If you haven’t heard of a liberty bodice, believe that half-a-crown is something to do with impoverished royalty and never had the experience of slapping a television to stop the grainy black and white picture from rolling, then this series might not be for you. Please give it a go, though – I suspect that most of it will still resonate no matter where you were brought up!
The Rat in the Python is about Baby Boomers who, in the stability following the Second World War, formed a statistical bulge in the population python. It is a personal snapshot of a time that is as mystifying to my children as the Jurassic Era – and just as unrecognisable.
My intention is to nudge some long-forgotten memories to the surface, test your own recollections and provide information and statistics to put it all in context.
Are you sitting comfortably?
My Review:
This really is a gem of a book. For anyone who lived through the nineteen fifties and sixties in the UK, for anyone who wants to know how their mothers or grandmothers existed in the two decades after the Second World War, this is the book is for you.
Filled with so many details of the homes and everyday life at the time, there are also delightful pithy recollections and humorous facts of the author’s own life, such as this section on decorating and her father’s hilarious attempts:
“ Not only did gloss paint drip and take ages to dry, it had a powerful smell. My father used the tried and tested remedy of floating half an onion in a bowl of water and leaving it in the newly painted room as an early form of Fabreze. I can’t say that it reduced the pungent odour, but the paint smell still lingered for day – and as it began to fade, you’d pick up the top notes of old onion. Enchanting.”
And then the bathroom accessories:
“We had a wire rack, with cracked and splitting rubber handles, that spanned the bath and in one end was a bar of soap…. There was also a scratchy flannel.”
I loved these! In fact there are many places in this book where I actually cackled with laughter, remembered sections with nostalgia. And then sighed with relief that homes are more comfortable and housework and such is so much easier these days.
Crammed with illustrations that are a story in themselves, The Rat In The Pythonis a winner for Alex Craigie, and I have absolutely no qualms in recommended this to … well absolutely everyone!
And I look forward to the sequel.
About Alex Craigie
Alex Craigie is the pen name of Trish Power.
Trish was ten when her first play was performed at school. It was in rhyming couplets and written in pencil in a book with imperial weights and measures printed on the back.
When her children were young, she wrote short stories for magazines before returning to the teaching job that she loved.
Trish has had three books published under the pen name of Alex Craigie. The first two books cross genre boundaries and feature elements of romance, thriller and suspense against a backdrop of social issues. Someone Close to Home highlights the problems affecting care homes while Acts of Convenience has issues concerning the health service at its heart. Her third book. Means to Deceive, is a psychological thriller.
Someone Close to Home has won a Chill with a Book award and a Chill with the Book of the Month award. In 2019 it was one of the top ten bestsellers in its category on Amazon.
Book lovers are welcome to contact her on alexcraigie@aol.com
I received an Arc of Lyrics for the Loved Ones from the author in return for an honest review, and I gave 4* to the book.
Book Description:
After half a century confined in a psychiatric hospital, Matty has moved to a care home on the Cumbrian coast. Next year, she’ll be a hundred, and she intends to celebrate in style. Yet, before she can make the arrangements, her ‘maid’ goes missing.
Irene, a care assistant, aims to surprise Matty with a birthday visit from the child she gave up for adoption as a young woman. But, when lockdown shuts the care-home doors, all plans are put on hold.
But Matty won’t be beaten. At least not until the Black Lives Matter protests burst her bubble and buried secrets come to light.
Will she survive to a hundred? Will she see her ‘maid’ again? Will she meet her long-lost child?
Rooted in injustice, balanced with humour, this is a bittersweet story of reckoning with hidden histories in cloistered times.
My Review:
As always with Anne Goodwin’s work, Lyrics for the Loved Ones is a good story that is well written. This is the final episode of Matilda Windsor’s story.
I have previously reviewed both the first of Matty’s journey through life: Matilda Windsor Is Coming Homehere and the sequel: Stolen Summers : A heart-breaking tale of betrayal, confinement and dreams of escape (Matilda Windsor)here. And, as with both of these books I will reiterate my words from these reviews: “I can only say how much I admire this author’s writing style and her ability to draw the reader into the world of the characters.”
None of us live in a vacuum; what goes on within our communities, and in the wider world, affects us. This is the same for Anne Goodwin’s characters. This story is set against the background of the Covid Pandemic and the protests of Black Lives Matter. So there are themes of frustration, anger, prejudices, technical and political and societal changes running through the whole book.
And, as always with Anne Goodwin’s work, every scene that portrays all of these themes, all of the reactions of the characters, are brilliantly shown. As well as the description of the actual physicality of the settings. So we are in the lounge of the care home, the cemeteries where one character goes to talk with those she knew when they were alive, the homes of the characters, and Matty’s bedroom.
The reader is also in Matty’s head; we comprehend and appreciate the confusion of her thoughts of all that is happening around her. And because the author is so expert in showing Matty’s dementia we completely believe her perspective on everything.
But her point of view (told in third person) isn’t the only one; the book alternates with other characters’ perspectives. And the backgrounds change.
And this was my only reservation about how the plot is organised. For me, how these other characters fitted into the story was initially confusing. Many times I needed to read, go back in the narrative, and re-read some chapters, some sections, to understand where and when they fitted in Matilda’s life. And, I must admit, this did slightly spoil my enjoyment ofLyrics for the Loved Ones. Anne Goodwin has a great skilful talent for maintaining a suspension of disbelief – but with some of these characters, it was sometimes a struggle to be truly involved in the story.
And one character’s dialogue is written in dialect; at first in very strong, constant Cumbriandialect, but which later on in the story, is less so. (For which I was grateful; I felt it was hard enough not knowing how the character fitted in, without having to struggle with understanding what was said) To be fair though, the author did insert a page at the end of the book which is a glossary of terms on the dialect. Perhaps this might be better placed at the front of the book, especially in regards to the eBook? Just a thought.
None of the above takes away from the poignancyofMatilda Windsor’s story. She is a memorable protagonist. Through her life, her situation (which, unfortunately, was once all too true in British society not too long ago) the reader is taken through a whole range of human emotions: happiness and sadness, anger and acceptance, empathy and indignation.
I have to admit I have laughed and I have cried whilst reading each of these books. And, despite the personal reservations I’ve noted above, I have no reservations in thoroughly recommending all three to readers willing to take the journey with Matilda.
About Anne Goodwin:
Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
Anne writes about the darkness that haunts her and is wary of artificial light. She makes stuff up to tell the truth about adversity, creating characters to care about and stories to make you think. She explores identity, mental health and social justice with compassion, humour and hope.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.
She told you the house would keep you safe. She lied.
Esther is safe in the house. For sixteen years, she and her mother have lived off the grid, protected from the dangers of the outside world. For sixteen years, Esther has never seen another single soul.
Until today.
Today there’s a man outside the house. A man who knows Esther’s name, and who proves that her mother’s claims about the outside world are false. A man who is telling Esther that she’s been living a lie.
Is her mother keeping Esther safe – or keeping her prisoner?
My Review:
I enjoyed The Safe House, it’s just the kind of psychological thriller I enjoy: well written, character driven, with many twists and turns. Told in two timelines, the past when the protagonist, Esther, is a child who develops asthma (described throughout as the demon living in her chest) and living with her parents in an industrial town with all the accompanying toxic pollutants. A situation that the reader sees her mother being driven to acute mental stress. And then the present where she and her mother, Hannah, are living in hidden in The House, with filtered air and away from all civilisation. It’s a structure designed and devised by Hannah, to keep Esther safe from asthma attacks.
But it’s a life forced upon the protagonist, and it’s not long before both the extreme, almost unbelievable, conditions and the length of time they have lived like this, is revealed. And, from the start, the restlessness of Esther, at twenty-one years old, and the maniacal determination to keep the status quo by her mother, becomes a tense standoff.
It’s very difficult not to give spoilers in a story such as The Safe House, so I will try to concentrate on the way it is written.
The two main characters, Esther and Hannah are well rounded, created to reveal the many sides of human nature – and then given extreme emotions – entirely acceptable given their claustrophobic and almost dystopian lifestyle.
A lifestyle that Esther is given chance to compare with Out There when a stranger eventually finds her and coaxes her to escape, to meet her father, who she has been told is dead – to go into a “rushing, flashing world” inhabited by people. The description of the settings, from the House to the countryside, the town, the first pub Esther has ever been in, the music festival, the night sky, seen for the first time. (there are so many first times in this section of the plot), give a brilliant sense of place.
This is not a book with many characters but each character is well drawn, each has their own personality, their own distinctive voice to add to the story. But it is the protagonist’s internal dialogue that carries the story; densely written, with each of her actions being considered, each thought, each physical sensation explored and described in a simple yet evocative way. This is powerful writing.
The story begins a little slowly, probably to evoke the sense of normality in a world that is totally artificial, but then moves with sudden twists and turns, some expected, others less so. It’s a good plot that held my attention all the way through to the end.
About Louise Mumford:
Louise was born and lives in South Wales. She studied English Literature at university and graduated with first class honours. As a teacher she tried to pass on her love of reading to her students (and discovered that the secret to successful teaching is… stickers! She is aware that that is, essentially, bribery.)
In the summer of 2019 Louise experienced a once-in-a-lifetime moment: she was discovered as a new writer by her publisher at the Primadonna Festival. Everything has been a bit of a whirlwind since then.
Louise lives in Cardiff with her husband and spends her time trying to get down on paper all the marvellous and frightening things that happen in her head. She is Co-Chair of Crime Cymru, a co-operative of Welsh crime writers, and is part of the team bringing Wales’ first ever in-person crime fiction festival to Wales. Gwyl CRIME CYMRU Festival will take place in Aberystwyth in April 2023.
Her thriller called SLEEPLESS was published by HQ in December 2020 and THE SAFE HOUSE came out in May 2022. SLEEPLESS was the July Asda Karin Slaughter Killer Read in 2021. Her new thriller THE HOTEL will be out in June 2023.
Many thanks to Jenny Loudon for sending a digital copy of Snow Angels to me, in return for an honest review as a member of Rosie’s Book Review Team #RBRT
I gave Snow Angels 4*
Book Description:
An accident. That’s all it was.
Amelie Tierney is working hard, furthering her nursing career in Oxford. She has a loving husband and a small son, who is not yet two. She jogs through the streets of her beloved city most days, does not see enough of her lonely mother, and misses her grandmother who lives in a remote wooden house, beside a lake in Sweden.
And then, one sunny October morning, it happens—the accident that changes everything and leaves Amelie fighting to survive.
Set amid the gleaming spires of Oxford and the wild beauty of a Swedish forest, this is a story about one woman’s hope and her courage in the face of the unthinkable.
My Review:
This is a story of love, of grief, of acceptance, of guilt, of survival, of secrets. There are many themes interwoven throughout: the love of nature, the inevitability of life moving on, the change of seasons, the exploration of human nature, as well as the more disturbing themes of racism, cynicism, suspicion, antagonism. All thoroughly explored by the author of Snow Angels.
And, as I wrote in my review of the last book I read by Jenny Loudon, Finding Verity,here, there are exquisite descriptions as well in Snow Angels that give a wonderful sense of place.Set in Oxford and Sweden, it is obvious that the author both knows and has researched both places extensively, and brilliantly captures the tone of each.As a consequence the pace of the narrative is vastly different.
The first quarter of the story narrates the inciting incident, the accident which completely changes the life of Amelie from wife, mother, daughter, to a grieving woman who has lost her husband, her child, her mother. The action in this section moves quickly, and in itself is shocking, portraying a reality that is distressingly realistic, and shows how tenuous life can be. It is well written, and the breadth of emotion explored here gives the characters so many layers that it is easy for the reader to see them, to immediately empathise with them.
In an almost unconscious need to escape the loss of the life she has known in Oxford, Amelie leaves her home, the friends she has there, and her work as a children’s nurse in a hospital, to escape to Sweden to stay with her grandmother, Cleome, who lives in a small cottage surrounded by a forest and close to a lake. And so begins the next phase of the book.
And this is where I show my subjectivity as a reader. Before I say anything about this I need to say that Jenny Loudon’s writing, when it comes to setting the scene is superb. This is truly poetic prose: expressive and lyrical, she conjures up wonderful images that juxtapose the emotions of her characters. The descriptions in these chapters, each headed to portray the different stages of the moon, the shifting of seasons, parallels the action within the plot.
However, as I say, this is where I reveal my preference in stories. The narrative slows up too much for me. I became aware that some scenes, some thoughts, some actions, some dialogue of the characters, were returned to, too often. And described in similar ways. I realise that this whole section iswritten to show the stages of grief, of acceptance, of moving on. But the repetition, albeit presented in numerous similar ways almost … not quite… but almost, tempted me to skip parts. I promise I didn’t!
What frustrated me was the fact that there were other subjects, other characters introduced into the plot that I feel could have been explored to more depth, integrated to balance the introspection of Amelie and Cleome. I became impatient of the contemplative mood within the text. There really are some brilliant minor characters in Snow Angels. But I felt they were only given a voice in a retrospective way; the reader is told their stories in a distanced, almost objective way, which, for me, lost the immediacy of their tragedies, their losses, the way their lives had fallen apart.
Which leads me to the last part of the story, the summing up of the action when the story is over. In one way it satisfied my curiosity; We are told what eventually happens to each and every one of the characters. In another, it disappointed me. The résumé almost felt like a synopsis, and, for me, emphasized the comparative slowness of the main section of the story.
Having said that some might wonder why I gave Snow Angels four star. Well it’s because I realise that, despite my preference for more action packed novels, I do like character led stories as well, and there are great characters in Jenny Loudon’s book. She also has a a very evocative style of writing that gives instant imagery that will appeal to many. In that vein I recommend Snow Angels to those readers.
About the Author:
Jenny Loudon is a British novelist whose work includes SNOW ANGELS, a moving and uplifting tale of recovery after loss, and the bestselling love story FINDING VERITY. She read English and American Literature at the University of Kent in Canterbury and holds a Masters in The Modern Movement. She lives with her family in the English countryside.
There are places that remain in our memories, the details may become slightly blurred, nostalgia may colour our thoughts, but they don’t fade. And how those places made us feel at the time is the one thing that remains.
Today I’m pleased to welcome Gail, who writes as, G B Williams and who tells us about an embarrassing incident she had in Paris, Francemany years ago, that inspired a moment in her book, Breaking Free
The city of Paris is beautiful. It is also dirty, busy, and crowded, like all cities. There are many places I remember well of my visits to Paris, I could wax lyrical about the Eiffel Tower swaying in the wind (hope you’re not seasick), or the Louvre (which in places really needed more ventilation to keep the visitor going), perhaps I could tell you about the Mona Lisa (overwhelming impression – is that it?), how about the boat ride down the Seine (have actually done this every time I’ve visited Paris because it’s spectacular).
But no, the place in my memory that I’m going to tell you all about is in the Metro.
Now the Paris Metro is, historically a fascinating place, the art nouveau signage and features are gorgeous, the history should be read more, the engineering that went into the building the Metro was ground breaking (and I mean that in every sense). Really, read up about how the Metro was built and you will find out about a lot of innovation in civil engineering.
But the place I’m going to tell you about didn’t have any art nouveau signage or features. There’s nothing historical about it. I don’t even remember which station this happened in. What stuck is my mind about the place was the incident of my own sheer stupidity.
Imagine if you will, it’s 2008, not a year of much note, but it was when this happened. I’m with my husband and our two children, both young at the time (14 and 10). Not one of us can speak French and we needed assistance with our journey. We needed to ask someone.
Now I’m not afraid of admitting I don’t know something, and I’m not afraid of making mistakes, but I do get hugely embarrassed when I make them. I’m not shy, but if a mess up, I will crawl back inside my shell and try to hide from the world, this was one of those times when I didn’t have that luxury, which is probably why it sticks so much in my mind.
Without any confidence at all, I thought I could at least ask the woman at the information desk if she spoke English. That’s not hard really, we’re all taught phrases like that. The phrase in this case is: “Excusez-moi parlez-vous anglaise?”
Did I say that? No, of course I didn’t. I said: “Entschuldigen Sie sprechen Sie Englisch?”
So, just in case like me, you are not a linguist, let me lay that out for you. I asked a French woman if she could speak English, in German.
The worst thing about this is that she switched to English, was very helpful and I thanked her, with “Merci” which for once was French. She never said a word about my idiocy. It was my husband pointed out it out as we were walking away. I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me. That woman must have thought me a total idiot.
So why pick this as the place in my memory? Because this memory has stayed with me. Because when I wanted to demonstrate a woman out of her depth, Elaine Blake in Paris, travelling alone for the first time ever, and abroad for the first time in over 25 years, what did I write about? That’s right. I had her ask a French woman if she could speak English, in German. If you want to see that, read Breaking Free, if you want to know what other trials of being human Elaine goes through, finish the story in “Play The Game”. Either way, I hope you enjoy my embarrassment more than I did, am now going to go hide in my shell for a while.
Bio: GB Williams specialises in complex, fast-paced crime novels, most recently, the Elaine Blake Novels – “Breaking Free” and “Play the Game” – and the standalone novel “The Chair”. GB was shortlisted for the 2014 CWA Margery Allingham Short Story Competition with the story Last Shakes, now available in “Last Cut Casebook”. GB is a member of the Crime Writers Association, Crime Cymru, and with working with others to organise the Gŵyl CRIME CYMRU Festival in Aberystwyth while working as a writer and freelance structural editor. GB hates every photo ever taken of her including the publicity shots.
As some of you may know, I hold creative writing workshops and I also tutored creative writing for the local council for many years before Covid came along. Tutoring adults can be rewarding (discovering wonderful writers), chaotic (my lesson plans were rarely followed – someone inevitably took things off at a tangent) hilarious (the undiscovered comedian/ the completely unaware comedian) and thought-provoking (especially with memoir writing and poetry) I’ve kept promising to share some of their work. Here is a thoughtful piece of free verse poetry, written quite a few years ago, by the now very successful author, Alex Craigie. It’s one of my favourites., and, I feel, appropriate for these times.
Trish was ten when her first play was performed at school. It was in rhyming couplets and written in pencil in a book with imperial weights and measures printed on the back. When her children were young, she wrote short stories for magazines before returning to the teaching job that she loved.Trish has had three books published under the pen name of Alex Craigie. The first two books cross genre boundaries and feature elements of romance, thriller and suspense against a backdrop of social issues. Someone Close to Home highlights the problems affecting care homes while Acts of Convenience has issues concerning the health service at its heart. Her third book. Means to Deceive, is a psychological thriller.Someone Close to Home has won a Chill with a Book award and a Chill with the Book of the Month award. In 2019 it was one of the top ten bestsellers in its category on Amazon.
Many thanks to Jenny Loudon for a digital copy of Finding Verity in return for an honest review as a member of Rosie’s Book Review Team #RBRT
I gaveFinding Verity4*
Book Description:
An unhappy woman. An unfinished romance. A sense that time is running out…
Verity Westwood is a successful London businesswoman whose husband is handsome but selfish. When Edward Farrell, a nomadic American journalist from her past, returns unexpectedly, she is swept by the irresistible desire to fulfil her dreams of working as an artist, like her famous father before her. After being caught in a storm on the Cote d’Azur, she vows to change her life. What she does not foresee is the struggle involved, the ultimate price she will pay, and the powerful force of enduring love that changes everything.
My Review:
The premise of this story is a woman searching for her true self: for the person she left behind years ago, the girl who had dreams and hopes, but has instead found she has been subsumed by the selfishness of a husband, the thoughtlessness of her daughters, and the need for her to make money using the talents she has, but not in the way for which she yearns.
I found this book a difficult one to review. On the plus side there was much for me to enjoy about the story. It’s an interesting insight to a marriage long since settled into a pattern of sacrifice and barely hidden resentment by the middle-aged protagonist, Verity, and the indifference of her husband, Matt. Put into the mix one unforgotten friendship with Edward, an American journalist, who Verity met before she married Matt, and a purely coincidently meeting on a short break in Cote d’Azur, and there you have the plot. With all the intricacies of a relationship floundering, and the insertion of various disasters, the author has produced a very real feel to life that many women endure – have settled for.
I liked the portrayal of Verity. The character is nicely rounded, the internal dialogue adding layers as she struggles to make sense of what is happening. The reader becomes increasingly aware of her emotional and mental fragility as the story progresses, and, for me, anyway, more and more exasperated by Matt and his refusal to even acknowledge her needs. So, when Edward is back on the scene I found myself urging her to see what is under her now; a man who loves her. Until he also is shown to be struggling with his life, and a past that affects his ability to be truly honest with Verity.
All the above is a big plus; it’s an emotional read, one with which the reader can truly empathise. The author writes with a brilliant understanding of the human psyche, and I admired that. I really did.
But then, for me, the descriptions of some of the settings stopped the story in its track. The narrative is mainly divided between London and the south of France, with a section given over to the Isle of Skye. The London scenes give a succinct and very real sense of place, and paralleled Verity’s internal dilemma. So far so good. But it was the descriptions of France and the Scottish isle that jarred. Beautifully written, evoking such imagery that I don’t doubt that most readers would read and reread just for the pleasure of savouring the words. And I understood the need for the lengthy portrayals to give a sense of the scenery at times; they reflected the protagonist’s internal dialogue, the slow moving on of her future. But these scenes made me impatient, I wanted to get on with the story.
And I had the same problem with some sections of dialogue where I felt the same emotion, the same interaction between the characters, were repeated, but in a different way, it felt as though it dragged the scene along, the repetition almost used as a filler to the action.
I realise this obviously reveals the kind of reader I am. I like fast moving books, rather than introspective ones. So in no way does this review detract from what a good read Finding Verity is. It’s a purely personal and subjective opinion. And, despite these last points, I have no qualms in saying that this is a good story that epitomises the feelings that many women in mid-life, and will suit many readers
There are places that remain in our memories, the details may become slightly blurred, nostalgia may colour our thoughts, but they don’t fade. And how those places made us feel at the time is the one thing that remains.
Today I’m really pleased to welcomePatricia M Osborne, friend, author and poet and supporter of many writers, whose work she highlights every week.
When Judith asked me if I’d like to submit a blog about a place in my memory it was Bolton that instantly jumped out. I often wonder why my years as a child from the age of seven to ten were so impressionable. Maybe it was because we first arrived in Bolton after becoming homeless and were housed in a half-way house.
It was January 1963, I was seven coming up to eight, and the snow was thick on the ground when my dad made me go to the shops with him so I’d know where to go in future. Freezing, I sobbed. I wanted to go home, but Dad told me off for whinging, saying he was cold too. The day afterwards I got sick and couldn’t keep food down for weeks other than a bowl of Oxo. Maybe that’s why I hate snow so much because it takes me back to being so poorly.
Our two-up-two-down terraced house in Bamber Street, Daubhill, had a front room, a sitting room, a tiny scullery and two upstairs bedrooms. There was no bathroom, just a tin bath stored in the yard which Mum had to drag in, fill with hot buckets of water from the stove, and bath us in front of the fire. The toilet was at the bottom of the yard and I was terrified to go out there on my own in case there were any daleks.
It was at this house my late sister, Heather, got carried out on a stretcher to hospital. We were like inseparable twins and after being left alone without a playmate for two whole weeks, I was jubilant when she returned home. We’d play upstairs in the cold bedroom for hours. She’d be John Steed banging a large umbrella on the wooden floorboards while I was Cathy Gale.
I loved the museum in the town hall which also consisted of a library and aquarium. It’s still there. This was a place where Heather and I spent most of our time. If not choosing Milly-Molly-Mandy books in the library, we’d be exploring the mummies in the museum or hovering around the glass case of porcelain dolls. There was something about those dolls that made me yearn to own one while Heather found them spooky.
The tiny church school we attended consisted of only three classrooms. It was situated at the bottom of our cobbled street, and although only five minutes away, Heather and I managed to be late most days. A lot of the time was spent being taught the catechism, or learning subjects via the wireless such as the Monday morning singing lesson. Whenever I hear The Skye Boat Song it takes me back to those times.
In the playground the older kids loved swinging me around because I was so light. It was in that same playground during out of school hours when a flasher exposed himself to Heather and I, but we were too frightened to tell Mum and Dad. And then there was the kind teacher who at the end of term offered me the three-foot Christmas tree from our classroom to take home because she knew we didn’t have one.
My best friend, Susan Brown, lived over a wallpaper shop. Sometimes when I’m playing table tennis out on my patio, I experience a kind of déjà vu when I’m back in Bolton as an eight-year-old in my best friend’s backyard pushing her doll’s pram.
On my ninth birthday party, the landlord, who was a taxi driver, turned up at the door. He grabbed my mum by the wrist and made her cry as he tried to pull her out of the house because he wanted it back for himself. It was only when Dad came home from work we were safe. My sisters and I used to lie in bed at night petrified at the sound of a car going by or when car lights shone over the ceiling in case it was the bad man back.
Daubhill holds a lot of memories for me, good and bad. Two years later we were housed in Tong Moor, a different area of Bolton, in a three-bedroom house with a bathroom and garden but still an outside loo. It was here that my youngest sister was born. But then that’s another set of memories.
Thank you, Judith, for letting me share some of my memories.
Thank you, Patricia for sharing. Your memories brought back many of my own, especially the outside loo, where my fear was the spiders!
And If ever you feel like coming back to tell us more of your memories you will be very welcome.😊
Photograph of the places that Patricia remembers can be found through the links below…
In February 2019, she graduated with an MA in Creative Writing via the University of Brighton. She is a novelist, poet, and short story writer. When she’s not working on her own writing, she enjoys sharing her knowledge and acts as a mentor to fellow writers.
In 2017 she was a Poet in Residence at a local Victorian Park in Crawley and her poetry was exhibited throughout the park. In 2019 her poetry was on display at Crawley Museum.
Patricia has had numerous poems and short stories published in various literary magazines and anthologies.
I can’t believe it is almost five years ago since I wrote this review of Jan Newton’s brilliant crime story. Originally, I was given an ARC of Remember No More by the publishers, Honno, for a fair and honest review. I said at the time:”Believe me, this is one to look out for!!“ I wasn’t wrong. And now Honno have released Remember No Moreas an audio book: https://tinyurl.com/32cm2n8s. So now we have a choice… read, or listen – it’s brilliant.
Book Description:
Newly promoted DS Julie Kite is at a crossroads. Her husband’s new job takes her away from urban Manchester and its inner city problems to a new life in tranquil mid-Wales. It is to be a new start for them both. On her first day at Builth Wells police station, Julie is thrust unexpectedly into the centre of a murder investigation in a remote farming community. At the same time, Stephen Collins is set free from HMP Strangeways. He immediately makes his way back to mid-Wales, the scene of his heinous crime, in order to confront those who had a hand in his incarceration.
The twists and turns of the investigation into the death of solicitor Gareth Watkin force DS Kite to confront her own demons alongside those of her new community and the lengths to which we’ll go to protect our families.
My Review:
This is a plot with many twists and turns. The depths of the historic layers are slowly revealed alongside the introduction of the protagonist, Detective Sergeant Julie Kite and her struggles in both her work and home life. I loved the author’s ability to balance – and juggle – both, and to keep the reader interested throughout the story. For me the genre of crime fiction can only work if there are false leads, clues that baffle or can give a ‘eureka’ moment. Remember No More does all these.
The story is told from an omniscient point of view, weighted mostly from the protagonist’s viewpoint and this works, as I have the feeling we will be hearing more from DS Kite. But there is also an insight to the other characters and this adds depth to the them; to their struggles, their loyalties, their place in both the community and their families. The characters are well rounded and it is easy to empathise with some of them – and to recognise the weakness and malevolence in others.
The dialogue works well, differentiating the Welsh born characters and contrasting with the accent of Julie Kite and other Northern England characters. The internal dialogue gives greater perception to them all. I liked the slow internal acceptance of the protagonist’s change of life and work situation from Northern England to Wales.
I think one of the great strengths in the author’s writing is the descriptions of the settings. If I can’t picture the world the characters live in, it doesn’t work for me. Jan Newton bases her book in mid Wales. The details are authentic and give a tangible sense of place. I admired her ability to bring the sense of place alive. I was immediately drawn in by a very early description: ” the road was hemmed in either side by reeds and grasses, which had been bleached by the winter’s snow and were still untouched by the spring sunshine…”.And later, “the car rattled over a cattle grid and a vista of villages and isolated farms opened up below them as the road hair-pinned to the right, before descending along the edge of a steep valley. the tops of the hills were the pale browns of moorland, but the valley bottoms were already lush with meadows and hedges.” Good stuff!!
If I had any reservations about the story it would be about the relationship between the protagonist and her husband. But this is only because I wanted to know the background of their marriage. Maybe this is something to be revealed in the next story of DS Julie Kite.
A couple of last mentions; I love the cover, the image is wonderful, I feel it is the scene that the buzzard sees in the Prologue. Oh, I do like prologues!
This is a book I have no hesitation in recommending to any reader who enjoys a good strong crime mystery.
I enjoyed reading Remember No More, and, by the way, there’s another offering fromDS Julie Kite …
Book Description:
Newly promoted DS Julie Kite has been in sleepy mid-Wales for mere months when she’s faced with her second murder case. A man’s body has been found by school kids trekking the Monk’s Trod. The trail takes her back north to her parents in Manchester and to a housing estate in Blackpool. It’s not a simple case – a young mother has disappeared, but so has her son and her next door neighbour’s wife. And the husband of the landlady of the B&B where the girl was staying. When an ex-serviceman farmhand with PTSD attempts to take his own life the case gets more complex still.
Jan Newton grew up in Manchester and Derbyshire and spent twenty years in the Chilterns before moving to mid Wales in 2005. She has worked as a bilingual secretary, an accountant, and in the Welsh stream of Builth Wells Primary School. She plays the euphonium in Llandrindod and Knighton brass bands
Jan graduated from Swansea University in 2015 with a Masters in Creative Writing and has won the Allen Raine Short Story Competition, the WI’s Lady Denman Cup, the Lancashire and North West Magazine’s prize for humorous short stories and the Oriel Davies Gallery’s prize for nature writing. She is a member of the Crime Writers’ Association.
Today I’m really pleased to welcome wordsmith extraordinaire, Kathy Miles, to tell you about her memories. I’ve known Kathy and her works for some years, and today, for a change, I’m going to leave it to her to express her thought onPlaces in our Memories.
The places in our memories are constantly changing. New insight or knowledge might lead you to view a cherished place with different eyes; sometimes the place itself will have altered beyond recognition over the years, and your memory of it becomes elusive, so you ask yourself whether what you remember is the truth, or built upon a desire for it to be so. Sometimes they vanish. I live near the coast at Aberaeron, and sea-mists often obliterate the landscape so completely that it becomes hard to remember what it looks like on a hot summer’s day:
Some days the land is stolen from itself,
chimneys and slate roofs swallowed, village
and pit-head lost to this cold mouth of mist
as it muffles hymn and chapel bell, silences
the scold of crows that crowd around
the plough like a flock of ranting preachers.
(‘Vanish’)
In my case, these problems of recall are compounded by a breakdown I suffered in my mid-forties, which wiped away a good many of my childhood memories. What remains is fragmentary and fleeting; a series of impressions that appear occasionally, like landmarks emerging from a sea mist, or footprints that might at any moment be washed away by the tide.
Growing up in Liverpool, the sea and river were constants. My paternal grandfather and great-grandfather had been merchant seamen, and their love of the sea passed to my father and on to me. I remember standing with my Dad on the Cazzy, the Cast-Iron Shore on the banks of the Mersey, where the sand was rust-coloured from the residue of an old iron foundry. Dad was wearing a shirt and tie as always, jacket slung across his shoulders. His face had already reddened in the heat. We kept a wary eye on the tide. The river creeps quickly and silently over those mudflats, brimming up as suddenly as an unwatched bath. A slub of saltmarsh, shards of driftwood, and just up the river bank, old shipyards festering in the sunshine. From there you can see the outline of Welsh mountains across to Moel Famau. But it was the water Dad was staring at, with a kind of longing, as if he wished he could be whisked away to far horizons.
It was inevitable that our annual holidays would be taken by the sea. Cemaes Bay, Cornwall, and later on, Guernsey and Sark. Mum would pack a picnic basket with boiled eggs and sandwiches, a thermos of tea, and the three of us walked to the nearest beach, stopping on the way to pick field mushrooms for next day’s breakfast. I’d head for the nearest rocks, fishing net in hand, and was soon absorbed in a rock-pool, catching tiny shrimps and sometimes a rockling or blenny. Dad fished for mackerel from the shore, whilst Mum would scoop out limpets to use as bait, and patiently rewind my crabbing line when I’d tangled the twine.
Home in Liverpool was a small bungalow, built on farmland in the 1930s as the edges of the city expanded. It was eight miles from the Mersey, but still close enough for us to be able to hear the ferry hooters blasting out in chorus to mark the start of each new year. Dad took the train to work each morning, and in the evenings I’d race up the road to West Allerton station and stand on the bridge as his train came in, usually getting covered in steam and smuts. If trains can be special memories of place, then these old steam trains are mine, with their plushly-covered seats, leather strap to pull up the window so the door could be opened, and pictures hung above the luggage rack. Even now I still feel the excitement of boarding a train, the promise of new experiences and unknown places.
At 18, having failed most of my A levels, I went to work in the Everyman Theatre for a year. I had to retake my exams if I had any hope of getting into university, and we also needed the money. The Everyman at that time was a shabby building in Hope Street, in desperate need of renovation, but with a fabulous bistro in the basement run by Paddy Byrne and Dave Scott. My job was a combination of ASM and general dogsbody. I helped out in the wardrobe department, sourced props, answered the telephone and manned the box office. On one occasion I even appeared on stage, though as I was crammed into the frame of a large fabric-covered snake, it was hardly going to make my fame and fortune as an actor. The company then included Antony Sher, Jonathan Pryce, Roger Sloman, Alison Steadman and David Goodland, and the director was Alan Dossor, who produced gritty, contemporary agitprop plays. The actors shared a single dressing-room; costumes were often held up by safety pins or my dangerously-loose tacking stitches, and in one notable production of Caucasian Chalk Circle, Roger Sloman was carted off to hospital after being hit on the head by a large iron hook that descended from the ceiling at the wrong time. It was chaotic, but it was also fun. Everyone worked as a team, and when I left – very reluctantly – to go to university, I was presented with a large publicity poster of the whole cast as a present. Although the Everyman is now a state-of-the-art modern theatre, I’ll never forget that old building, which stank of fags and paint, sweaty tights and damp wood, and to me was as glamorous as anything in the West End.
When I came to Lampeter, however, I finally found my special place. The Everyman had been a wonderful experience, but I’d never felt truly at home in Liverpool. My Mum in later years said that Wales had stolen me away, and she was right. I had grown up with Welsh-speaking aunts, and from the moment I stepped off the rickety old Richards bus that brought me from Aberystwyth, I felt I had truly found my cynefin. Here I was near my beloved sea, and a landscape I instantly felt rooted to. In 1995 I published an anthology of poems and photographs, The Third Day; Landscape and the Word (Gomer Press), commissioning work from poets such as Dannie Abse, RS Thomas, Gillian Clarke, Sheenagh Pugh and Raymond Garlick. Travelling around Wales to photograph old Welsh sites gave me new places to tuck away in my memory, including the then-unrestored Aberglasney, where the photographer and I kissed surreptitiously in the Yew Tunnel, and a different chapter of my life began. If my memory of those early years is sometimes veiled in sea mist, and many of the places of my childhood no longer exist, the ones I have gained since then provide a constant source of delight, and inspiration for my writing.
About Kathy:
Born in Liverpool, Kathy Miles is a poet and short story writer living in West Wales. Her work has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, and her fourth full collection of poetry, Bone House, was published by Indigo Dreams in 2020. Kathy is a previous winner of the Bridport Prize, as well as the Welsh Poetry, Second Light, Wells Literature, Shepton Mallet Snowdrop Festival and PENfro poetry competitions. She is a regular book reviewer and workshop facilitator, has co-edited The Lampeter Review, and guest-edited Artemis magazine.
Poetry Collections
Bone House (Indigo Dreams, 2020)
Inside the Animal House (Rack Press, 2018)
Gardening With Deer (Cinnamon Press, 2016)
The Shadow House (Cinnamon Press, 2009)
The Third Day: Landscape and the Word (Gomer, 1995)
The Rocking Stone (Poetry Wales Press, 1988)
Other
Ugly as Sin and other clichés (Pentad Books, December 2020)
Their mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen had become a widow in 1870 after her first husband, Herbert Duckworth, died of a burst abscess. She already had three children: George, Stella, and Gerald. The latter was born shortly after Herbert’s death in 1870.
Eight years later Julia married Leslie Stephen. English society in the late 1800s was built on a rigid social class system, and as a graduate of Eton and Cambridge, a respected literary critic and biographer, Leslie was seen as one of the literary aristocracy. He was also a widower and father of a girl, Laura, who had a learning disability, and who, incidentally, was the granddaughter of the Victorian novelist William Makepeace Thackeray.
Despite Leslie doting on Laura as a tiny child, by the time she was nine it was obvious that something was wrong; she was slow to talk or read, and veered from total fatigue to violent tantrums. It was a problem for both her father and Julia (although Julia, as friend of the family, had already partly taken on the role as a surrogate parent after Leslie’s wife, Minny, had died when Laura was five). But marriage and producing four children in quick succession: Vanessa in 1879, Thoby in 1880, Virginia in 1882, and Adrian in 1883, increased the difficulties for the two parents. Neither of them were equipped to deal with a child who had special needs.
Besides being agnostics, both Leslie and Julia were humanists, who advocated the rights for women to be the same as for men, to reach their own conclusions in matters of religion. Yet both believed that the home was the true basis for morality, a sanctuary free from corruption, and therefore home was the place for women. So Julia, who despaired that she was unable to discipline Laura, or train her to carry out domestic chores, apparently felt that her stepdaughter was deliberately wilful. And Leslie, who, during a time when society viewed anyone who was not seen as “normal” as undermining that society, was ashamed of her. His domineering patriarchy in in this upper-class, intellectual, and claustrophobic household would be viewed as bullying these days.
He must have been very frustrated by Laura, and it was a conflicted family: having little parental authority over one daughter, whilst succeeding in having total control over the other two.
Unlike their brother, Thoby, neither Vanessa nor Virginia were allowed to go to school. It was still not considered suitable to send girls to school, so they were educated at home by tutors.
Initially, as small children, they spent their days inventing whimsical stories about their neighbours, then progressed to writing illustrated stories and poems, and making up riddles and jokes for a family magazine they called the Hyde Park Gate News. In years to come, biographers of the two sisters were to declare this as early proof of the reciprocal nature between them that, well before any formal training, they nurtured each other’s art, acting as the other’s friend, adversary, and creative muse. And they must have decided between themselves which of them followed which creative path: Virginia the writer, Vanessa the artist. Yet each one’s individual talents led to the same ending, an endeavour to tell stories through their craft, Virginia with words, Vanessa through her paintings.
But, in the background there was always the perceived family problem of Laura. And, in 1886 at the age of sixteen, when Vanessa was seven, and Virginia was four, Laura was sent away to live with a governess. And was absent from the public family.
Four years later, despite being deprived of any early official schooling, and notwithstanding the Victorian restrictions on girls and women, Julia and Leslie decided to encourage their other daughters to pursue their talents. Over time, Vanessa studied both at the Royal Academy Schools and the Slade School of Fine Art, Virginia took classics and history in the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London.
Laura, on the other hand had been diagnosed by psychiatrists as suffering from ‘imbecility’. However I do need to point out that, despite extensive research, I could find no established medical rules of defining mental illnesses at this time. Yet in law, under such acts as the Lunacy Act of 1845 and the Idiots Act of 1886, there were precise specific and distinct legal classifications for certain conditions. These groupings fluctuated though. Laura was initially admitted to Earlswood Asylum in 1893, aged twenty-three, as an “imbecile” but in the 1901 census she was labelled a “lunatic”. which could suggest worsening symptoms
Virginia and Vanessa had battles of their own to contend with; both, as children, were sexually abused by their half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth. As an adult Virginia Woolf wrote extensively about this incestuous abuse in her diaries and letters, although there is little I can find about the abuse with either sister. Understandably, many say this was the origin of the fragility of Virginia’s psychological state. But It needs saying that it has been suggested in various papers that there were genetic connections of mental instability on the paternal side: Leslie Stephen was prone to violent mood swings, his father suffered from depression, a nephew had a bipolar disorder and was admitted into an asylum for mania. Virginia herself suffered from depression, and Vanessa is reported to have had at least one nervous breakdown.I should also add here that therefore it could follow that this family history of the Stephen family means it is likely that whatever condition Laura suffered from in her life, her genetic composition means she was more susceptible to other mental disorders.
In 1895, their mother. Julia Stephen died of heart failure, following a bout of influenza. Shortly afterwards, Virginia had her first mental breakdown.And, when their older half-sister Stella Duckworth, who in the absence of their mother had stepped in to run the household, also died two years later, and after their father died in 1904 after a long battle with stomach cancer, Virginia made her first suicide attempt.
Vanessa took charge. After dealing with all the domestic affairs, she moved the family (Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian) from Hyde Park Gate to the Bloomsbury district of London in 1904 to begin a new life.
Here Vanessa, Thoby, Adrian and Clive Bell started The Bloomsbury Group with friends who were writers, intellectuals, philosophers, and artists who rejected the oppressive Victorian principles of their parents’ generation, and they adopted creative freedom, sexual permissiveness, and atheism. They became known for their unconventional lifestyles and love affairs, shocking many outside their social group.
As the older sister Vanessa dealt with many of Virginia’s emotional and mental breakdowns. But she also held true to her own code of conduct; her lifestyle, her unconventional, sometimes eccentric relationships, were reflected in her art: the nude portraits of her friends and family, the use of design in her work. (both considered to be the prerogative of male artists) Yet her loving care for her sister was balanced by the long term and continuous rivalry in their separate spheres of creativity. Reading through the lines during my research I wondered whether, sometimes, this conflict was wearisome for the older sister; whether Vanessa’s marriage, in 1907, to Clive Bell was subconsciously an effort to distance herself from Virginia.
The marriage, a year after their brother Thoby’s death from typhoid, made Virginia descend again into some sort of nervous breakdown. The marriage meant that Virginia and their brother Adrian had to move out of the Bloomsbury house, thus providing a distancing between the two sisters. A distance Virginia resented, because, before long, she began to pursue Vanessa’s husband, Clive. Their love affair lasted, intermittently, over six years. And there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that reveals enough proof, I think, to believe that the underlying reason for the affair was so that Virginia was once again at the centre of her sister’s life.
In 1914 Vanessa began a life-long relationship with Duncan Grant, who was bi-sexual. Taking Vanessa’s two sons, Julian and Quentin, from her marriage to Clive, and accompanied by Duncan’s lover, the writer David Garnett, they moved to Charleston Farmhouse, Sussex. In 1918 Vanessa and Duncan had a daughter, Angelica.
Because I have concentrated on these two women as sisters, and because much has been written about their achievement by far more scholarly people than me, I have left out details of the body of work that both women produced. I was more interested in what made them ‘be’, what formed them as human beings.
I found an extensive amount of articles, journals, newspaper reviews, discussions, diary quotes, lectures etc. on Virginia that revealed much of her personality and mental health. But far less details on Vanessa’s character. Because she didn’t keep a diary as Virginia did there is little written about her personally, except for the time of her son, Julian’s death during the Spanish War, when she became extremely and understandably depressed. But, mainly, there are only facts about her place in the family, about her marriage and relationships, her part in the Bloomsbury set, and the cannon of her work. And I found almost nothing on Laura. Having left few records of her own, she’s as invisible in history as she was in her family. And yet, her small story needs to stand alongside her famous sisters, because, I think, her presence (wherever she was during her life) must have had some effect on Vanessa and Virginia. There had to be some experiences, some memories they shared, that would always have impacted on the three of them.
Troubled by mental illness throughout her life, Virginia was institutionalized several times and attempted suicide twice before drowning herself by filling her overcoat pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse on March 28, 1941. Her ashes are buried in the National Trust garden of Monks House, Rodmell.
Vanessa died at Charleston Farmhouse, at the age of eighty-one, after a bout of bronchitis, on 7th April 1961. She was buried on 12th April, without any form of service, in Firle Parish Churchyard.
N.B. Leslie and Julia visited Laura until Julia’s death in 1895. Stella visited her until her death in 1897. Her aunt Annie Thackeray Ritchie visited her until her death in 1919. Annie’s daughter Hester Ritchie brought her home for visits on occasion. Then the visits stopped. When Laura died in 1945 the asylum did not know of any living relatives, though both Vanessa and Adrian outlived her and even inherited the remainder of the legacy Leslie had left for her care
Sometimes, family members can become estranged from one another, either by choice or by circumstances. “In one of her informal reminiscences from around 1922, Virginia describes ‘Thackeray’s grand-daughter, (Laura) a vacant-eyed girl whose idiocy was becoming daily more obvious, who could hardly read, who would throw scissors into the fire, who was tongue-tied and stammered and yet had to appear at table with the rest of us.’ Virginia makes the difference between them clear: Laura was not, in fact, one of “us,”’ https://tinyurl.com/36sj5mc5
And, in a way, this is how Lisa (formerly Mandy) feels about her sister, Angie, in my next book, Sisters, when she says, “I never wanted to be in Micklethwaite ever again. Yet here I am. And meeting the one person I never wanted to see again. “
Sisters will bepublished by Honno on the 26th January 2023, It’s available to be pre-booked:
This book is a collection of stories about some of Kaye’s first-time experiences with life’s most natural events. Told through the intimate conversational writing we’ve come to know from this author, poignant personal steppingstones to learning moments are revealed. She encompasses the heart of each matter with sincerity and sprinkled inflections of humor.
From first kiss to first car to walking in the desert with four-inch heels, Kaye’s short coming-of-age stories take us through her awakenings and important moments of growth, often without warning. Some good and some not, life lessons are learned through trial and error, winging it, and navigating by the seat of her pants.
My Review:
Fifteen First Times is a collection of short but evocative memoirs by D G Kaye. I actually wasn’t sure what to expect when I first started to read. All I knew was that, having read various other books by this author, and having always admired her intimate writing style, I was in for a treat. I wasn’t disappointed.
Although brought up in a different country with a background that was poles apart from my own, I found myself nodding, reminiscing, and recognising so many of her firsts. Indeed I would go so far as to say, that many women would recognise something of themselves, something of their own experiences, in what these recollections bring to mind, wherever they have lived.
The poignancy of some of the stories brought tears, others a “laugh out loud” moment. But all are written with integrity and complete openness, something I always anticipate from D G Kaye. It’s like sharing and swopping tales from our youths. We have all had our “firsts” in our lives, and this compilation of memories is a treat that makes the reader sit back and reminisce – very satisfying.
So I would urge any reader to immerse themselves in this book… to enjoy and reflect on their own “firsts”. That’s what this author’s words brought out in me. Highly recommended.
As I say above, I have read other books by D G Kaye, and never been disappointed.The following are a couple from quite a while ago; around the first time I came across this author. As you will see, I’ve been impressed by her writing for many years.Do check them out…
Ann Hatton and her older sister Sarah, were the daughters of Roger Kemble and Sarah Ward, who led a troupe of travelling actors. Sarah was born in Brecon in July 1755, Ann, otherwise known as Ann of Swansea, in Worcester in April 1764. There were ten other siblings.
All, except Ann, were early performers on stage with their parents.Considered by her family to be unsuitable to be on stage, owing to a disability (she had a slight limp), Ann was more or less excluded from the family. Later in life she often said she received little love from her parents, and that her education wasneglected.
In contrast Sarah was well educated, adored by her parents, and performed her first major Shakespearean role, as Ariel, at the age of nine.
Yet both fell in love with men whom their mother and father thought unsuitable.Ann, at the early age of sixteen, married a man called Curtis who was actually already married, and was later convicted and jailed for bigamy. She was considered to have brought disrepute on the family and was cast out by them; their only concern was their determination to validatetheir respectability within the theatrical world.
Sarah was dealt with in a different way. Initially sent away to work as a lady’s maid because she began a relationship with William Siddons, (one of the members of her father’s troupe), she was soon forgiven by her parents, who gave their blessing for her to marry William. Sarah was then allowed to continue her acting career. She was so outstanding that she was noticed by David Garrick, actor, playwright, theatre manager and producer, who took her to London to appear on the stage at Drury Lane, although her first role at Drury lane wasn’t a total success.
Rejected and isolated Ann became increasingly depressed and suicidal, actually attempting suicide in Westminster Abbey. She lurched from one catastrophe to another. After her failed marriage she attempted to earn her own money by working for a Dr James Graham, a sex therapist, who ran a business called the Temple of Health and Hymen,in Pall Mall.Her family was enraged to discover he advertised the lectures Ann gave as “given by Mrs Curtis, Mrs Siddons’ younger sister”.
In 1783, Ann produced her first volume of poems, (Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects). Again she gained her family’s wrath; she published the collection under the name of “Ann Curtis, sister of Mrs Siddons”.
The Kemble family was determined to disassociate themselves from Ann, so Sarah, joined with one of their brothers, granted Ann a yearly allowance, but only with a condition that Ann lived at least a hundred and fifty miles away from London.
The annual payment meant that Ann’s reputation and station in society became more acceptable, and in 1792 she married William Hatton.
They emigrated to America, and it was here that she wrote her opera libretto Tammany (otherwise known as The Indian Chief), which was given its première on Broadway. This was the first known libretto written by a woman.
Following the triumph of her libretto, Ann and William returned to Britain, and by 1799, had settled in Swansea in South Wales, where they ran a bathing-house and lodgings near the coast until William’s death in 1806. She then moved to Kidwelly.One of her poems, Swansea Bay, describes her emotions as she left Swansea. Eventually, she returned to Swansea in 1809 where she settled down to write her poetry and Romantic novels. These encapsulated themes of social and moral parody,(sometimes with gothic leitmotifs). She used the pseudonyms of “Ann of Swansea” and Ann of Kidwelly.
Many of her books were set in Wales; Cambrian Pictures, published by my publishers, Honno, is one of them.
Sarah and her husband William, took up the life of a travelling thespian, playing many parts all over the country. She cleverly chose roles that made her more popular, that protected her image and preserved her reputation as a wife and mother of five children, as well as an actress. This helped her to avoid any rumourmongering and scandal that usually plagued actresses at the time. She ultimately became Britain’s most renowned and highly paid actress in the 1780s, much sought after by equally famous painters, such as Sir Joshua Reynolds, to sit to have her portrait painted. She even gave private readings for the king and queen at Windsor Castle and Buckingham House. Reputed to have a striking stage presence she became most famous for her role as Lady Macbeth; a role she was reported as played to perfection, and she was also called the Queen of Tragedy.
But, after thirty years the marriage between Sarah and William became strained and they separated.
She retired from the stage in June of 1812, playing Lady Macbeth in Macbeth. So enthralled by her performance were the audience that they continued clapping when she finally left the stage and the play ended there.
She died in 1831 and was buried in St. Mary’s, Paddington. Her funeral was attended by thousands, and a statue of her was later created by Francis Legatt Chantrey and erected in Westminster Abbey (ironically, as I said, earlier, the place where her sister, Ann attempted suicide after her first marriage to the bigamist, Curtis, and when she was both ostracized by her family, and desperately poor). .
Ann died and was buried in 1838 in a churchyard in High Street, Swansea. She left most of her belongings to her servant Mary Johns, executor of her will, as a “very small remuneration for her affectionate, honest and undeviating conduct” for almost 16 years.
At no time in my research for this post, did I discover that the two sisters ever met again.
It occurred to me that, sometimes, it is only through fate and coincidence that estranged families are forced into contact. And so it is for the two sisters, Angie and Mandy (later known as Lisa) in my next book, Sisters.Due to be published by Honno on the 26th January 2023, I’m thrilled that it’s now available to be pre-booked.
There are places that remain in our memories, the details may become slightly blurred, nostalgia may colour our thoughts, but they don’t fade. And how those places made us feel at the time is the one thing that remains.
Today I’m really pleased to welcome Jane Fraser to Places in our Memories. Jane is a a Honno author like myself, I’ve known her quite a while, and know how much she loves Wales. Here she tells us how, although enjoying a wonderful holiday in… she missed her homeland… and how it brought other thoughts.
Hiraeth
Home Thoughts From Abroad
I am in the elevator going up to the condo on the 6th floor. It feels moist: a stale smell of sweat and coconut sun-oil cloying the cramped space I’m sharing with my husband and another couple. We’ve all rushed off the beach because of the squall. The sign with the palm tree on the wall tells me to have a nice day.
“Where you guys from?” asks the man with the baseball cap.
“Wales,” I say.
“Oh, part of England – we passed through it on our way to Ireland when we did Europe a couple of years ago, didn’t we Jo? he says to his wife who says: We sure did. It’s where Princess Diana was from.
I don’t bother to even try and explain but say, Bye, enjoy your day as we make our way back to our little rental overlooking the Atlantic which is now stewing, a nasty grey, with white spume peaks whipped by the wind as far out as the eye can see. I sit on our balcony, my mind’s eye can see far across this ocean, as far as the wet west coast of the home I’ve escaped this Christmas.
“You homesick?” my husband asks.
“A bit,” I say. “The weather, probably.”
“Least it’s hot rain. Won’t last. They’re not there anyway.”
He’s right. My daughter and the kids are in Australia to see the in-laws; my son is happy with his girl-friend in the north of England. My parents are sorted going to my brother’s for Christmas lunch in Cardiff and I know they’re OK as I see them all year, living just a couple of miles away. I’m guilt free. I haven’t left or abandoned anyone. No person I love. It’s just my house I see empty and forlorn; standing unlit and unloved, in the place that tugs at my insides.
“Don’t you miss our house? Our beach?” I ask my husband.
“It’s just a place, “he says. “C’mon. We’ve worked all year for this.”
I continue looking at the ocean, listen to its constant churning. It sounds the same as home. And it’s beautiful. But at 27 degrees north 80 degrees west Hutchinson Island is not 51 degrees north and 4 degrees west in Llangennith. The tide hardly budges here between high and low water, no vast expanse of sand exposed on the ebb. When my wind blows from the south west it is mild and wet, it cakes my windows with salt and browns and bends everything I try to grow in my garden. Everything here is back to front: the north-easterly brings the rain, steamy and sticky; and when the wind blows from the south-west, it’s off the land, hot, dry on the skin, giving respite from the humidity. When my sun rises it is behind me, comes up over Llanmadoc Down and when it is done at the end of the day it falls into the sea just to the left of Burry Holms. I just cannot come to terms with the sun coming up over the ocean and going down over the land.
“You’ve got no sense of home, have you?” I snipe at my husband.
“What Merthyr Tydfil? London? Gower?”
“You don’t belong anywhere, do you?”
“No. Happy in a camper van, me. Don’t need that stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“Roots.”
“Running away all the time, you are.”
“Nothing to run from.”
“No place you see yourself dying? Spending your last days?”
“Jesus. We’re supposed to be on holiday.”
I see myself in my own bed at home. I am lying propped up on pillows, looking out through the sash windows at the expanse of ocean. The window is pulled up slightly at the bottom and fresh air rushes through the gap, making the silk curtains billow, and cooling my face which is warmed with the sun in my south-facing house. If I had a choice about the last thing I’d like to see in life it would be the view through this window: the bronzed burrows, the conical dunes, the limestone island of Burry Holms which when the tide is high rises like a turtle out of the sea.
But it is beautiful here in its own way. Now. The scale of the views astounds: big skies; big seas; but too much sea if there is such a thing. Sea that is not broken up or interrupted with headlands or coves or churches or castles that run down to the water’s edge. There is but one long, straight continuous ocean’s edge strung out along the rim of the pan-handle. I long for things to shrink, for the familiar littleness and quirkiness of my peculiar patch of earth.
I’m in the tropics in a flat right in the dunes and I am happy and grateful for what life has dealt me. But they are not my dunes. My dunes are golden and soft-sanded, carpeted with marram grass, sea holly and thrift and all manner of orchids and blackberries when autumn comes. Here the sand is greyer and grittier, a flat colour pitted with holes where ghost crabs burrow. Where blue and pink-bubbled Portuguese men of war with foot long tentacles lurk ready to sting at the tide’s drop line. Here everything grows quickly, too quickly; it is hard to keep things under control, to hold back the mangrove to prevent the railroad vine choking. Here the dunes sometimes cannot hold back the hurricanes. Here there are signs that say evacuation route.
My husband goes back inside the condo to the chill of the air-con, sliding the door behind him. Even though it is raining, I am covered by the popcorn roof of the balcony and shielded from the wet by the sliding concertina-folded shutters. The heat is sapping the life out of me. I consider life’s evacuation route. When and how my end will come. There have been a few near-misses to date and again, I am grateful that I’ve still got a few lives left. My mind wanders and I hope I will have what my grandmother used to call a ‘good death’. A death that is in old age, that is relatively pain-free. One where there is time to say goodbyes.
I open the sliders and go inside. The air-con confronts me like a fridge.
“Do you want to be buried or cremated?” I ask my husband. But he cannot hear as his earphones are on and he’s on the iPad catching up with latest episodes of ‘London Spy’.
“What?” he shouts, taking out one of his ear-pieces.
“When you die. Buried or cremated? We need to make our wills.”
“You need to see someone. Seriously.”
“I want to be buried. In the church. Near the wall. Gets the sun all day. And I can keep an eye on what’s happening in the pub opposite!”
“Just feed me to the birds. Or drop me overboard near Burry Holms.”
“I was thinking Burry Holms to start with too: though sprinkled like your mother. Then I changed my mind and fancied the crem. But thought, no. Production line. So it’s to be burial. But not in Llanrhidian with my mother’s lot. Too dark. Damp.”
“Long as I know.”
“Don’t you want to be buried with me, then?”
“Don’t believe in all that tosh.”
“Is it ‘cos we’ve got different names? Shall I change my name to Griffiths?”
“You do what you like. I just want to go back to nature. No fuss.”
“That’s great. Buried alone. That’ll give them something to talk about.”
“Who?”
“Villagers.”
“Well, you won’t hear them, will you?”
On Christmas Eve the sun has decided to shine again. It is in the high eighties. The checkout girl in Publix tells us the weather here is Bipolar. My husband tells me he thinks I am too.
We hit the beach again with our striped canvas chairs, turning away from the sea to follow the sun as the day progresses. We watch fisherman landing croakers and pompanos, their rods bent like arcs over the sparkling ocean along the water’s edge as far as the eyes can see. One man is sweating with the effort of reeling in a big fella that’s been taking line for over an hour as far south as Miami. Must be a shark or a stingray his friend says who stands at the ready with a rope to help him when the time comes. But the line snaps and it was the one that got away.
The sun is high even in mid-winter, searing the crown of my broad black-rimmed hat which I notice is fading so fast. I look at my watch. 3pm. Eight o’clock back home. It’ll be dark and raining and the teles will be blaring and the pubs heaving. At this precise moment I’m not missing it at all.
But at six o’clock, when the light goes yet the heat remains locked in, I’m out of kilter again. The condo looks bare even though we’ve tried out best with potted red tulips and white lilies and red and gold baubles which are too glitzy for my liking. The Christmas cards we’ve bought each other in Barnes and Noble are too schmaltzy and shmucky: like the apples and the vegetables in the supermarkets, too big and shiny and perfect that look lovely but don’t actually taste of anything.
The tele goes on but it’s all American Football and medical adverts every few seconds with lists of alarming side effects of certain medications. It’s Fixer Upper then, nothing but edition after edition of Fixer Upper and houses that are transformed in Wacko Texas for under $80,000 including land. Next is Chopped which I tell my husband is a poor imitation of Bake Off and even worse than Australian MasterChef.
I turn to my iPad for comfort and start googling Llangennith. I get the Gower Webcam from The Worms’s Head Hotel looking across Rhossili Bay. But it’s dark there, the sea hardly visible just an eerie rippling. It will restart live at sunrise tomorrow morning the message promises. Apparently it’s been a great day for surf. Overhead and light winds from the south west. I go to Wikipedia: pictures emerge of a village on the Gower peninsula near Swansea in Wales. It has an 11th century church dedicated to St Cenydd. It is the largest Church in Gower and the only one with a lych gate. I know. We were married there. I am suddenly in its nave, in its chancel, standing among the choir stalls with a bouquet of lily of the valley, taking our vows. It’s where I’ve recently told my husband I’ll be buried. I can see the unkempt grass, though not onscreen, see the weathered tombstones, tottering at all angles, see the names of generations of Taylors and Groves and Bevans and Beynons. I think I’ve made the right decision about being buried there, I say to my husband but he’s engrossed in Dallas Cowboys v Pittsburgh Steelers. I can smell home through the ether, pine and Christmas pudding.
“You umbelicalled to that thing?” he shouts from the sofa.
I’m on Google Earth now, I’ve keyed in my postcode SA3 1JE and I’m being taken from the beginning of Cock Street following a white arrow like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs, past Gill and Paul’s at Bullen’s Well – I can see the spout from the well, taste the spring water I always taste in cupped hands when I’m finishing up my daily walk. The camera takes me on along the single track lane – there’s Cock Street Farm with the gate with the two horses’ heads and the Land Rover parked in the yard. Must have been taken a few years ago as Joe Grove has changed it now for an Isuzu Trouper. And it must have been early summer too as the gorse is out, a blaze of yellow and the ferns at the lane’s edge are hip-high. I press the arrow with a compulsion, I’m at Long Offing now, and then the old barn in the field next to mine – Steve Taylor’s Fiesta is parked outside the gate – probably watering the plants in his polytunnel. And then there’s my gate. From 5,000 miles away right in front of me is my five barred farm gate and my drive with the car parked in it. CF13 MFU – all my personal things there for me to see, but not to touch. I can hardly bear it. I zoom on to the front of the house. It’s white and lime washed and perfectly symmetrical. Surrounded by newly ploughed brown-earthed fields it looks like it’s growing there, like it belongs there, like it’s been there for all time.
It looks sad without us there. The windows at the front look as though they are crying. The wooden loungers are in place on the patio, perfectly positioned to take in the views of the ocean and the full sun. But they are empty. The stone pots of lavender are in full bloom but there is no one to smell them or water them. The seeds I must have planted back then are sprouting in the raised beds and the olive trees standing tall in the terracotta pots on the plum stoned driveway. They say all roads lead home at Christmas, I tell my husband. But he doesn’t reply.
About Jane:
Jane Fraser is an award-winning fiction writer, based in the Gower peninsula, south Wales. Her debut novel, Advent, was published by Honno, the UK’s longest-standing, independent women’s press, in January 2021. It was Book of the Month at Books Council of Wales in February 2021 and in June 2022 was announced as winner of the Society of Authors’ Awards – The Paul Torday Memorial Prize for a debut novel in English. Her first collection of short fiction, The South Westerlies, was published by Salt, the UK’s foremost independent publisher of literary fiction, in 2019 and her second short fiction collection, Connective Tissue, in October 2022, and also published by Salt.
She has been widely published in anthologies and reviews including New Welsh Review, The Lonely Crowd, Fish Publishing, TSS and The London Magazine. Her fiction has figured highly in major international competitions: in 2017 she was a finalist in the Manchester Fiction Prize (and has also been highly commended eight times), and in 2018 was a prize winner in the Fish Memoir Prize. She has also long and shortlisted in the Cambridge Short Story Prize, the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Prize, the Rhys Davies Short Story Competition and Retreat West Short Story Competition. She is winner of both the British Haiku Society and Genjuan International Prize for haibun. Her work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as part of its ‘Short Works’ series.
She is a Hay Festival Writer at Work, a prestigious creative development award for emerging writers. She has a B.Ed as a first degree, and an MA (distinction 2013) and PhD in Creative Writing from Swansea University.
Jane Fraser is proud to be represented by Gaia Banks, Literary Agent at Sheil Land Associates Ltd. http://www.sheilland.com
When she is not writing, Jane Fraser is Co-Director of NB:Design a brand and digital agency along with her husband Philip Griffiths, a designer and photographer. When she is not working or writing, she walks her home patch of Gower and tries to be a good grandmother to Megan (13), Florence (11) and Alice (8).
There are places that remain in our memories, the details may become slightly blurred, nostalgia may colour our thoughts, but they don’t fade. And how those places made us feel at the time is the one thing that remains.
Today I’m really pleased to welcome Liz Hines to Places in our Memories. She brings to life her memories of growing up in a house that was once a public house, and living in a strong matriarchal family.
Home
It took the builders three days to knock through the wall of my bedroom to put in a window. Day after day, they chipped and hammered and swore until the hole in the four foot thick wall was big enough to let in the sun, but bigger than the view of Polly Garter next-door’s garden deserved.
The slate steps that led up to the always-open front door featured in countless family photos
My bedroom was at the back of the house in the part that had already withstood eight generations. In my great-great-great-grandfather’s day it had been a public house. Years later, when it was finally rid of the smell of ale and gin, my great-grandmother wanted the front, which at that time still bore the legend, ‘Albert Inn’, fashionably pebble-dashed. The work had scarcely begun before the local bigwig, Harry Libby, came thundering to the door, ‘What are you doing, woman? This is sheer vandalism, destroying the heritage of the village.’ My great-grandmother didn’t give birth to twelve and raise eight children to be told what she could or couldn’t do with her own home — especially not by an upstart village boy — and she told him so.
That house, the place of my birth and my home for twenty-five years, stands in the middle of a terrace in the heart of the village. It was a matriarchal household: throughout my childhood there were four generations of women living there, my grandmother being the dominant force. My grandfather was a quiet gentle man, content to sit in his chair by the window, listening to the wireless and smoking his cigarettes. The room he sat in we called the kitchen, though all cooking, and washing of clothes, dishes, and bodies, was done in the scullery under the corrugated tin roof.
The kitchen was a low-ceilinged room where the light was always on and the fire always lit. The one window looked out onto a limed wall, eight feet high and three feet away. It was a small room crowded with furniture – a settee, two armchairs, a bureau, and a dining table with assorted chairs. Shabby but clean and polished.
I see my grandmother now, bustling in.
“Put some more coal on, Jack, the fire’ll be out in a minute.”
Her husband chooses to not hear her.
“I suppose I’ll have to do it myself. Wait till I see that coalman, giving me this English rubbish, I’ll tell him.”
She rakes the fire and shovels on more coal. Standing up she wipes her hands on her pinny and then stops in her tracks. She picks up a candlestick from the mantelpiece and tuts.
“I’ll have to clean these tomorrow.”
It will take her all morning to polish the candlesticks and horse brasses and souvenirs of trips to Tenby, and when she’s done, the house will smell of Brasso for the rest of the day.
It is she who is largely responsible for my upbringing, my mother having to go out to work in order to keep me fed though I was clothed in hand-me-down dresses from my conveniently six-month older and much richer cousin.
My grandmother’s father had died the year before I was born leaving a legacy of legend. He – almost single-handedly if family history is to be believed – built Ford’s first factories in America. When the hiraeth became too strong, and he returned home to Wales, Henry Ford himself – again, the stuff of family myth – came to our village and begged him to return, offering to transport the whole family back to the States. But the women wouldn’t go and a good thing too else my story would be completely different.
As I said, my great-grandmother had eight surviving children and her presence in my growing-up home meant a constant flow of visitors. The encompassing of me within this extended family provided a shelter, the walls of which were stronger than bricks and mortar, and it was easy to ignore the non-existence of one person, to have only a vague awareness that something was missing but that it didn’t really matter much. I was surrounded with love and its Welsh synonym, good home cooking. When there were lots of us, the family, there for dinner we would pull out the table and I would squeeze onto the bench next to the wall. This was my favourite place, where the bricks I leaned against were warmed by Mr Shires next door’s fire. I sat quietly in the glow of conversation and knew that here I was safe.
Back in the late 1920s, two of my gran’s sisters were married from Albert House in a double wedding.
In 1964 I passed my eleven plus and the door to the another world, to Glanmor Grammar School, a more precarious world of Latin and physics, was opened to me. There was one other fatherless girl in the class but her father had had the decency to die. I lied to those who wanted to know that my father worked abroad. The summer of love was still to come and, in any case, free love only applied to the beautiful people out there, not the parents of good grammar school girls in South Wales.
My French teacher was called Miss George. She was soft-spoken with a gentle face and greying uncontrollable hair. In her lesson she asks around the class the question, “Est ce que faites votre pere?” Thirty three girls sitting in rows waiting for their turn, or in my case, praying for the bell to ring, please, before Miss George gets to me, please don’t let her ask me. Shall I lie, make up an answer? “Il est un medecin. “”Tres bien,” where does he work? No, I’d blush, stutter, be caught out. “Mon pere est mort.” Convenient but they all know. The bell rings, the problem goes away for today, and I go home to steak and kidney pie and rice pudding.
So was that it? The worst I had to bear? It stands out in my memory but when I stop and think, try as I might, I cannot recall one unkind comment, not one slur on my parentage through the whole of my childhood and adolescence. If that was as bad as it got, then surely the family did its job well.
When I enter the house that is now my home, I breathe in the same sense of security that my first home gave me; I hope my children feel it here too.
Albert House has been in a state of disrepair for a few years now
I was the last of the family to be born in Albert House and I linger over the link with the past. I’ve looked on old maps, tried to locate the public house that was to become my home. I’ve never been able to find it.
Judith Barrow 