A day that has, inevitably, like so many other traditions, radically moved away from its original form, its 16th century origins.

Then, it was not, naturally, an event about flowers sold at inflated prices and cards and special Sunday lunch menus cashing in on the day.

In fact, it was not even about mothers at all.

With its roots firmly in religion, it was the fourth Sunday in Lent when people visited their mother-church in the local parish where they had been baptized and was originally called Refreshment Sunday.

Falling in the middle of Lent, a time of fasting and abstinence, there was a licence given on this one day for breaking that fast.

Slowly evolving into something closer to our own understanding of the day, Going a-Mothering became the annual Sunday when servants and apprentices were given the day off to visit their mothers as well as their home churches.

Picking wild flowers and baking Simnel cakes became synonymous with what was called Mothering Sunday and in 1914, the British government officially recognised Mother’s Day, still to be celebrated on the fourth Sunday of Lent – and thus it found its way into diaries as a day devoted- ideally, anyway – to appreciation and recognition of mothers and motherhood.

19th century literature seems to provide us with mothers who are either impossibly saintly and wise (think Marmee in Little Women), embarrassingly awful, feckless or incompetent – Jane Austen serves us well on this score – or absent from selfishly dying and depriving our protagonist of a loving maternal figure – Jane in Jane Eyre, Oliver in Oliver Twist, Pip in Great Expectations …I could go on. Absent mothers seem to be a popular trait of classic novels, conveniently casting our hero/heroine into murky and unpleasant waters without the support of maternal care.

More contemporary literature also gives us absent mothers and their death or disappearance is also often used as the catalyst for the main character’s subsequent life, again a useful tool for the novelist – Donna Tart’s The Goldfinch, Valerie Martin’s The Confessions of Edward Day and, dare I mention it, my own The Odyssey of Lily Page come into this category by making use of this propelling cause.

Then there’s Carol Shields’ novel, Larry’s Party, where it’s a notably absent Grandmother who casts a curious shadow over proceedings …

Which conveniently takes me to where I want to reach – which is beyond current mothers being feted on Mother’s Day but back to their mothers, and theirs and .theirs and…to our forefathers – or rather to our foremothers as I like to think of them.

Our Great Grandmothers, and our Great-Great Grandmothers and all the Greats lying behind them had, to put it mildly, such very different experiences of motherhood that I feel they deserve our attention on today of all days. They merit a focus, those women who are entirely absent from our lives yet crucial to our very being.

Their lives – our Edwardian, our Victorian – and earlier – foremothers endured, no doubt, endless uncontrolled pregnancies, long and painful labours and deliveries, the threat of infant and maternal mortality before they had even carried a baby safely home – and a home that was no doubt (except for the very few) overcrowded and absent of any labour-saving devices.

Husbands, however loving, were hardly likely to have been ‘hands-on’ with the child-care and the main support would have been to turn to the oldest daughter, no doubt still a child herself, for help.

My maternal Grandmother was the oldest daughter in a family of eight surviving children. She used to say that she only had one child herself – my mother – as she felt she had already spent a decade or more in caring for her siblings.

And what were their rights, these women, our Edwardian and Victorian Great and Great- Great and Great-Great several times over?

Minimal.

No vote.

No salaries.

No child allowances.

And little time, no doubt, simply to enjoy their children, delight in their very existence, watch their progress and development. And those children would have had to grow up fast – to make room for the next baby at the breast, the next toddler clambering for a space on mother’s knee.

Our Greats and Great-Greats et al must have been extraordinarily strong women.

Strong and resilient. Social and domestic circumstances forced that upon them. Choice was rarely theirs.

So today seems a good moment to pause and think of them, think of the long line of mothers trailing behind us, connecting us to their lives, to the generations of women for whom, possibly, a bunch of wild flowers and a simnel cake were hotly anticipated gifts from their many offspring on the fourth Sunday of Lent.

Whether anyone cooked them a Sunday roast or made them stay in bed for an extra hour for a cup of tea and slice of charred toast is, however, highly unlikely!

The post Let’s Hear it for the Great and Great-Greats … appeared first on Jude Hayland.

Most attach themselves firmly to a particular age or stage of growing up,

Childhood games give way to adolescent interests and gradually morph into the preoccupations of adulthood.

So I find it consoling to think that something I enjoyed doing from a very young age still sustains me as a source of pleasure now that I am …well, a woman in the possession of quite a number of accrued years.

Libraries.

A visit to a library.

My earliest memory of a library stems, probably, from before I could even read.

I remember a very old building, small, squat, near Woolworths in Pinner.

There, I must have acquired my first library cards as my mother acquired books on my behalf.

Soon, however, there was great excitement in Pinner!

The old library was replaced in another location in the town with the splendid, parquet-floored new public library – enormous it seemed to me – and that was the place where I was to spend aeons of time over the next 20 or so years.

For libraries have always been safe spaces. Harmonious places.

Somewhere to spend an hour or so after school or before a ballet class or awaiting your mother or father to arrive to take you home. Places to do your homework or revise for your exams.

Places to draw your excitement as you spot a new Lorna Hill or Pamela Brown or Noel Streatfeild novel that you have not read!

And then later, that transition into the adult section – no YA shelves when I was in my teens, of course – and the gradual discovery of L.P. Hartley and H.E. Bates and Lynn Reid-Banks and Margaret Drabble and so many more.

Such delights – and free delights! – waiting to offer escapes into other worlds. To learn about other lives.

Of course, at one time our high street chemist, Boots, was the provider of the Boots Booklovers Library.

Researching for my fifth novel, set in London in WW2, has sent me down the path of finding out all about this wonderful institution that was so familiar to readers in the first half of the 20th century.

Subscription and circulating libraries were a feature of 19th century England with Mudie’s Select Library and W.H. Smith establishing themselves in the Victorian era. Then Jesse and Florence Boot opened their first libraries in their two Nottingham chemist shops and provided attractive and comfortable surroundings with the addition of in-store cafes to lure potential readers and subscribers. Very soon, their bookish empire had grown until there were numerous Boots Booklovers’ libraries all over the country.

And what could be better? A pleasant morning spent choosing books followed by coffee and scones with a friend, sitting at a table covered with a hand embroidered cloth – idyllic!

So yes, Boots’ subscribers were mainly middle class and mainly female and they could choose between either Class A or B subscriptions, the former costing an annual 17s 6d. whereas the latter cost 10s 6s.

Class A subscribers could borrow any book they chose whereas Class B readers were confined to books over a year old. A certain class divide here that spoke to the status quo of the times!

In my new novel, the character of Connie works at Boots Book Lovers’ Library in Hammersmith. She also contributes to the war effort by being a member of the WVS and working on mobile canteens serving civil defence workers. She is only a minor character in the novel – but the creation of Connie has given me a wonderful excuse to delve into the history of Boots Book Lovers’ Libraries and if anyone is interested, I recommend highly the book Lipsticks and Library Books, by Jackie Winter which is a wonderful exploration of this national institution that dominated the library scene for over 60 years.

Nowadays, libraries have become a political issue in so many areas with closures threatened or realised and what an appalling loss to any community this causes. Some have been rescued to become community hub libraries through valiant fund-raising and volunteering local efforts and therefore survive against the odds.

Others, like my local library, have become Discovery Centres or Arks or whatever new terminology is applied to places that are now so much more than lending libraries with extensive IT provision, cafes (but no hand embroidered table cloths now on show …) exhibition spaces, gift shops and so much more.

Which is wonderful.

And I still find myself spending much time browsing, reading, delighting if I find a particularly treasured author or desired title on the shelf, coveting it as if coming across a small nub of gold.

Boots libraries thrived in the 1930s and 40s but gradually their popularity waned and they found it hard to survive the very different post war world of the second half of the 20th century. Falling memberships and rising costs contributed to their decline and finally, in 1965, all libraries were closed.

Fortunately for my fictional character, Connie, her services at Hammersmith Book Lovers’ library were still very much in demand in the war years when reading during the endless blackouts, in damp shelters, underground stations, in basements and church crypts during an air raid was entertainment and diversion.

Meanwhile, I will continue to love libraries and seek them out wherever I am.

It will come as no surprise, therefore, to hear that my friend of longest standing – trailing all the way back to the first days of infant school – is a librarian herself.

We obviously both had some curious foresight of future fate and destinations as we chose each other to befriend even before celebrating our respective fifth birthdays!

The post A Life in Libraries … appeared first on Jude Hayland.

The historian and commentator on British social history, Juliet Gardener uses it when talking about fiction written immediately in the wake of historic events, the recounting of an age unclouded by nostalgia or hindsight.

And in recent months, my reading diet has been composed of fiction written around, in or immediately in the wake of WW2.

Initially, this was to serve as research for novel 5, my work in progress, (with a working title of By the Green of the Spring but that will no doubt change) but I have now found so much enjoyment from reading these authors that I’m beginning to spurn anything written later than half way through the 20th century.

There are so many wonderful writers and brilliant stories to discover and I fear that many may be neglected these days. There seems to be a kind of thirst to read books on prize lists, the latest bestsellers, books by authors being interviewed on Radio 4 or featured in papers or on podcasts.

And there seems no better way for sensing the mood of a particular time, the flavour of ordinary, domestic life in a certain phase or decade than by reading the fiction that was produced either in or just after – within touching distance, in fact, so fingertip history.

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s collection of short stories, English Climate: Wartime Stories, provides a delightfully entertaining read and all the stories were written and published between 1940 and 1946. This is domestic life during the war years. There is no mention of battles or theatres of war or second fronts or campaigns – but a great deal about jam that won’t set through inadequacy of sugar rations, the impossibility of making a successful omelette with dried eggs, the bossiness and petty squabbles between women on committees and parish councils.

There are also more complex issues addressed – the service man or woman home on leave who returns to different circumstances, who can no longer find their place in the household.

Molly Panter-Downes’ short story collection, Good Evening, Mrs Craven: the wartime stories is equally compelling through engaging with the Home Front side of the war. Here, again, are the stories that history books don’t concern themselves with – yet they are the human story – and a wonderful minefield for the contemporary writer wanting to find out the climate of those times.

Monica Dickens’ novels seem to be very overlooked these days. Yet again, I have found them so enjoyable with characters that leap off the page with conviction. Of course, as Charles Dickens’ Great Granddaughter, that’s probably no surprise. Many of her books were inspired by her personal experiences – as a nurse, in a munitions factory producing spitfires, in a newspaper office, as a home help – although she made clear that I did not take these jobs in order to write books – the books just came out of the experiences. Her novels capture so keenly for the contemporary reader what it was like being a woman in the 1930s, 40s and 50s – informal social history, if you like, in the guise of a novel.

Ivy Compton-Burnett is another writer that is well worth our attention. Born in 1884 and living until 1969, she is described in the edition I have of her novel A House and Its Head (picked up at a charity shop sale) as one of 20th century England’s most original and admired writers. She published 18 novels and was made a Dame shortly before her death – yet how many book groups and contemporary readers bother with her now? On the back of my edition, there’s a quote from a review describing her as One of the most original, hilarious and disturbing novelists of her generation. A House and Its Head is set in 1885 and was first published in 1935 – so again, we have fingertip history for Compton-Burnett was still within touching distance of the decade.

So next time you are trying to figure out a choice for a book group read or are scanning the shelves for something neither classic nor contemporary, why not give these wonderful authors a consideration?

You will, I promise you, be richly rewarded!

,

The post FINGERTIP HISTORY ….in fiction appeared first on Jude Hayland.

a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,

Further on in the wonderfully sharp, observant, amusing and perceptive A Room of One’s Own, which grew out of a lecture that the author had been invited to give at Girton College, Cambridge in 1928, Woolf clarifies:

five hundred a year …and rooms of our own.

Obviously, £500 a year was a considerable amount of money in 1928. According to my very brief and scant google search, it equates to the buying power of around £40,000 today. How many women in 1928 were in possession of such sums that they could call their own?

Precisely. Very, very few.

But what interests me more is the fact that Virginia Woolf apparently considered that it was only the lack of a room of her own and a tidy sum of money that prevented women becoming writers of fiction.

For in our current self-promoting, assertive, social media fuelled era, it seems to me that very different requirements, demands and priorities exist for the aspiring fiction writer.

For we live in a world where an online presence, brazen self-belief, frenetic networking and an eye and an ear perpetually alert to marketing opportunities divide and rule.

These, it appears, are the essential qualities and skills needed to secure writerly success and a recognition of sorts.

But what about talent, you may ask?

Well, yes, what indeed? But let’s leave that relatively insignificant matter aside.

Some time ago, I went to a talk given by a literary agent in which the startlingly young and coolly collected woman was asked what criteria she used in selecting authors to represent.

What was most crucial for her, she declared, before she had even read a word of any submitted manuscript, was to check out the author’s social media presence, frequency of engagement and number of followers.

We’ve clearly come a long way from the Bronte sisters submitting under pseudonyms from their remote Haworth parsonage or Jane Austen only admitting on the title pages of her novels that they were Written by A Lady.

And self-belief as a fiction writer is, I have found, extremely hard to acquire. After all, there are so many books! The shelves of every book shop in the country is crammed with them. Why should I spend my time – days, weeks, months and years – adding to that mass of invented words and consider anyone interested in reading them?

But daily I see on social media writers proclaiming the worth of their novel, asserting to be prize-winning authors and best sellers to boost the validity of their worth. So could I claim to be a prize-winning author because in my time, over the years, I have been a prize-winner in writing competitions, on various short lists and long lists – all of which, quite frankly, I find irrelevant and a little embarrassing to state when trying to promote my novels.

But perhaps I should be bolder.

Then there’s marketing and advertising on social media.

Virginia Woolf did not have to acquire complex computer skills, awareness and understanding of such matters as algorithms, a comprehensive grasp and ability to handle Amazon’s advertising potential and techniques.

A couple of years ago, I went to a conference in London on How to Market and Successfully Sell your Novels – or words to that effect. There were several seminars led by – you’ve guessed it – Multi-Award Winning and Selling Authors – and after three minutes of the first of these seminars, I was entirely lost.

It might as well have been delivered in an oral dialect of a forgotten tribe in Ancient Britain.

I did not possess the lingo. The lexis. The language. Explaining brain surgery to me would have seemed less elusive. I felt pathetic and very much a dinosaur with a 20th century mindset.

In other words, I was entirely out of my depth and immediately wanted to crawl away and admit ruefully that I was out of tune with the times.

I do not consider myself luddite in my attitudes. I am ever thankful for the ability to save work, copy and paste, print out on demand, delete et al. I am a very swift, touch typist.

But that’s where my abilities on the key board start and stop.

And how I envy those who can promote assertively and confidently, use the tools that the internet age provides for us, access and exploit the marketing potential of social media.

Authors are told that they need to think of themselves as A Brand. And to market and sell that brand – a kind of disassociation from the actual act of writing, a branch of PR, if you like.

But I find this near impossible – a burden. And want to crawl back to my silent study, my solitary cup of coffee and my desk to address only the blank page/screen.

To my very cosy and accommodating Room of My Own, in fact.

And if Virginia Woolf was alive today, she would find herself in a very different world where a room of one’s own and an unearned annual income of £500 – or even £40,000 a year – would be judged as entirely inadequate as requirements for writing fiction.

Algorithms, Virginia? Digital Marketing? Feeds on Insta, TikTok, Facebook? How many influencers are promoting your work, Virginia?

I thought not – and her ghost appears to show not a flicker of interest in any of them!

The post Just A Room of One’s Own …or so Virginia thought … appeared first on Jude Hayland.

It’s one of those phrases – narrative perspective, narrative voice, point of view, that attention is drawn to on creative writing courses.

The reader is obviously aware of a first person narrative as in Jane Eyre, for example, where the main character is clearly narrating the story and therefore viewing events solely and purely from their perspective.

But if the story is a third person narrative, no doubt the reader simply enjoys the tale and gives little thought for the author’s task and dilemma in considering – well, basically, which characters to view only externally and which to inhabit from inside their minds.

After all, a constantly shifting viewpoint can be extremely irritating and confusing.

Think of any favourite novels. Do you know every characters’ thoughts and desires? Do you know what they are all thinking and feeling throughout the story?

Absolutely not.

For the author, there has to be a selection process.

And that choice is often dictated by the plot.

After all, surprise and revelation are essential ingredients of any novel and if every character reveals their inner most thoughts and motives to the reader – well, there is little chance for a revelation to occur!

If we knew that Darcy actually had designs on Elizabeth from the start, that Wickham was constantly up to no good and that Charlotte fancied her chances with the odious Mr Collins, Pride and Prejudice would be a far less entertaining novel.

But we are privy to Elizabeth Bennet’s thoughts. Other characters, on the whole, are viewed externally and revealed through their dialogue. We are very clear about Mrs Bennet’s intentions through her dialogue, for example, and Jane Austen’s marvellous ability to convey character through dialogue and her narrator’s ironic voice complete the task.

Sometimes, a first person narrative is given to a minor rather than a central character. It is curious, in this case, that the author has chosen to avoid the obvious of giving control to the main protagonist. The Great Gatsby, for example, gives the job of first person narrator to Nick Carraway who is on the margins of the main action rather than centrally involved in it. This means that he can comment with some sense of distance and even judgement.

Of course there’s always the problem – or use, depending on whether we see this from the author or the reader’s perspective – of the unreliable narrator. Is the reader to trust what the first person voice is telling us about events and other characters? On the other hand, a narrator like Nick can offer the reader more nuance on an event as when Gatsby meets Daisy again for the first time in years in a meeting engineered by Nick:

As I went to say goodbye, I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! …There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.

A first person narrative can seem more personal to the reader – as if the story is being shared specifically with that reader. Here, it’s Nick’s interpretation of Gatsby’s face as displaying bewilderment – a view which might be right or wrong – whereas in a third person narrative it would be expressed as fact rather than opinion – An expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face – reads as definitive. And that phrase colossal vitality of his illusion – well, it tells us so much and is so poignant. It’s as if Nick is saying to the reader we all build people up in excess of their worth!

Back to third person narratives.

When I was writing my fourth novel, The Odyssey of Lily Page, I was actually at least a third of the way through before I consciously realised that I could only be in Lily’s head and not roam into the thoughts of the other key protagonists since …well, without giving the plot away, it was essential that should happen – the story and its resolution simply wouldn’t work otherwise!

So it’s not just first person narratives that limit the freedom of the author to roam freely between different mindsets and inner feelings.

Third person, omniscient narratives also require choice.

Plays are another thing altogether, of course. And Shakespeare uses the great tool of the soliloquy when he wants the audience to hear direct from the character.

But that’s for another discussion, another blog post!

In the meantime, getting close to halfway through writing my fifth novel, I am tangling with the idea of whether seeing events through the viewpoint of two characters – Ralph and Harriet – is sufficient. Effective.

Or whether, in fact, I need to trespass into the minds of Connie or Edith or Edmund or Florence or …..

A decision needs to be made before I progress any further!

So next time you are engrossed in a novel that has a third person narration, stop and think about which characters you know from inside – their thoughts and feelings – rather than purely their actions and dialogue.

It might surprise you how few, in fact, the author has decided to allow your access!

The post WHOSE POINT IS IT, ANYWAY? appeared first on Jude Hayland.

And now that the decorators have finally departed leaving a splendidly refreshed and bright interior – I was beginning to feel as if I was sharing my newly acquired Victorian terrace with the two of them – I am able to turn my mind away from paint choices, discard endless sample pots and colour charts and unpack cases of books onto my purpose-built and customised book shelves.

It’s what I’ve always wanted – the ability to have virtually all my books in the same place rather than randomly distributed around the place.

But then here comes the dilemma: how to arrange and display them?

The choice is endless, it seems.

Do I go for aesthetics and colour code them?

That’s popular in some circles, I’ve heard.

Or by height order? Tallest to shortest, thickest to slimmest?

Or, of course, there’s the conventional alphabetical by author route to take. That’s surely standard.

But what about separating paperback from hardback – is that a given or should one be less divisive about such a matter? Should all fiction be thrown in together regardless of the quality of the cover?

So many dilemmas and decisions face me as I stare at my brand new white shelves built against my dark blue open under stairs ‘library,’ as I like to think of it.

I start with what I have always done – namely, a shelf for classic fiction- 19th and early 20th century novels – and a shelf for all fiction since.

So far so good.

But even that begins to look problematic. The size of contemporary paperback fiction varies so. There are those ‘airport special early paperback editions’ that are noticeably bigger, chunkier, than book shop acquired copies and sit rather ungainly next to their more diminutive cousins. Should they be shelved separately? As if their size suggests sidelining to a more discreet location that will not jar the eye.

And if fiction doesn’t prove sufficiently troublesome, the range of non-fiction is a positive minefield.

Some categories are straightforward, of course. Poetry – tick. Drama – tick. Children’s books – Postman Pat, P. B. Bear’s Christmas, Paddington Bear, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt et al tick.

But I seem to possess random books that require a solitary position that even my generous new book shelf allowance cannot run to … I mean 800 Years of Women’s Letters, A Grief Observed, The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, Women Who Write – where and under what genre do librarians place these titles?

There is also another problem that I am choosing to turn my back upon at the moment.

My new shelves are now nearly full.

Yet I’m aware that there are considerably more books lurking in deep cupboards that have not yet shouted loud enough to be discovered- books shoved out of sight to allow floor space and decorators’ access to walls on the first few days after moving in.

There’s virtually the entire oeuvre of Beatrix Potter hiding somewhere, books inherited, books unread but with a vague sentimental attachment. The Princess Book of Ballet – an annual so at least three editions circa mid 1960s – must still be submerged along with random items yet to see the light of day in their new home. Wherever will they take up residence when they are finally released from their current subterranean quarters?

But enough is enough. A problem for another time.

After all, Christmas is now upon us and it’s far more important to unearth the tree ornaments and lights, find the tree stand and make pertinent decisions about where to place the cards, the holly, ivy and mistletoe to serve the season.

But my curiosity remains.

How do other people arrange and display their books? Am I missing a trick, have I overlooked a habit that 21st century readers and book buyers have adopted?

I’d love to know!

The post Conventions & Categories …or how to arrange books on book shelves! appeared first on Jude Hayland.

The sources of Bah! Humbug! and Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents come swiftly to mind – but trying to be more original is hard. There’s C.S.Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, with the sad cry from poor Mr. Tumnus that:

It is winter in Narnia and has been for ever so long …always winter, but never Christmas.’

but again that’s hardly an original thought.

Then there are the carol singers – the field mice – in The Wind in the Willows who entertain Mole at Mole End. Again, a very well-known – and therefore cliched – reference.

Of course before Christmas was elevated by Dickens and Prince Albert in the mid 19th century it was a far quieter season with religious observance at its heart rather than a cascade of crackers and cranberries and an excess of expenditure and entertainment. No reason for novelists to think it an event worth working into the narrative.

So it’s the cliches of A Christmas Carol, Little Women, Narnia and performances of The Nutcracker ballet and Peter Pan that come to mind when thinking of Christmas.

But like most cliches they only exist as such and linger because they are good. Apt. Worth an annual revival.

And isn’t that partly what Christmas celebrations are about? A once-every-12 months revival of remembering friends – remote and near – reviving memories, digging out a particular recipe, reaching for the box of vaguely familiar decorations that live for 49 odd weeks of the year occupying precious storage space at the top of the tallest cupboard?

They are talismen, if you like, providing the consolation of tradition and continuity.

In the perpetual maelstrom of our daily lives, marking the season in the well-trodden footsteps of past Christmas tides with our own established rituals is reassuring. At least I find it so.

I am sure it is the same with all religions, with people of all faiths and none. Festivals provide a bond of continuity of sorts, marking a particular event in religious calendars but also offering a structure to the year. A sense of shape and purpose.

Equally, of course, such celebrations can underline the pain of loss and can be poignant in other ways, underlining what has changed or not been fulfilled during the past 12 months ….it is by no means a season of unmitigated joy for many.

But this isn’t a sermon – and I need to get back to literature. To dwell on the lighter, brighter side of Christmas.

So if I can’t think of any original literary references to blog about, I will unashamedly indulge in the cliches.

And John Betjeman’s poem Christmas is always a favourite of mine to read at this time of year, alongside T.S.Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi for a more sombre, profound note.

And while I’m in a poetic vein, Laurie Lee’s Christmas Landscape is another that’s on my Christmas poetry reading list. (not that I have anything as organised as that – the only lists around my house at the moment are far more prosaic itemising potatoes, paprika, peppers, carrots, cream and more …)

But to return to Kenneth Graham’s carol singing field mice – I will let them have the last word:

Villagers all, this frosty tide,

Let your doors swing open wide,

Though wind may follow, and snow beside,

Yet draw us in by your fire to bide;

Joy shall be yours in the morning!

And to end in the most cliched of ways:

A very happy and joyous Christmas to you all!

The post CHRISTMAS Cliches – and all that! appeared first on Jude Hayland.

The season of goodwill is also, of course, a season for remembering. For reading the messages that old friends have scrawled into cards and matching them with reassurances that we really will get together in 2023!

Memories are, naturally, the stuff of autobiography. And diverging from my usual obsession with reading fiction I have read two excellent and compelling autobiographies in the past couple of weeks. And yesterday, on one of my regular visits to an old school friend, cruelly and prematurely suffering from dementia, the past and the memories engendered by school days were the pre-occupation of an hour or so.

I took along with me the photograph of our Upper Sixth class, a professional photo of 30 or so 18 year old girls smiling at the camera, on the threshold of their adult lives. And as I sat with my friend and tried to name everyone ( I managed every forename even if my recollection of surnames was less secure) in an effort to prod her very fragile memory, I realised that most of these contemporaries of mine disappeared for me that July day when we left school for the final time. Only four have stayed and grown up, as it were, with me. I know nothing of the lives of the others – they have remained forever 18 years of age in my memory, their subsequent lives, fates and fortunes entirely unknown.

And let’s face it, most people’s lives are not extraordinary. Few become famous, infamous or celebrated and would not consider their lives worthy of an account in an autobiography. Yet why not?

When we reach a certain age, the past suddenly becomes far more compelling and fascinating. The lives of our grandparents and their parents, instead of being dull stories that we choose not to hear, become the focus of interest and attention. Yet it’s too late – they are no longer around to give us their first person accounts!

We could have listened and asked questions at the time. But we didn’t.

So instead we have to turn to the internet and census records and pay money to companies that will release details that we could have acquired first hand.

Perhaps we should all provide some rudimentary form of autobiography just in case future generations decide one day that our lives really were of interest to them!

As to those recent autobiographies that I have read this dark, winter month, Claire Tomalin’s A Life of My Own is heartfelt, informative and haunting in its honesty and poignancy. Married to the journalist Nicholas Tomalin who was killed covering the Yom Kippur Arab-Israeli war in 1973, her life has seen both extraordinary suffering and tragedy as well as literary success. Anyone who has read any of her biographies – about Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Katherine Mansfield among others – will know of her skill and brilliance as a biographer, but her autobiography reveals the woman behind the words and is a superb read.

For autobiographies are social histories. The recipe of the times in which the subject has lived is revealed through personal story and recollection – the living history, as it were, of what is was like to be alive at a certain point in the spinning world.

A belated Happy New Year – and I think one of my resolutions for 2023 has to be to read more autobiographies – I commend them to you!

The post 2023 …Here we go! appeared first on Jude Hayland.

Homes are a far more complex matter and say a great deal more about us than the raw ingredients of the actual structure.

Pictures on the wall. Photographs on a table. Books on the shelves. The colour of a lampshade, the choice of a cushion, a particular chair – all betray our affections, our tastes and, in truth, our bank balances.

I’ve always been a bit obsessed with houses. I love looking at them, keeping abreast with market trends, upturns and downturns, new builds, conversions – the lot. I come from a long line of house obsessives from my paternal grandfather, through my father and have even managed to produce a son pursuing a career in estate agency. Clearly, it’s in the blood.

Lately, as I am contemplating moving home, starting to view houses, I’ve become even more of an obsessive.

Which has led me to think about houses in novels. How much do we find out about the homes our protagonists live in?

Sometimes, a great deal.

Take Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House – well, yes, clearly the house is central to the plot and the characters’ lives pivot around its centrality. Carol Shields in her wonderful novel, Unless, pays a lot of attention to describing the house her first person narrator, Reta Winters, lives in and the fact that Reta addresses such detail conveys much about her affections and the importance of her home and family life.

The house is a hundred years old, a simple brick Ontario farmhouse that has been much added on to by its several previous inhabitants and by us….the large square entrance hall has a Swedish wood-burning stove on the left-hand side which we installed during the bitter winter of 1986 …

Muriel Sparks’ The Girls of Slender Means features the May of Teck club, a London hostel housing young lady residents immediately post war and the house is indeed of acute importance to the plot. The opening of the novel captures precisely an image of the hostel:

windows of the upper bedrooms overlooked the dip and rise of treetops in Kensington Gardens across the street …. these upper bedrooms looked down on the opposite pavement on the park side of the street, and on the tiny people who moved along in neat-looking singles and couples, pushing little prams.

Anita Brookner’s novels pay attention to houses. To rooms, their furniture, light and shade. In one of my favourites, A Closed Eye, the reader is told a great deal about the enormous house which Harriet insists her husband buys and yet when they move in:

Furniture looked stranded on expanses of pale blue carpet which she now saw should have been pale green: Freddie’s Persian rugs, over which she had tripped continually during the first year of her marriage must now be laid end to end until she plucked up the courage to change the whole room.

Yet throughout the novel, in spite of her desire for the large house, Harriet continues to yearn for that small empty room of her own devising in which she might read unpretentious books, think unpretentious thoughts, even eat unpretentious meals. That empty room becomes a leit-motif, a symbol in the novel and at the very end Harriet says My life, she thought, an empty room.

19th century novels don’t seem to concern themselves much with describing houses. Perhaps it was because most people did not choose their homes. If you were Mr Darcy or Mr Woodhouse you simply inherited a stately mansion. If you were poor, you lived and worked in someone else’s house. If you were an unmarried woman you either stayed at home, lived with a married brother or became a governess. In Jane Austen novels, key events so often seem to take place outside – in gardens and parklands – rather than in rooms. In Mansfield Park, a stark contrast is shown between Fanny’s family home in Portsmouth and the grandeur of Mansfield Park where she goes to live, but it is more the mismanagement of that modest Portsmouth accommodation that is described rather than the house itself: the tea-board never thoroughly cleaned, the cups and saucers wiped in streaks, the milk a mixture of motes floating in thin blue and the bread and butter growing every minute more greasy than even Rebecca’s hands had produced it.

Fanny does seem to have forgotten that Mansfield Park has a retinue of servants running the place whereas her mother lacks a single one …but we get the idea!

My own novels are as obsessed with houses as I am! Miller Street SW22 has a specific focus on one house which was modelled on my first flat – or rather on the converted late Victorian house in SW15 with me owning just a very small slice of studio flat, the smallest and most modest of the apartments.

And if you were in our village in Gavalochori, Crete, I could point out the two houses which inspired my description of the two homes in the Greek island section of my first novel, Counting the Ways. In The Legacy of Mr Jarvis, the house plays a crucial part of the plot, almost a character in its own right and I loved being able to indulge in describing the dilapidated large seaside home in my fictional Sea View Parade. Memories of such houses and streets were drawn from childhood when we used to visit grandparents on the south coast and spent seemingly endless hours driving in a stuffy car along rainswept sea fronts from Brighton to Peacehaven et al and back again.

The Odyssey of Lily Page, my next novel, also makes great use of a house and I have made several visits to the streets of Islington N1 to pick out the road for my fictional Alfred Street. The house is elemental to the plot, providing a kind of crucible for events and the cover image will certainly reflect that. I don’t think I consciously consider a house as central to the focus of my novels – but there certainly seems to be a pattern there!

In the meantime, I need to finish the novel! The last couple of chapters are the hardest, I find – so many resolutions of plot needed, but the pace has to be controlled as otherwise there is too much drama on every page!

Thus, houses are very much part of the fictional world my novels inhabit – and my actual life is similarly intrigued – especially for the next few months with the hunt on, looking for my next house to render into a home.

The post HOME is where the HEART is … appeared first on Jude Hayland.

Coronations must have seemed relatively commonplace to them although fortunately plans for Edward V111’s were neatly, seamlessly transposed to serve Geroge V1’s.

But I – and most of my friends – have always thought of ourselves as Elizabethan babies. Whether your sympathies are royalist or republican or somewhere in between – which probably defines a lot of people who might question the inherited privilege of the institution, but revere the tradition and continuity of it – Queen Elizabeth 11 was always, simply, there.

We’ve never known any other heads on stamps or on coins. Her initials on post boxes. Her existence has surrounded us in some form or other.

I can see myself sitting cross legged on the floor of the infants’ hall at West Lodge Primary school in Pinner, staring at a print of Annigoni’s Portrait of the young queen on the wall.

And our childhood years mirrored her children’s – even if in somewhat dissimilar style.

And now one of those children is finally the monarch. At an age when few people are thinking of working even part-time – let alone taking on a full-time commitment that rarely allows for a moment away from obligatory duties.

Monarchs in literature are frequently, naturally, found in historic fiction, of course.

I spent my early and mid-teen years devouring Jean Plaidy’s historical romps through the lives and fortunes – and misfortunes – of Henry V111 and his wives, Elizabeth 1 and her contemporaries. More recently, Philippa Gregory’s novels such as The Boleyn Girl have become very popular and have provided material for film adaptations.

Rose Tremain’s novel, Restoration, set in the reign of Charles 11 (followed by the sequel, Merivel: A Man of his Time written later) is a compelling and fascinating account of that particular court, its characters and events.

I suppose the literary heights of historic novel writing would have to be considered Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, Wolf Hall with its exploration of early Tudor politics and the pivotal figure of Thomas Cromwell. I’m ashamed to say I have not read it – not in its entirety – having only dipped into it and taking the easier route of seeing the RSC adaptation for the stage which was magnificent.

Novels written in the second Elizabethan age might not have focused on the life of the Queen (The Crown claims to have done that which is debateable …) but numerous writers that have emerged during her reign have mirrored the stages in changing social order, in shifting norms, values and beliefs that have accompanied it. Think of The L-Shaped Room and The Millstone – by Lynn Reid-Banks and Margaret Drabble respectively – that portrayed single motherhood in the early 1960s and the stigma surrounding it, novels that now seem utterly anachronistic in subject matter.

And remember that it was as late as November 1960, when the queen had already been on the throne for 8 years, that the publishers of D.H.Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover faced an obscenity trial over the publication of the unexpurgated version. Penguin won, of course, and another tide was turned for the changing mores of the Elizabethan age.

So now we have a king.

King Charles 111.

And in these very early days of his reign, it’s hard to believe that we will never again see that diminutive figure in her suits, her hats, gloves and sensible shoes.

For she was remote from our lives yet inextricably woven into the fabric in a way no other pre-technology monarch could be.

After all, she even invited herself into our living rooms on Christmas Day amidst the trappings of family celebrations!

King Charles 111 quoted from Hamlet in his first address. Another quotation from the same play, mildly adapted, seems equally relevant.

We will not look on her like again.

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