A Present Day Encounter with Susanah in Riches of the Earth - my First adult novel.

 

By 1990, I had worked for more than a decade in teacher education at
Sunderland (then a Polytechnic, now a University), having thrown myself into the fascinating but very hard work of educating teachers and focusing on the inner and outer lives of children. I loved the job. Always the idealist, I was very committed of the thrilling process of encouraging new teachers in the practice of child-centred education.

 This principled process involved creating a classroom ethos where children had the time and space to engage in the world of school by interacting through language and creativity which allowed their unique identities to evolve in the universe of the classroom. Learning to read and write and to handle knowledge and information was integral to this process. In doing so the individual child would make progress within the primary curriculum.

 In those days I was critical of the highly centralised French and German education systems where I learned, the educational progress of every child is monitored, noted, and reported to the central authority. And in primary schools across each country on any given day pupils would be going through the same routines of the curriculum.

 A free spirit myself, for me in those days, markers for success for the children should be measured through the development of talking, reading and writing skills which fostered the personal confidence that should emerge through their experience in the classroom,

 In the field of mathematics, for instance. success was measured as the individual child develops problem solving strategies and skills, using observation and the use of evidence.

 In those idealistic days monitoring a child’s educational achievements was not dependent on centrally set exams and boxes being ticked so the child could be judged.. The idea then was that, with the help of a teacher in a creative classroom, each child should experience avenues to fulfil her or his own unique potential.

 But things have changed now. Today the practice of education is very different. What counts as education in these days is the crucial and sometimes destructive dependence on the centrally monitored system of tests and exams and boxes to be ticked and applied to children as young as seven.

In time, working as a lecturer basing my work on my ideal principles drained a great deal of both my emotional and intellectual energy, including as it did the supervision of the students actually working in classrooms right across the north-east.

Eventually I became tired and debilitated and rather sank into depression. I was told.  “Give your brain a body a rest, Wendy.” So that was why I came to leave the profession which I had relished so much.

 After a period of recuperation and rest, inevitably a new story started  to edge itself into my consciousness. Creativity abhors a vacuum. So it was that out of this jellylike morass emerges Susanah, my heroine, and around her, my first adult novel.

Reading Riches of the Earth now I realise that I had been distilling from my subconscious the voices, events and characters from my own rather troubled childhood when I experienced my day-to-day life with great intensity.   I see now that this intense inner reference came to inform and enrich my novels and stories as the years have rolled on.

For example, take Riches of The Earth - my first adult novel. As I read it now, the context and some of the feelings expressed in its pages bring to my mind my most recent book, Siblings, a short story collection written nearly 3 decades later than Riches of the Earth. It dawns on me now that this applies to most of my subsequent novels and stories.
 
However, I would emphasise that I do not tell the same story in every novel; it is much more complex than that.  In writing my fiction I am dipping into a complex multi-layered world buried deep within me.  As the years have gone by I have this process has been a strong element in my fiction. (I have written essays elsewhere here on Life Twice Tasted about this mirage-like border between memoir and fiction.)
 
And now I am I am beginning to realise that, in collaboration with my friend literary archivist Donna Maynard, in this process of the exploration of all my work, I am rediscovering myself as a writer and a human being.
I honestly don’t remember thinking about all this as I wrote the novel. Like each of my novels Riches of the Earth  flowed from my head through my arm into the ink and onto the page. It is dawning on me now that my academic research and my understanding of children and their thought processes filters through into the novel, as it was very much part of my recent life at that time. My instinctive insight into the lives of my evolving characters was nurtured by and grounded in my professional insights and principles.  

So-o-o, here I am recognising that, in writing all my novels, I was then and have been since influenced by my own contemporaneous experience of family life as well as my research – lending sociological and psychological insight alongside the instinct and commitment to what my characters would do next. I do remember loving my characters who reminded me of my own growing children and also the young people who had filled my professional world for so long.

Having completed Riches of the Earth I was delighted that  the prestigious publisher Headline – then newly established - wished to publish the novel when I first offered it. Once there I welcomed the support and insight of my editor, the wise and gifted Anne Williams  She guided and supported with me on my journey through a good number of books. I felt I was in very good hands until she moved on to higher things, eventually taking on her present role as a respected agent. Her writers are very lucky. My next editor - Harriet Evans – a talented writer herself, was also very supportive of my novels as they emerged. Interestingly, Harriet has proceeded to become a very much-admired novelist in her own right.

At this point I need to continue the discussion which I started in the last essay on Life Twice Tasted about the significance of covers. Delighted as I was at the time that Riches of the Earth was to be published.  the original hardback cover – although it seemed like a bit of magic at the time – now looks predictable and stereotyped and not really true to the energy of the narrative. You will see this included here. However, you will also see that the cover of the paperback, published in the same year, is infinitely better than the hardback cover. Susanah’s face at the top is alive and has a sharp contemporary feel. The World War I aeroplanes on the front and back cover offer a predictive reference to the role of World War I in the narrative. Altogether the paperback cover has much greater energy and narrative reference,

So, as I read Riches of the Earth again after more than thirty years, I enjoy afresh revisiting the varied characters as they live their lives from1895 right through to 1914, culminating with the international shock of the First World War. As with novels written during the following decades, many issues precious to me are woven into the narratives – identity, class, war, comradeship, women’s lives, the nature of work, family politics, birth, death, and here in this novel, pacifism.

 In this and further novels I observe myself as a kind of ghost in my own family, going back through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, dipping into my Welsh, Scottish and Irish heritage. It seemed to me that in this novel, Susanah, the central character. and Caradoc her father are particularly recognisable. I can see myself clearly dipping into my own Welsh heritage and particular perceptions of family life politics.

 In Riches of the Earth I observe that the pattern of power and control in the family is threaded through the narrative arc of the novel as it is in further novels. I note with retrospective approval that in this narrative as well as the others I have not been reduced to stereotypes or sentimental image is of north-eastern family life.

 Incidentally in reading the book again I am also reminded that I have alluded to an historically true event - within the fictional narrative. This is when a young soldier hitches a ride with a pilot who is flying reconnaissance over the battlefield. The boy is amazed as he looks down at the River Somme spread out below him in the French landscape. This incident was inspired by a detail from my research into letters, memoirs and personal histories from that time. Like other true elements, it serves to enhance the authenticity of in my fictional story –   all emerging from my deep research into contextual sources which provides and continues to provide deep realism into what are fictional narratives in all my novels.

 Lastly,  for your further interest I have included here below the synopsis - probably created by Anne Williams – of the story from the cover of the hardback. It is an excellent example of a well-written synopsis. Here it is:

When, in 1895, the Laydon Joneses move into Selby Street they are just another Welsh family who have come to work in the mines of County Durham. But Caradoc Laydon Jones, dour, unforgiving and in his spare time a genius of clockmaker, is a force to be reckoned with, whether it be down the pit, or in the chapel, or in his home where he rules with an iron fist. His daughter Susanah has inherited his strength but will not, she is determined take on his bitterness. And Jonty Clelland the young pacifist schoolmaster by whom she is increasingly intrigued, is the antithesis of her father. At the annual young people’s camp in Livesey Woods it looks as if the attraction between Jonty and Susanah might finally blossom into love - until tragedy intervenes. The news is brought that Susanah’s younger sister has been drowned in the colliery pool and before long her timid mother, who had never learned to speak the language of the English has followed her into her grave.

Overwhelmed by guilt, Susanna is left to look after her grief- maddened father and a handful of brothers, estranging herself from the man whose arms were around her as a little sister drowned. And when her vivacious friend Betty died in childbirth, leaving her husband, local football hero Mervyn Sargant, alone with a tiny baby, Susanah knows what she must do. Without fuss she adopts the child and, at his pleading, finally agrees to marry the broken Mervyn. But as the country enters the nightmare of the First World War, Susannah, prompted by her warm hearted Aunt Bel, begins to realise that life was to be seized and lived – that she, as much as those she loves, has a right to all the riches of the earth has to offer.”

“A vividly textured novel, steeped in the passions and the politics of the north-east, which is the of the Earth is Wendy Robertson’s first novel.”

 

SIBLINGS STRUTTING THEIR STUFF

  

At last, after one or two to production hiccups, my new collection Siblings is now live for interested people on Amazon. Producing my own volumes is the most exciting late-life experience for me. Since Theft, my first published novel in 1972 (one keen reader remembers this novel here )  my novels have been produced by major publishers accompanied be a small army of accomplished proof-readers and marketeers.

I was always happy with their work, although sometimes the covers – beautifully painted - were more saga-esque than I would have preferred. I remember one editor telling me that if there was a woman on the cover – there was always a woman on the cover – this could produce thousands more sales. And if the woman was accompanied by a child, that could mean thousands more. The same applied if there was gold foil on the cover.   

In those days I just wrote my novels alongside the many other things – children, husband, demanding profession - in my life. These novels would be long - often running to 80 or 90,000 words.

However, in recent years the world around me has changed radically:  it has shrunk and slowed down, dominated as it is now by my role of full time carer. However, writing is my vocation, and I am still writing – now rather slimmer volumes -  and publishing them myself through  Amazon Createspace. 

 As my Auntie Alice (aka Eirwyn in my newest book Siblings…) wrote in my autograph book circa 1951. ‘I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.’

This is never more so than my new collection of short stories, Siblings.  

These later volumes are slimmer and perhaps do not appear so genre-specific as many of the early novels on my list. When I first started on this private publishing gig (see Damselfly )  I continued to produce in the  long fiction form. – Becoming Alice – The Pathfinder – An Englishwoman France – without deliberately meeting the protocols of genre fiction. (One of these books - the novel The Bad Child features an extra perceptive middle child who resembles Ayla, the central storyteller in Siblings.) Other recent books feature short prose (Kaleidoscope) and  poetry (With Such Caution) turning more and more to the seductive melding  of memoir and fiction about which I have written here on Life Twice Tasted before. Of course there have been those larger novels one was Becoming Alice the other one The Bad Child. And I have another one in plan.  

I am happy with them all. Writing and producing books in this way is not dissimilar to having children, in terms of the protective pride one feels as they venture out there in the world

I am feeling that now in the case of Siblings, out there, strutting her stuff.

So here I am - rather weirdly with my editor’s cap on - talking about myself in the third person on the back cover of Siblings:

In this collection Wendy Robertson dances the borders between memoir and fiction, exploring the lives of seven siblings presided over by their mother who was widowed in the First World War. Their separate stories begin in the year 1922 in a mining village in South Durham. Each of the five sisters and two brothers has an individual story unique to themselves. The storyteller here is observant Ayla, the middle child in this talented family.

 

She tells us: “This collection of short stories is dedicated to my mother Barbara and her siblings. Her family of storytellers embroidered their often-told stories not only into the history of their own family but also significantly into the history of the 20^th Century.”

 

She has published many novels and several books of short stories. Many of these reflect the history, landscape, and personalities emerging from County Durham, where she has lived most of her life. In that time she has also travelled researched, written other novels set in London. Coventry and North Wales and far afield as Singapore, America, and France. Discover more about these novels on her blog at http://lifetwicetasted.blogspot.com/

 

 

See her essay about dancing the borders between fact and fiction, 

ORDER SIBLINGS HERE 

 

 

 

 

‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ Plato. 'The Midnight Mannequins.'

 

 ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ Plato

I am aware that in the modern world an increasing range of people have heartfelt aspirations to write. However it might be the case that some people who have aspirations to write never quite manage  to examine their own life or the lives around them in the Platonic sense. Some people think that writing means ‘writing down’ as opposed to the reality of writing, which is observing, thinking and transforming their own experiences to make them universal and truly felt by the reader.

(Sadly at the present time some writing aspirations have been built around ideas of fame and fortune which is a false doorway into that precious room of writing.)

My admittedly long life in writing and publishing has been divided almost equally between writing and teaching in and out of schools and institutions. Then, after a number of published novels and short story collections,  this has inevitably culminated in more recent years in workshops and courses in the community, addressing the writing process.

And now I am reflecting on all the courses and workshops I have facilitated over this long time. I have the feeling now that many people who are not actually labelled ‘writer’ can indeed write and that some have a well-founded, deep desire to see their stories on the page. These are people of talent and persistence like Mike Daley who have developed their innate ability in the Platonic sense, to examine their own life and the lives of people around them.  

So I understand that many people who are not actually labelled ‘writer’ can indeed write and have a deep desire to see their words and creative perceptions on the page. In some cases these people have moved on towards publication. One of the pleasures of doing all this has been meeting people like Michael Daly, writer of The Midnight Mannequins.

Some years ago Mike came to one of my workshops and - if you like – ‘caught the bug’.  And so inevitably I have been thinking about these years of teaching as I read and enjoyed his new published volume of short stories The Midnight Mannequins. .

It seems to me that, in going through this process, Mike Daley has developed the complex literary ability to walk the line between memoir and story- a delicate process I have written about this elsewhere on this blog.http://lifetwicetasted.blogspot.com/search?q=+Memoir+and+Fiction

Mike certainly has had a life which is worth examining. His witty and confiding tone has the familiar literary ring of the Irish voice. Born in Roscommon, Ireland he came to Britain to join the RAF at the age of seventeen. After a successful career culminating in the role of Squadron Leader he left to become a university bursar in Durham city. In 1985 he was awarded an MBE for military service in and was awarded the freedom of the city of London.

Interestingly his fiction is not confined to any journalistic accounting of these experiences. The titles of his short stories will give you a clue. Besides The Midnight Mannequins, we have How Was Your Mother?, Jolly Good Show, The Price Tag, Love Letter, Lunch Without Laughter, The Book Club, Bed Seven, The Tea Dancers, The Defaced Fiver, and The Dance Band. All these stories lead the reader from one to another to explore the life experienced with weight, irony, and knowing allusions ensuring that good writing is the product from  unique ‘examined life’.

Read and enjoy! And – I would say this, wouldn’t I? 

To obtain it : https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Midnight-Mannequins-and-Other-Stories-by-Michael-Daly/9781398410404

    

The Writer as Outsider

 

 For several years now, perhaps triggered by the isolation engendered by the Covid situation, I have spent much of my time - as I say in a recent blog post (scroll down) - dancing on the border between memoir and fiction.

One outcome of this has been my new collection This has resulted in at least one distinct collection called Siblings: seven distinct stories of a family of seven siblings. The stories are all told by the middle child – called Ayla. She is the storyteller.

This book will be published in the spring but you can listen again to these stories on Bishop FM. 

I have written elsewhere about middle children – for example in my novels The Bad Child and Becoming Alice. Inevitably some observers will say that is this is a deep reflection on my own role as the middle child in a diverse family who relishes the role of the outsider.   

But I would assert that this outsider feeling transforms itself to a creative resource when one is a writer who can reflect on the events going on around her.

There is a poem about this feeling in my book WithSuch Caution – a Life Glimpsed in Short pieces. 

I thought you might like to read it. Here it is, Wx

Outsiderness

 

Being the third child of four

I was bred to be an outsider.

Being the new child from a far town

I was labelled outsider.

 

Talking with the wrong tone

I was seen as a verbal outsider.

Being the cleverest child in class

made me an outsider.

 

Working alongside men

I was the female outsider.

Writing stories made me

a mendacious outsider.

 

Living with a man doesn’t see

I have become an invisible outsider. –

Learning to make myself comfortable

In this ultimate containment.

 

Now, living through to older age

I am an intimate outsider, even

the ultimate outsider, relishing

this … Outsiderness.

 

SIBLINGS: My stories on Christmas Radio

In my last post here on Life Twice Tasted  (scroll down) I outlined my adventures during Lockdown on the borderline between memoir and fiction as I worked, story by story,   on this new  short story collection  SIBLINGS. In it I argued that  – like many writers of fiction – I am exploring the gap between fiction and  the uniquely true nature of a family’s history, grounded as it is in intricate and deeply observed family experience and liberated by the freedom of creative storytelling.

At last in SIBLINGS  I have now completed the seven stories that are the essential truth emerging from a family spanning the first half of the 20^th century. In this process Ayla, the middle sibling, is the storyteller for all the family. One by one she tells the complex stories of her four sisters and two brothers. These children are not alike.  Ayla tells each story with her acute, sometimes idiosyncratic, observations of her much-loved family.

In the long term SIBLINGS has an over- arching narrative linking 1922 to 2022 –starting in 1922 when Ayla is telling us the individual stories of her sisters and brothers, living in a small house in a Durham street under the magisterial care of their ‘Mam’, widowed by the First World War. But the final curve of the arch reached me,  writing these stories during the Covid confinement of 21/22. I am sitting here telling the unique stories of the seven siblings in Ayla’s voice,  truly walking the line between memoir and fiction.

As an experience of writing, this process has the quality of a dream as each distinctive sibling comes to life before me, flowing through the ink of my pen onto the page of my notebook.

My original idea was to record the stories and one by one and provide links to them here on my blog, so you could hear them as well as read the text. For this purpose I turned to Anne Dover the brilliant professional actress who has narrated a number of my novel into audio. Anne has the perfect voice for my Durham prose, incorporating the musicality with  quiet authority and capturing the nuances, the soft tones of our way of speaking. Although she has travelled far and wide with her profession, Anne originally comes from Wolsingham in County Durham, so she starts with an advantage here.

For the final audio edit on the first story BRAM,  I turned to Gillian Campbell of Bishop FM. Having done a great job on this. Gillian suggested to me that the radio station would be interested in broadcasting the SIBLING stories.  

So now it turns out – with the collaboration of Gary Burgham, the Bishop FM programme director - that the seven stories which constitute siblings will be broadcast beginning at 2pm on Christmas Eve.

I will also post them here on my blog week by week. If you would like to see the first of the sibling stories – the story of BRAM the oldest brother – you will note that  the whole text of that story is posted in full on my previous blog post. (Scroll back…).

After they are broadcasts you will be able to listen to to Anne Dover's wonderful narrations.  again here and on Bishop FM .

So this is my Christmas present to you - all the great people who have shown an interest in my work both recently and through the years when my novels emerged into the light.

Wendy R x

From Gary Burgham Programme Director of Bishop FM at

 https://www.bishopfm.com/.

Bishop Auckland author Wendy Robertson has been working on a collection of short stories entitled SIBLINGS, told by the eleven year old middle Sibling, Ayla, set primarily in the year 1922. Although the seven siblings from whom the stories spring are genetically connected to each other and in the subsequent  generations genetically connected to the author, these stories will essentially  be pure fiction, shot through  with fragments of the author's true memory. Siblings will be read by actor Anne Peacock who originates from Wolsingham   and can be heard on Bishop FM on Christmas eve at 2pm and at 2pm each day thereafter. 

Visit Anne Dover, the gifted narrator of SIBLINGS
at
https://www.annedover.co.uk/anne-dover/

 

SIBLINGS: My stories on Christmas Radio

 

In my last post here on Life Twice Tasted  (scroll down) I outlined my adventures during Lockdown on the borderline between memoir and fiction as I worked, story by story,   on this new  short story collection  SIBLINGS. In it I argued that  – like many writers of fiction – I am exploring the gap between fiction and  the uniquely true nature of a family’s history, grounded as it is in intricate and deeply observed family experience and liberated by the freedom of creative storytelling.

At last in SIBLINGS  I have now completed the seven stories that are the essential truth emerging from a family spanning the first half of the 20^th century. In this process Ayla, the middle sibling, is the storyteller for all the family. One by one she tells the complex stories of her four sisters and two brothers. These children are not alike.  Ayla tells each story with her acute, sometimes idiosyncratic, observations of her much-loved family.

In the long term SIBLINGS has an over- arching narrative linking 1922 to 2022 –starting in 1922 when Ayla is telling us the individual stories of her sisters and brothers, living in a small house in a Durham street under the magisterial care of their ‘Mam’, widowed by the First World War. But the final curve of the arch reached me,  writing these stories during the Covid confinement of 21/22. I am sitting here telling the unique stories of the seven siblings in Ayla’s voice,  truly walking the line between memoir and fiction.

As an experience of writing, this process has the quality of a dream as each distinctive sibling comes to life before me, flowing through the ink of my pen onto the page of my notebook.

My original idea was to record the stories and one by one and provide links to them here on my blog, so you could hear them as well as read the text. For this purpose I turned to Anne Dover the brilliant professional actress who has narrated a number of my novel into audio. Anne has the perfect voice for my Durham prose, incorporating the musicality with  quiet authority and capturing the nuances, the soft tones of our way of speaking. Although she has travelled far and wide with her profession, Anne originally comes from Wolsingham in County Durham, so she starts with an advantage here.

For the final audio edit on the first story BRAM,  I turned to Gillian Campbell of Bishop FM. Having done a great job on this. Gillian suggested to me that the radio station would be interested in broadcasting the SIBLING stories.  

So now it turns out – with the collaboration of Gary Burgham, the Bishop FM programme director - that the seven stories which constitute siblings will be broadcast beginning at 2pm on Christmas Eve.

I will also post them here on my blog week by week. If you would like to see the first of the sibling stories – the story of BRAM the oldest brother – you will note that  the whole text of that story is posted in full on my previous blog post. (Scroll back…).

After they are broadcasts you will be able to listen to to Anne Dover's wonderful narrations.  again here and on Bishop FM .

So this is my Christmas present to you - all the great people who have shown an interest in my work both recently and through the years when my novels emerged into the light.

Wendy R x

From Gary Burgham Programme Director of Bishop FM at

 https://www.bishopfm.com/.

Bishop Auckland author Wendy Robertson has been working on a collection of short stories entitled SIBLINGS, told by the eleven year old middle Sibling, Ayla, set primarily in the year 1922. Although the seven siblings from whom the stories spring are genetically connected to each other and in the subsequent  generations genetically connected to the author, these stories will essentially  be pure fiction, shot through  with fragments of the author's true memory. Siblings will be read by actor Anne Peacock who originates from Wolsingham   and can be heard on Bishop FM on Christmas eve at 2pm and at 2pm each day thereafter. 

Visit Anne Dover, the gifted narrator of SIBLINGS
at
https://www.annedover.co.uk/anne-dover/

 .

 

 

Dancing the Shadowy Line Between Memoir and Fiction

 

Dancing the Shadowy Line Between Memoir and Fiction

I don’t  know whether it’s the Lockdown or the enclosed life of being a carer -- (the latter being a version of Lockdown, I suppose) - but the notion of memoir is very much on my mind these days.

In my rare moments of literary reflection I am working on a collection of short stories emerging from the lives of seven siblings in the nexus of 1922. This collection will be entitled SIBLINGS.

I am driven to think so deeply about this shadowy line between memoir and fiction because I will be enjoying the  privilege next Sunday 24^th of October of being part of the Weardale WordFest 2021 22- 24 October  

My role in Stanhope on Sunday afternoon will be to have tea and cakes with readers and writers and  share a conversation about living a writer’s life and the instinctual function of memory in my novels and stories. See them   HERE

I have just posted about my ideas about all this HERE on my blog. 

In thinking about this theme of the shadowy line between fiction an memoir I will certainly touch on  my current  writing project Siblings,  a collection of seven individual stories called told by the eleven year old middle Sibling, Ayla, set primarily  in the year 1922.

Although the seven siblings from whom the stories spring are genetically connected to each other and in the subsequent  generations genetically connected to me, these stories will essentially  be pure fiction, just as my  numerous published novels and short stories are pure fiction, although – as I will explain - they are shot through  with fragments of true memory - my own and others’. These seven stories told from the point of view of the this middle child are entirely separate, each Sibling existing in their own universe,

In my own substantial writing life I’ve come to realise that literary expression and story-making are not the purview of the privileged literary middle classes. My own life experience informs me that depth and quality of literary expression is embedded the conscious experience of every family where literate reflection and story-telling is an ongoing aspect of that family environment, whatever their cultural location in our multi-layered society.

Holding this view I now take note of a new awareness of this in the welcome flowering of attention from publishers, agents and reviewers of writing emerging from previously marginalised social and racial groups in our society. I welcome this with a full heart. It is overdue.

I have observed that in my own marginalised group at the bottom of the class structure in English society, that the custom of intricate in intergenerational storytelling has served as the key to our literary existence and educational success.  This view is informed by the fact that my own family emerges from the so-called “disadvantaged” working class, being “Northern”, working class and originally in manual jobs if working at all.

I am very much aware of the convenient category of so called Working Class Writing and Kitchen Sink Drama that emerged in the twentieth Century English Canon. And I do admire the work of people like Sid Chaplin, Jack Common, James Kelman and William McIlvanney. However I worry that the working class works can be prone to sentimental memorialising which can serve to prevent proper insight into the rich complexities of working class family life located as it is at the margins of English society. Often it seems to me that little of this output been properly recognised as literature rather than occasionally entertaining illustrations of an alien life form.

Of course you will tell me that the books are there.  A valuable Guardian piece from 2018   lists books in which ‘working class’ heroes are  defined by  courage and fortitude and political significance. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/06/top-10-working-class-heroes-in-books  Perhaps it is of interest that all of these referred  books, except one, feature men  and subjects and male preoccupation in the fields of  war, politics, protest and urban survival. There is praise for their talents in overcoming the early disadvantage of working class environment and origins.

Fair enough! There are some honourable mainstream works here.

However in my view the key to the best of literature is the positive and intricate aspects of the story of lives lived which can create and inform heroism in all its aspects, domestic or otherwise.

So, you may say, what about you Wendy?

I suppose my own writing is speckled with the benefits of being born into what some would call this disadvantaged life. One of my earliest memories is sitting under the table in a cluttered somewhat neglected room, listening to my mother and her sisters telling and repeating stories emerging from their own lives , from their mother and father’s lives and their grandparents lives going back more than two generations. The stories had been shared, modified and developed time and time again through the decades, through the century.

 “Er… don’t you remember? That’s wrong. The truth is, she …”

Within this family details of memory have been worked over again and again like the fine stitches finishing off an elaborate piece of embroidery. And in the retelling of the stories, each story-teller would incorporate elements of her own life experience to embellish, deepen and contextualise the meaning of the story.

More recently I have been thinking that there is possibly a genetic instinctual element to my own story which  informs  my own lifelong  storytelling instinct and continues to have an impact the children and grandchildren of the seven siblings who are the leading characters in my new collection.

In my own family’s case   this custom, practice, and focus of encoding family life   into stories has proved itself in various ways facilitating a deeper understanding of the literature and various other texts that we read – a world away from the cluttered working class house. This custom somehow engendered the passing of exams, the apprehending of stories in other languages, through to the taking up of professions involving teaching, high class journalism, even the creative problem-solving in the world of scientific research. As well as this, building, making, writing, painting and other creative preoccupations have evolved into a generation which is manifestly successful in the complex modern world. I am now thinking that such progress is achieved, not despite the disadvantaged working class family origins but because of the unique nature of that family’s history grounded as it is in intricate and deeply observed family experience.

My own family heritage is significantly Celtic – part Scottish, part Welsh with a smidgen of Irish. And now I am thinking of the Celtic custom of relating ancient tribal history and politics through storytelling. I note that this cultural identity is reflected in many of my own longer novels and particularly explicitly in my novel set in post-Roman Britain called The Pathfinder. And now I can trace this instinct in all of my novels, whether they are set in Nineteenth Century County Durham, in 1938 Spain, in 1941 Singapore or in mid-20^th century France.

While I work on these ideas I am beginning to realise how the significance of work is woven an individual’s experience of a particular family ethos. This is definitely the case with each of the seven Siblings in my collection. To illustrate this you might like to read the first story   in the collection. This is the story of the eldest Sibling, Bram.

 You can read it HERE. 

Bram

1922 January 22 British Troops roll over Dublin’s Cobbled streets

and take up positions on the docks and market areas

 

So. There is this man in our Front Room. Our Dee whispers in my ear that he’s this big man from the pit. He’s sitting on the horsehair sofa talking to our Mam, his flowing tweed coat unbuttoned and his white silk muffler tight around his neck.

Our Mam is sitting on the music stool in front of the harmonium on which she plays each night after we’ve gone to bed.  She practices for the Sunday services. She plays at Sunday services on Sunday mornings at our own chapel and at the Welsh chapel at Chilton at the evening service. She makes us go to the services at our own chapel but we don’t have to bother with the Welsh chapel, where the words are all jumbled up.  It’s not jumbled for Mam, of course – her being proper Welsh. Our Eirwen does go there, as she always clings to Mam and is a bit daft that way. But at least she gets to speak a bit of Welsh so that’s probably a good thing.

Anyway, here now in our Front Room is this this big man in the big coat.  We’re all here, even though we’re never normally allowed in the Front Room. Mostly we’re just in the kitchen and the scullery. The Front Room is for best.

But now, here we are - me, Eirwen and our Dee (whose Scottish name is Deoiridh), our Aderyn (whose Welsh name means bird but round here they call her Ada which means nothing). We are all sitting on the chairs lined up against the back wall, Breedlen (whose Welsh name means helper but round here they call her Bree) and our young Evan, are sitting cross-legged in front of the fire.

‘Well, Mrs Angus...’ The man’s voice sounds like a kind of whispery roar.  ‘We know your lad Bram is a good scholar. Your Jimmy’s friends tell us that.’

Mam nods, her eyes wary at the mention of our Da’s name.  She sits up straighter on the stool. ‘Our Bram passed the School Leaving Certificate when he was 12 and they let him leave school then.’  She speaks in English but her words swim up and down in that Welsh way.

The big man crosses his legs and leans back on the horsehair sofa, which creaks. ‘Like I say, a clever lad. They tell me that he’s working in that tailor shop on the High Street?’ He raises his eyebrows.

Mam nods. She's proud of our Bram. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘He’s apprenticed to the clerk there. Only got the job, look you, because he's a good scholar.

 ‘Mmm,’ He grunts. ‘No pay, like?’

‘He’ll start on a wage on Boxing Day.’ Mam’s lips close tight together. Tight.

He strokes his bristly chin. ‘That’s as mebbe, Mrs Angus.’ He pauses. The ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece is very loud. Then he coughs. ‘Your Jimmy did all right down the pit didn’t he? Got to be deb’ty when he was not much more than a lad.  That was before he volunteered, like, in fourteen.’ He pauses. Then he looks around at us one by one. I shrink back. ‘And left you with seven bairns to keep.’

Her eyes, cold as ice now, look him up and down. He glances around our Front Room with the clock on the mantelpiece and the bulky harmonium bought second-hand for her by my Granda so she would play in the services in his Welsh chapel. After my Da died in the war he sent us a bag of boots leftover his spare time job as a cobbler. All boys’ boots of course. Me, I refused to wear them, although our Dee loves hers and wears them when she goes out to play chasey and football with the lads.

Now here in the Front Room the big man coughs and nods his head. ‘Well, like, I have instructions from Mr Stevenson to talk to you about all this.’

Bree’s voice tickles my ear. ‘Mr Stevenson’s his big boss at the pit.’

The man’s thick fingers stroke his bristly chin again. ‘Well, Mrs Angus, it’s three years now, isn’t it, since we lost Jimmy and all our other lads? And we see even now that Jimmy’s a big miss to you as well as the pit.’ He pauses and examines his fingernails.’ But in these years since the war, haven’t you had this colliery house in this fine row?’   He looks again around the bright Front Room ‘And of course the coal for your fire.’  

A dark cloud settles now around us.

He coughs. ‘Well, Mrs Angus, it boils down to this. Mr Stevenson says I should explain that there’s talk of new men coming up from Cornwall to fill the gaps left in the workforce by the war. And the houses – only granted to working miners - are needed for their families.’

Mam sighs very loudly and I want to cry. Then she puts her hands together as though she’s praying and looks around the room. ‘You want us out, then?’

The big man coughs yet again. ‘Mebbe that won’t quite be necessary, Mrs Angus.’ He surveys us, one by one. ‘How old is your oldest again? The one that works at the tailor’s?’

‘Our Bram’ll be fourteen next Monday.’

‘Well then! There’s a solution to your problem. The lad’s fit enough to work in the pit isn’t he? Then he’ll be your working miner. So you can keep your house and your coal. And, being a clever lad, he won’t start at the very bottom.’ The big man stands up, re-buttons his topcoat and reties his muffler. ‘So you’ll think about this Mrs Angus?

She hauls herself to her feet and turns towards the front door. Like the Front Room, it’s rarely used. The last time it was used was when an officer in DLI uniform brought the letter from the army to say how brave our Da had been and how the King was proud of him. I was only seven then but I remember it like it was yesterday.

Now the big man shakes Mam’s hand and looks her in the eye. ‘Come Monday I’ll get Tab Smith, who worked marras with your Jimmy, to call here for your lad at half five sharp. Tab’ll take it him in-bye and make sure he gets to know the ropes from the start.’

Mam tries to pull her hand away, but he clutches it more closely. ‘It’s the only way, Mrs Angus. It’s for the best, you know it and I know it.

She slams the door behind him and stands with her back to it. Her eyes glittering and her teeth clenched.

We know that look. We begin to melt away through the middle door and make our way through the kitchen, through the scullery and down the backyard. We race out onto the Green behind the houses where Bree has a store of clay which we can make into beads and buttons to bake them on a tray in the oven.

 

At 8 o’clock my brother Bram marches down the yard in his shiny black shoes and leaps straight upstairs to hang up his white shirt his jacket in his black trousers. He comes down in bare feet wearing an old shirt and sits at the kitchen table now spread by Mam with a white cloth, on the end of which Mam has spread a white cloth. Bram sits down and bends his long gangly body over the table, his mop of black hair falling over his eyes. (The rest of them have shiny black hair like Mam’s. All except me, that is. My hair is rusty red like my Da’s. My Mam told me once not to worry about that, as the Queen of the Icenae had red hair and she was a brave woman.)

Bram grins across at Ada and me, his white teeth flashing. In front of him on the table is his meat and potato pie. It was made by Ada, who is now Mam’s right-hand-woman in the house. She gets to stay off school on Monday to help Mam with the washing, and on Wednesdays for the ironing and baking.

  Bram spears his fork into the crisp golden pastry. Mam stands watching him, her back to the roaring fire, her arms folded. The rest of us – all six of us – are scattered around the room in our nightclothes. Bree is sitting on a wooden cracket, her hands busy with her knitting needles. Deirdre is leaning on the windowsill humming a tune. Evan is leaning the fireguard at Mam’s knees. And our Eirwen is staring dreamily out of the window.

Bram grins across at Mam. ‘Real good, these taties, Ma. Has Uncle Davey been over?’  He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. At last he notices the silence in the room turns to cast his eye over each of us. Eventually he looks at Mam and smiles his sweet smile. ‘Now, Mam, I was wondering what you’re gunna give us for me birthday. Is it a secret?’

 She shakes her head, her eyes cold. ‘The pit, Bram. Your birthday present is the pit.’

 

On the Monday all of us except Dee are watching for Bram to come home from the pit. Dee is off with some lads down in the woods because her mate Bobby Vann says he’s seen them dancing down there. The rest of us hear the sneck on the back gate click and we watch as Bram comes down the yard. His brow and his chin of his face are as black as his hair. His jacket and shirt are grey with coal dust. When he sees us his white teeth gleam in his face.

We are prepared; Bree has hauled in the tin bath from the yard. Bree has filled it with hot water using the long handled ladle to dip into the boiler beside the fire. Mam has set the big clotheshorse around the bath and draped sheets over it. For Bram’s modesty, like. Evan’s job is to be at the ready to scrub his brother’s back with soap and the rough flannel. We can hear the boys laughing and talking behind the makeshift screen. Then we watch as Bram’s clean shirt and trousers vanish from the clothes-horse. And so, before our eyes, he emerges from his tent, his face shining and clean except for the glamorous black lines around his eyes.   

He sits down at the table opposite Mam, who is ladling rabbit stew onto a plate for him. She nods at him her face bland. ‘Well son’ she says, 'How was the pit then?’

 

Post Scriptum 

So there you are. Our Bram worked down the pit from when he was fourteen until he was sixty two years old. In that time he made good progress up the complicated professional pit ladder. Like our Da   Jimmy he became a Deputy at a young age. And in the following years he became a great expert on the intricacy of the seams of coal and the mines that crisscrossed the underworld of County Durham. Interestingly some of them have women’s names such as Beamish Mary, Ravensworth Betty and Emma. Others have historic names like Ladysmith. Others are named for places like Newton Cap, Princes Street Drift, Throstle Gill and Hole in the Wall.

It all remained poetry to him. The world underground the green surface of our county was his universe. All his life he was driven to talk about this world to whoever would listen.  Our Bram truly was a good scholar and his university was the pit. 

1922. February 16. Unemployment now over one million

including 348,000 ex-servicemen,