); idiosyncratic biographies which would help me to become intimate with my characters: I also gathered notes, poems metaphors, analagies, images, quotations. maps, images and drawings.


Every day something new occurs to me, Some of this stuff goes on the wall, some on the table, some in boxes.


The more I go through this process the more things come to me - gathering like iron filings on a drum. (I am reminded that psychology there is a process called set presupposing perception. That’s when you think of something and then you notice it everywhere...)


In this way I begin to build up a mass of relatively shapeless inchoate material which has sprung out of that the original inkling: that first twinkle in my eye.


There comes a time when the mass becomes critical. In The Romancer I described this point as like fragments in the interior of a kaleidoscope. You shake those pieces and a distinctive shape emerges,


To develop my iron filing analogy - at this point you put a strong magnet under the drum and the iron filings shift into coherent and meaningful shapes and patterns.


This is the point where I find at last where the novel will begin;, what might be the issues; the possible low points; the possible high points; the ultimate climax; a possible ending. This is also when I discover significant gaps in the meaning and the structure of the narrative.
So begins a new brainstorming process to create credible links and  substantive new material to make the prose and the narrative work.

Clue to AOR:New Novel

Earlier this year with this current novel, AOR*, I felt as though I had more than enough material and the novel was going out of shape again. I could feel the energy of the novel outstripping its form. This can be quite a worry,


Somehtimes, at this stage working at home one can get stuck in the rich alluvial soil of a novel. For An Englishwoman In France at this stage I  went to France for two months to clear my mind to sort this out.


 This year my solution to this problem was - with my good writing friend Avril - to spent five days in the peace and quiet of Balliol College in Oxford to regain control of this mass of writing, material and inspiration and make my novel work.


And in that academic peace and quiet the final shape of my new novel did emerge. Reaching this point can be truly magical. This time it was like a key clicking in a lock: a door closing behind me. I knew that was it. I had the shape: all I had to do now was finish the novel,


ALL! Well there you go.

Oxford Wall Plan

On element that emerged in Oxford was that this novel would take place over an eight day week. While I was there I made a wall chart that showed me how all my parts fit into the whole.


I am now working in and on the crucial Saturday in the lives of my characters.


Phew!




*Title under wraps just for now, but it’s a good one.


PS Next!  - a work in progress extract from the end of the novel...

The Boy Who likes Chocolate and Academic Life...

Mismatched socks cool

‘A’ the boy who likes chocolate is visiting from university where his life is exciting, fulfilling, challenging, surprising: all one would wish. The usual subjects are covered: food, girls; a girl; studying; games; training. (As the game in question is American Football there is much to learn.)

 He plays me beautiful new sounds on his acoustic guitar which remains his relaxation in this welter of activity. He restrings his acoustic guitar. He takes to pieces his electric guitar and puts it back together again. It still works.

Secret Student

We talk quite bit, as is our custom. We get to genetics - his central study at the moment. He teaches me some very basic facts about genetics, with diagrams to  make it accessible. This is a world where the language is signs and concepts that can only be explained graphically.  New words emerge, which have a poetry all of their own: genotype, alleles, epistasis, diploid...

We discuss the  potential magic of intervention in the womb which could bring about the end of life-threatening genetic conditions. Inevitably we move onto ethical concerns and how medical ethics will be an important part of his future study.

Of course we move onto the way in which  nurture (my field) interacts with genetic predisposition. We talk about my own lifelong interest in twins – quite significant in the research into child development, which was once my own field of study.  My obsession was possibly due - I say - to the fact that my oldest siblings were twins,  christened the moment they were born  who died close to their birth.

 In the subsequent generation at the time of their birthday my mother would talk about them. The Twinnies would have been sixteen today … the Twinnies would have been twenty one today…  Calling them Twinnies made them seem so alive. She told me once that when the second twin died she stopped believing in God.

A man from around here once told me a story about an old woman, referring to her as ‘the Third Twin’, meaning the third of identical triplets. I looked it up and found that the likelihood of identical triplets was one in two million. That notion is at the core of my novel Family Ties. No novelist could resist it. Come to think of it my novel The Lavender House involved in-depth research into the Kray Twins, whom I used as models for two characters in that novel.  I suppose the notion of twins is closely linked to the nature of identity, which is a theme in so  many good novels.

‘A’ and I have played Scrabble together from when he was about four years old. For a few years I would manufacture sequences so he could make good words.  But soon we were playing  for real, which he enjoyed as,  despite being a quiet person, he is intensely competitive (think Rugby and American Football...) We played Scrabble this week-end. I banned two letter chemical formulae as it gave him an unfair advantage. It was a long, high-scoring game. 

Needless to say, he won.
wx

Once, in France

The Aviatrix Anne Lindbergh and the Double Sunrise

From my Boody Jar

'I began these pages for myself, in order to think out my own particular pattern of living, my own individual palace of life, work and human relationships. And since I think best with a pencil in my hand I started naturally to write.’  (Anne Morrow Lindbergh: A Gift from The Sea. More info about her life on  my Reading Blog..)

Anne Morrow Lindbergh's book  -  A Gift from the Sea is her meditation on aspects of life based on her observation of  sea shells.

 I have shells in the pot that I call my Boody Jar, written about here before, so having read this book I got them out and put them on my desk. Then I thought hard about where they had come from, from raw beach at Seaton Carew to a steamy  beach on the North Island of New Zealand.

Of course, being me, I read Ann Morrow's book as a writer.  As a writer I identify with her - particularly in terms of observation. So many writers look, but only see the surface of things and their seeing in not really embedded in their writing; it is not part of their thought  process. 

In her introduction Morrow  says.... 'And since I think best with a pencil in my hand, I started naturally to write.' This reminds me so much of my own mantra 'How do I know what I think till I see what I say?'

Shell Kiss

Each chapter focuses on one shell that Morrow finds, or is given, on her island retreat. First there is her observation and then comes her meditation. My favourite observation is the shell she calls 'The Double Sunrise':' Both sides of this delicate bivalve are exactly matched. Each side, like the wing of a butterfly is marked with the same pattern; translucent white except for three rays that fan out from the golden hinge binding the two together. Smooth, whole, unblemished shell. I wonder how is fragile perfection survives the breakers on the beach.'

 She goes on to compare this with a human relationship: 'Two people listening to each other, two shells meeting each other, making one world between them, There are no others in the perfect unity of that instant, no other people or things or  interests. It is free of ties or claims, unburdened by responsibilities, by worry about the future or debts to the past. ...And then how swiftly, how inevitably the perfect unity is invaded; the relationship changes; it becomes complicated, encumbered by its contact with the world...

This can be interpreted in all kinds of ways but to me speaks of the fragility of true romance and its claims on real life.And here the end of pure romance is the entry of the snake in Eden. It is a very feminine observation and thought process:  it can be taken as proto-feminist or retro feminine. 

Each chapter, each shell opens up another aspect of a woman's life perhaps in the 1950s. And the sensitive perceptions of this woman, who - although economically privileged - has flown the heights and plumbed the depths of family life, make thoughtful readon. Certainly millions of people have thought so since 1955.

My favourite aspect, though, of this book is the beginning of each chapter where she observes   the physicality, the nature of the shell. That level of observation should be in every writer's skill box, in every writer's habit-satchel. 

wx

The Power of the Wild Bluebell

On the bank in my garden leaves of bluebells are massing, ready to bubble forth  in flower late in April.

G., who has a writer's eye, took this photo on his phone: it is a wild bluebell in flower in the wild woods a short distance from here. Almost buried in last year's dead leaves and grasses and tangled in importunate ivy, this ancient flower stands there heralding a proper, wild spring.

The bluebells, long  naturalised in my garden, will be a paler, more apologetic blue, having lost their wild power.

Thank you for the thought, G.

Aslan in South Shields

Sand Aslan

Slick seal tide stains silk soft sand
when its  and the persistent push of water
makes a brand new tide of  pebbles

Food Bread in plastic, wrapped in silver,
tea from flasks in stainless steel
cigarettes in slackened fingers

Sisters, brothers,  all garnered
guile and  innocence
paw down  sand in rusty  tins

Sharpened spears of twice-used wood.
 pierce  the sand-scapes

- chips, perhaps,off the old lion block?

(This is a new one. I am stll working on it...as you see W)

The Itinerant Muse - Kathleen Jones Scribbling on Trains and Planes

Thinking, perhaps

I do love  Kathleen Jones' blog. It reflects her life as a  biographer, poet, teacher  and fiction writer of unique vision. Her blog reflects her life travelling the world and expresses her celebratory  and  principled approach to to life and literature. I asked her to be the guest blogger on Life Twice Tasted.

 Welcome Kathy...

'I’m writing this on a train - which is fairly normal for me, since I seem to be almost always on the move.  My partner works in Italy, our home is in the north of England, and my work as a writer takes me frequently to London and beyond.  Research trips for books have taken me to America, New Zealand, most of Europe, Russia, Cambodia and Australia. Before that, in another life, I was an engineer’s wife, trekking my children from one developing country to another across Africa and the Middle East.  You could say that I’ve learned to live like a nomad, with everything I need in my suitcase.
             All this travel is exciting and there’s all the input and stimulus that a writer needs, but it’s also necessary to have quiet, reflective, creative space to actually produce anything.  And that’s the hardest thing to achieve - a block of time to develop an idea in your head and put it down on paper.  I’ve learnt to use ‘transitional moments’ between one place and the next.  Trains and planes, buses and cafes - hours of time in limbo.   When you’re travelling, there’s no nagging list of ‘must do’s’, no washing up, no unexpected visitors.  Switch off the mobile phone and you’re secure.  The mind and imagination float free and - because nature hates a vacuum - all sorts of words and images begin to appear.
          Lots of writers have made use of the in-between spaces.  Katherine Mansfield  sometimes wrote on the staircase, which she saw as a transitional space, like a railway station - one had departed, but not quite arrived, and it became an alternative universe of space and time to be inhabited.   As AA Milne put it:

 Halfway up the stairs isn't up and isn't down.
It isn't in the nursery, it isn't in the town.

And all sorts of funny thoughts run round my head.
It isn't really anywhere, it's somewhere else instead.

            All this travelling has had an effect on the kind of things that I write.  Serendipity.  I’ve never concentrated on one genre, but always taken what turned up.  In the middle east it was English broadcasting for a local government station serving the Arabian Gulf states.  Then it was going a series of programmes for Woman’s Hour on what it was like to be a European woman living in an Arab world.  I’d have a go at almost anything - poetry readings in supermarkets, magazine articles on witchcraft, biographies of other writers I’ve admired, stories dug out of my own weird life.  Maybe I’d have been more successful if I’d stuck to one thing - but I wouldn’t have enjoyed it half as much!

              Although there’s a small part of me that longs to be ‘rooted in one dear, perpetual place’, as Yeats put it, the rest of my personality experiences a thrill of anticipation at the thought of travel - I can’t see a plane overhead, or a lighted train passing in the night, without wanting to be on it.   This passion for travel must be in my DNA - my mother’s family were seafarers who travelled the globe on ships and brought home foreign women as wives.   My father’s family were itinerant Irish, cattle drovers and horse dealers.

            But, for the itinerant writer, what happens to that sense of belonging, of writing out of place, the father/mother-land, believed to be essential for a writer?

             My roots, my sense of belonging, will always be in the north of England, Cumbria, in the wild landscape where I was born and brought up.  But even then we didn’t stay long in one place.  I was born in a farm labourer’s cottage not far from Caldbeck, then taken at the age of 3 to live on a remote croft in the Cheviot hills between England and Scotland.  At the age of 8 we moved back to the lake district, where my father had a farm manager’s job, before he begged and borrowed enough money to buy a small, ruinous (in both senses)  hill farm in the Uldale fells.  Different schools, different houses;  I became very independent and used to relying on my own resources.  Eventually my father went bankrupt and moved again, and I decided to go to London, where my real travelling (and writing) began.
        There are places I can’t write - places too noisy and busy, where I can’t settle.   And I can’t write when I’m stressed and anxious.  It was particularly difficult when my children were small.  We once lived in a hotel room for four months in the middle east, and we were shuffled round a series of rented apartments and other people’s houses - sometimes moving two or three times a year. Electricity and water were fragile things - not to be taken for granted. There was a busy expatriate social life I came to hate.   I learned to write in my head, memorising things to be written down as soon as I could snatch a moment. 

            I discovered that there’s a space inside your head you can go into and close the door, a parallel world of imagination.  Like Harry Potter’s Room of Requirement it usually appears when you need it. But no amount of searching will reveal it - the door opens by magic.  I’m always afraid that one day it won’t, and that the impulse to create will have vanished overnight, regardless of where I am at the time.  

            I’ve just written the last paragraphs in the airport departure lounge - plane an hour late - and, though I’m aware of the throng of people around me, it’s as though I’m in a little bubble of time, suspended out of real life for a moment.  In transit.  Very odd, but after so many years I now  recognise that it’s part of how and where I write.

© Kathleen Jones