Fenwick Frolics

One upon a time in my well spent-youth Newcastle was a happy hunting ground for unusual clothes and frothy coffee in good company. On occasion we would hitch-hike down from our small Northumberland college - I lived in Harry Potter’s castle, but that’s another story – and spend the afternoon in Newcastle trying on clothes we couldn’t afford, drinking frothy coffee in juke box cafes, and once – I think it was someone’s birthday – having high tea in Tilley’s restaurant where the waitresses still wore black dresses and white aprons.

Years later, with our children, my friend Pat and I would meet in Fenwick’s cafe for coffee and cakes. In those innocent days we used to let the children take the escalator to the next floor on their own (!) to play in the toy department. Meanwhile Pat and I would talk up a storm about the meaning of life – perhaps particularly our lives – and drink more coffee. After a while we’d go up to fetch the children from the toy department and bring them down for ice cream - and get on with being mothers.

I remember now that I bought my un-weddingy wedding outfit for daughter Debora’s wedding in Fenwick’s French salon – a long narrow skirt and jacket in navy blue velvet. I’ve worn it happily many times since.

And now this Thursday (tomorrow!) I’ll leave my desk to be on the other side of the counter at Fenwick’s – signing copies of the paperback edition of SANDIE SHAW AND THE MILLIONTH MARVELL COOKER.

People often ask me what a book about. Well, I wrote about this one in an earlier post, saying.
‘Sandie Shaw and the Millionth Marvell Cooker’ is about:
Friendship and salvation between women & authentic factory life when industry was booming & the birth of celebrity culture & changes in access to higher education & college life & about changing cultural attitudes brought about by the Women’s Movement & the nature and hesitancies of young love & the experience of immigrants moving into British life & the ironies, assumptions and secrets of institutions

But most of all, I say, I think – and hope - it’s a very good, funny, touching, rites of passage novel about this student from a small Northumberland college who works in a factory one summer in the 1960s ….

I’ve been wondering what I should wear for this particular Fenwick Frolic. Perhaps I should have found time to fit in a visit to Fenwick’s French Salon.

I’m certainly looking forward to it. I wonder if my good friend Pat will turn up. I hope you’ll come too. wx

12.30 pm Fenwick’s Book Department. Thursday 9th July 2009

The Potency of Paperbacks

This week the postman arrived with a big box of author's copies of the paperback version of my novel Sandie Shaw and The Millionth Marvell Cooker. I have written a good number of books - see http://www.wendyrobertson.com/ - but nothing beats the sight and smell of a brand new novel that started on my desk ,written with my inkpen in my notebooks. The cover of Sandie... is great. My publishers, Headline, have caught the spirit of this novel in those bright faces.

I don't know why paperbacks are so much friendlier and sexier than hardbacks, but they are. They are like sparky teenagers in comparison to the maiden aunt hardbacks. Paperbacks seeem set to live harder, travel further and die younger. They will hang around the streets, end up in strange places and fall into the wrong hands.

Boy, they will they have lived!

But where would we be without our sturdy maiden aunt hardbacks? Mine have done me proud, nestling in libraries all over Britain - even now in Australia and New Zealand according to my post - perhaps it's a kind of personal diaspora. People read your books and feel they know you. That's a naked truth for writers. B - who keeps me right on numbers - tells me that my novels are borrowed the best part of two hundred thousand times a year. Every year. Sturdy maiden aunts, these.

So it's good that Sandie Shaw and the Millionth Marvell Cooker - out last year in hardback, this year in paperback - is getting its second breath. (See also post 1 Making People is Mad).

I have written stories set in many places but never before in a factory. This has been an omission because - knowing the fizzy politics and dark humour of the factory world - I always knew it was ripe for a good novel. I never liked the fact that factories are always presented as dark, dingy places. In Sandie Shaw and The Millionth Marvell Cooker I wanted to show the colour and the human comedy of a factory, the charm of its people, the potency of its dark places. As dramatic settings, I think factories beat city firms, restaurants, and shopping malls into fits.

So anyway, my energetic teenager Sandie is now let loose! And I am sure her maiden aunt will watch her tearing around with sturdy pride. Let me know if you like her.

Wendy