Tag Laurel Lindstrom

An extract from The Ashes in the Boot Chapter 5

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It was while Brenda and Audrey were busy navel gazing and some two days after Brenda had established herself in Audrey’s basement guestroom. At the bungalow in Great Leigh a waning Ford Fiesta is parking wonky on the lane near the drive. The car belongs to Luke and Brenda’s neighbours and it cannot be seen behind a large delivery van with Asda painted in bright and cheery green on its side. As they get out of the car, the occupants of the Ford Fiesta also cannot be seen. Renée Sagemill and Ann Apio have lived in Great Leigh for about as long as Luke and Brenda and for most of that time have observed from a distance a miserable couple living a miserable life. Private miseries keep Ann and Renée tightly squeezed within the confines of their own often silent routines. They know little about Brenda and Luke, except that she’s the carer and he is wheelchair-bound.

But lately, following a series of dreadful losses (the dog, the ancient stagleaf fern, a  final parent or two) Ann and Renée’s constraints have eased a little. They need no longer suffer that fraught blend of guilt and defiance that was their only counter to the sniping and nastiness of their remaining parents. That the remaining parents remained no longer afforded Ann and Renée a previously unfamiliar and unexpected freedom. They were still moving out of the fog to appreciate what that freedom should mean to them, as individuals and as a couple. But less caught up in their own anxieties, they had started to notice the shouts and crying. Ugly sounds and energies seeped from their neighbours’ ill-fitting windows and doors. They had started to notice that Brenda was shakey and dishevelled when she helped her husband from his wheelchair into the car. They had observed that as she tried to lift his legs, she would sometimes crouch over unexpectedly and utter a small cry. And they had noticed that in the last few days, Brenda was nowhere to be seen.

“Shall we then? Shall we just go and check? What’s a good excuse? I know it’s nosey and none of our business, but we haven’t seen her in days.” Renée looked at Ann with a hard eye. She’s always so nosey, so concerned about other peoples’ stuff. “Look, if you want to barge in on complete strangers, go ahead. But I’m not coming with you. I’ll just wait here.” And Renée folded her arms and turned her head away to stare elsewhere. As Ann clambered out of the car and set off with rapid little steps towards the bungalow, her mind was winding itself too tight and her breathing was starting to stop. What would she say? Should she start with an apology for intruding? Or should she just pretend to be popping in to say hello. How lame is that. Back in the car Renée sighs and leans over to the back of the car to retrieve one of the staghorn ferns. They had bought them in a two for one: a back up if one died, which it wouldn’t. No more dying they had agreed. “Ann” she hisses striding low and fast. “Ann, I’m coming too. We can give them this.”

The couple and their fern round the van to see Luke standing almost upright on the threshold. He’s leaning against the doorframe to pick up bags of groceries. The women look at each other, small frowns and downturned mouths. A light breeze lifts the fern’s antler shaped leaves, a green stag testing the air. As the Asda van pulls away, Ann and Renée as one move closer into the tall leylandii hedge to see what happens next. It’s a first to see Luke Mordrake fully upright and unexpectedly tall. They watch as he moves back and forth carrying many shopping bags into his house. He didn’t move with any particular nimbleness or grace, but he was erect and mobile. The wheelchair was nowhere in sight. The two women again exchanged glances and continued to spy unseen until all the shopping bags had been removed.

Endgame

Laurel Lindström 1 Comment

The cleft of a hill blocks a miserly sun, rising slow and lazy. Her thin smock clings chill and comfortless and yet she does not move. The cold wraps around her goosepimpled skin, blue, tightwoven. And in her clenched hand the phone is buzzing. She holds it tighter to feel its motion and moves deeper into the undergrowth. Scratches are innumerable, skin tingling with pain, blood and water. Sleepy birds an anxious rustling somewhere deeper in. She shivers and cleaves tight to the ground no longer certain that this is any fun. 

Am I scaring you yet? The message from an unknown but known sender. It’s been going on all night this game, this cat and mouse thing. Touch table tennis, dirty words and dirt all over her body, her mind satiated with shifting equilibriums. Fear. Focus. Shared imperatives to arouse and thrill, but going too far now. Is it becoming murderous or is that just more of the resonance?

She can’t get out. He knows she is there, huddled in her dirty damp dress, shivering under the shrubs. Sparrows are starting to chatter, the slope still blocks the light, but light is coming stealthy and toxic. Sparrows and light together they betray her. Dress rending a sad small cry as she creeps slowly higher and sees a crouched form. It creeps menacing slow in the paling darkness as the night gently seeps away. A rock and a break in the shrubs to her right and she reaches out and throws herself into the open. 

He sees only a screaming banshee as she jumps down from her small vantage point, unseen rock in hand. The blood seeps slowly into his eyes as he cries out but he cannot remember the safe word. She raises her hand again and brings down the rock hard so close, its mass splitting her nails and grazing his head. He looks up at her fury, mouth gaping and lap wet. Into his open maw she drops a handful of stones and damp earth. From his open hand she takes the car key and walks out into the rising sun.

Sixteen Rothmans

Laurel Lindström 2 Comments

His car parked careless and crooked. He notices he’s left it on double yellow lines as he gets out and hurries into the newsagents. A dingy dusk is slowly coming on. Autumn’s stealth reaching out. Summer’s languid sprawl stifled. As he shuts the shop door behind him, the radio is playing Bye Bye Baby, a thin print baffled sound. The racks of magazines and newspapers are silent, unperused witnesses. At the counter he says “twenty Rothmans” fingering the change in his rough and calloused hand and finding a fifty pence piece. Slaps it down “there you go”. And she doesn’t flinch at the sharp bang but instead slides her eyes over him, bold and blatant. There’s a moment of sullen stillness, before she slowly turns her back.

When she reaches for the cigarettes high on the shelf behind her, he notices how her shirt rises, just above the top of her jeans. An edge of flesh. He can see painted nails only slightly chipped, imagines soft smelling hair, moist open mouths. A fascination that should have been momentary persists. The Bay City Rollers are singing “she’s got me but I’m not free”. As the chorus cuts in, she hands over the few pence of change. There’s the glimmer of a smirk as if she’s made some decision. He tries and fails to stare down her brittle stonebound eyes. He sees some decision that could be in his favour, or perhaps not. By the time he’s pocketed the change, she’s pasted on a real smile, doing her best against the odds to be winsome. “You’re not from around here are you?” “No” he says scooping up his cigarettes. “Thanks”. And he  hurries back to the double yellow lines. As he leaves the shop, he notices the sign with its hours dangling and bouncing on the moving door, opening and closing, opening and closing. Six o’clock he thinks. Not so far away. Unbidden the thought. “Maybe I’ll pop back.” And he glances over his shoulder, lazy hand raised.

The hotel is only a short distance up the slowly clogging road. He has a map and directions, and the journey was simple enough. He’s already followed most of it, not counting the unscheduled stop for smokes. Frowning out from tall and dreary undergrowth the downtrodden hotel is hard to see from the road. But he sees the tired sign and pulls in. He gets his tatty bag from the backseat, and picks up the cigarettes from the front. In reception he opens the pack and deep delicious that first long lungful. He signs his name and takes the key on its heavy fob. He turns towards the musty stairwell and takes the stairs two at a time in a lanky, uneven stride. The cigarette’s in a corner of his mouth and thoughts of her are in his jeans. The room is small, colourless, and growing greyer with night now fully formed. Bed. Wardrobe. Chest of drawers with a rusting Teasmaid and ancient biscuits plastic wrapped and dusty. He throws his bag down on the single bed and looks at his watch. It’s nearly twenty to six.

Stubbing out the cigarette in the ashtray on the bedside table he looks again. Still twenty to six. He lies down watching grey spirals rise slowly towards the ceiling, fading to tar. What next between now in this gloomy room full of unspecified browns and his job interview in the morning. As if he didn’t know. Hours and hours in the room’s soulsapping shadows, or at the hotel’s little bar also washed with unspecified browns, peppered with unspecified men like him. On the road looking for something else. Something else maybe at six o’clock. Another cigarette. He’d run out as he had passed the racecourse on the A19 into York. He knew he should cut down as he crawled in traffic through Fulford and had even pondered using this trip as an excuse to give up; a sort of marker between where he’s been and where he’s going. Who he was and who he thinks he should be. From the dismal to the thrill of the unknown. All he had to do was get through the traffic and turn right into Heslington Lane to Egbert’s Hotel. Get to his interview in the morning and his life would change. No more fags, no more birds. No more picking winners that didn’t win. Tomorrow they’d love him. Tomorrow he’ll be the winner. The one. Bye Bye Baby. Then he’d seen the corner shop, a beacon in the drear. With singular determination and no will power at all, he had lurched the car onto the yellow lines and gone inside for Rothmans.

Mika had watched him with narrowing eyes. Thin, wirey, old. He’s really old she said to herself, proper wrinkly. Might make a change. They say at school that older men are better at it, slower. She’s not sure what slower or better might mean, but the wrinkles would be a first. From his sharp blue eyes to his neck, the visible lines mapped a life and told old stories. She didn’t care much about what he had to say, but what would the rest look like? She pondered this as the lights were coming on out in the street and the traffic was thickening and slowing. She called up the stairs “I’m going now. Don’t forget to lock up.” A grunt and a foot on the stair and Mika flipped the lightswitch and stepped out into the faceless evening. She had homework she was supposed to do. She had promised to do it, but it was boring. And there was no one at home until her Mum got back from the dogtrack later. Should she linger? It’s cold and starting to rain. Was he likely to come back? Would she dare if he did?

At school next morning all the talk was of the corpse found in Egberts Hotel, stretched out, bound to the bed and strangled. Sixteen Rothmans in a pack on the bedside table and an empty ashtray the only clue.

Wasting your time

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Watching our hens is one of my favourite time-wasters. I call it thinking about stuff, but really it’s just mindless voyeurism. Seeing them peck and scratch about takes the mind into another realm, a much simpler one where the range of decisions to be made is limited. It’s like watching television where you are basically watching other people work, so it’s restful.

Today my favourite hen to ponder is Dahlia Lamé, so named because of her long neck and heavy fringe which makes her look like a llama. She is golden, silky and might be related to the Dalai Lama (not really). In the world of Dahlia Lamé, food is the top priority. She’s usually first out of the chicken coop in the morning, as long as she manages to elbow (do chickens have elbows)? her way past Marlena, who’s about twice her size and black with copper overtones. Dahlia Lamé makes straight for the feeder and pecks aggressively and noisily at the food for much longer than the other hens or our feisty little Peking Bantam cockerel. That might be because the cockerel usually has sex on his mind first thing in the morning. But he struggles to get out of bed, is sleepy and prone to laziness and as he is too small to reach Marlena, he soon gives up. He’s usually distracted by Dahlia Lamé’s urgent peck, peck, pecking so he joins her for breakfast. The cockerel is called Mustapha and his plumage looks at first glance to be black, but it is far from black. It ranges from iridescent greens and purples to white when the wind blows up beneath his underskirts. Mustapha’s really quite a magnificent little fellow.

The rest of the girls are distracted by the corn we throw out for them every morning, so Dahlia Lamé has no competition at the feeder and can eat and eat. Mustapha is a gentleman, so whilst he joins Dahlia Lamé, he does not crowd her. She eats consistently but never seems to get any bigger, unlike her sister Lavender who’s the bravest chicken I have ever met. Plump, pale purple and very round this little bantam hen waits every morning until all the other chickens are out of the coop. She sits patiently on the perch a metre or so up from the floor of the henhouse. She waits for the perfect moment. She checks wind speed and direction, she checks possible destination points and has an eye out for any obstructions. She seems to wait for confirmation that all preflight checks are complete and satisfactory. When she has it, plus a comforting little tickle under her little chicken chin she’s suddenly and noisily aloft. Lavender mostly lands with a bump about three metres from her perch, following a relentlessly downwards trajectory. Lavender gives herself a little huffle before scampering on her feathery feet to some distant corner of the enclosure. She remembers breakfast and then scampers back to the others. By tomorrow her failure is forgotten.

Why am I telling you this? It’s because today I have to waste time, abuse it and slap it about a bit. I have to let time dissipate, melting and dribbling away, gone forever. I don’t know why, but some days are like that, some days need that. And if you are reading this, you probably understand and I am not alone after all.

…so here is me trying to write romantic fiction

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The wind drove lonely clouds across a lowering sky and an icy rain was falling. Esmerelda pulled her shawl tight around her and hunched her shoulders. She leant into the wind, against the cold. She knew that somewhere in this desolate landscape she’d find the house. She knew that somewhere in the house, she’d find him. Would they let her see him? Would they know why she was there? Would he?

Ten years ago she could remember the way across the moors to the house. But that last time was in a summer of love and sunshine and so much had happened since. And there was so much more that was coming that Esmerelda daren’t take the chance of losing her way. She had to see him, she had to tell him about Elly before it was too late. She couldn’t risk getting lost, so she stuck to the road. Eyes down, one foot in front of the other, relentless and dogged along the sodden track.

The rain was coming down more heavily and it was getting dark. Off in the distance she could see the lights from the Hall. She trudged on determined, cold and so very alone as the dusk deepened and the wind picked up. To comfort herself Esmerelda took refuge in memories dragged up from the depths of her being, from somewhere deep amongst the shards of her broken heart. Simon had loved her, this she knew. Simon was coming for her this she knew too. Until things changed.

The certainty ended when she encountered a wayward hussar on the run from his regiment. He had told Esmerelda a different story when he had begged shelter. In a cavernous kitchen deep in the bowels of a big house, Esmerelda was getting food ready for the family. They were due to return to Harehurst Hall within hours and the whole house was in an uproar of preparations. She was humming softly and for a few brief moments, she was blissfully alone in the kitchen stirring a steaming pot of casserole. The hussar must have been waiting for his moment, the moment when Esmerelda was by herself. Drifting in and out of consciousness he had staggered in towards the warm, falling across the scullery threshold exhausted and hungry. An unexpected and filthy mess had fainted on Esmerelda’s immaculate floor. 

Esmerelda gave a small scream of surprise, dropping her spoon into the depths of the stew. Hot gravy was splashing on her apron and burning her hands. At the sound of her cry the hussar roused himself and looked up, peering at her through tangled wet hair, his blue eyes bleary and bloodshot. He was wild with unspoken fear and looked about the kitchen in terror, lest someone else come into the room. But the rest of the staff were busying themselves elsewhere, anxious to be ready for the telltale sounds of hooves and wheels on gravel as the family finally arrived home. Esmerelda could see that this pathetic wretch could do her no harm. She could see that the poor man needed food, warmth and shelter. He was doing his best to whisper something and she thought she heard in his garbled mumbling something about Simon. She drew a sharp breath and hurried to shut the main kitchen door, locking it sharply. 

… to be continued (or not). 

Losing one’s app-etite

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Living life via apps is not ideal, even if you’re young and trendy which I am definitely not. But I do think of myself as technically adroit, having made a reasonable living writing about technology for the last thirty years or so. So when I get confused and stressed because I cannot work out how to pay for parking or log onto an online bank account or buy concert tickets on my phone I get quite dejected. When I can’t find ferry tickets, order books, check in for a flight, join a Zoom call or whatever, I am increasingly inclined to put it down to age. Clearly I am too old for the appilytic life.

But then I see young people also getting frustrated, also swearing and huffing and puffing and having minor hissy fits. “Let’s just leave it.” “Oh, this app is crap” “I can’t be bothered to take care of this now,” and such like is not just a common response amongst old people. Young people get pissed of with apps too!

And this started me wondering why it is that old people accept that because they are old they can no longer learn new stuff. This suggests that it is ok to stop thinking for oneself, to stop learning. Yes thinking is harder when your brain is loaded to the gills with a lifetime’s experience and knowledge. All those people, books, places, movies and songs. All those memories of amazing conversations, lovers, food and drinks. Having overstuffed brains may be why old people tend to go with the cliché, because the excuse of age for losing the plot is convenient even if it isn’t always true. If you are in good health, do not accept that as every part of you decays with age, your imagination and curiosity inevitably go with it. Yes it is much easier just to believe what newspapers, television and websites say is true. After all, questioning the party line is just so tiresome. No! This is not the way to go. Informed critical thinking never has to stop and nor does your imagination.

It cannot be true that getting older means not having any more wild ideas. It cannot be true that the challenge of thinking for oneself is no longer worth  it. For most of us, getting older means that one can more or less make a choice and trust that it won’t matter if it is the wrong one. Someone else can sort out the consequences. Such arrogance. Laziness, tiredness, ill-health, complacency, fear, are all good reasons not to be bold with your thinking. But surely if none of the above apply, it has to be better to keep a young head, especially as everything else slides slowly into decrepitude.

There is an uglier side to this. Lots of old people look back on their lives, taking a certain smug satisfaction that they are still here, that they’ve made it to the final stretch. They are pleased to be old, because being old is some sort of a license to stop taking responsibility for thinking, doing, creating. But imagination mustn’t be allowed to run dry. Exciting ideas are not the preserve of youth, although the energy to implement them might be.

Young or old if you are feeling overwhelmed by an appilytic life, get out of your dusty corner and recapture yourself, starting with your imagination. Think three wild things a day and tell some bright young spark to turn them into apps. Step away from the grey shadows and face the light to reclaim the you you were in your prime. (Maybe have a little nap first to prepare yourself.) If your prime is now, make sure you do all you can to keep challenging the clichés as you age. Banish the mean and pinching clutches of decline and stretch towards the open and ever-expanding dimensions of your imagination. If that seems a push or you’re not sure how, don’t worry there’s probably an app for it. 

Opportunities for authors and their ilk

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The Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) recently published details of research into authors’ earnings. The study was conducted by the CREATe Centre at the University of Glasgow which found that the future of writing as a profession is under threat. But authoring isn’t under threat any more today than it ever was. People will always want to read and writers, whose imagination is their trade, are very good at reinvention. The ALCS figures, particularly the reduction in fulltime authors’ median earnings from £12,330 in 2006 to £7,000 in 2022, are alarming. But they do not tell a complete story.

Rapidly evolving digital technology has provided an environment for new commercial models within publishing. Technology has spawned a world of new opportunities throughout authors’ supply chains, primarily in online services and tools to support writers. Unfortunately this has helped to drive down average earnings.

The online publishing eco-system is a dynamic adjunct to the traditional publishing industry. It is one that publishers readily exploit without much investment. Hordes of online service providers from authors and copy writers to reviewers, filter and sift new talent at their own risk and to the benefit of publishers. These new players offer fee-based publishing opportunities and fee-based prizes in every imaginable category. New writers can today self-publish without much difficulty, because the technology and the people are there to grease the wheels. These business models did not exist in the same abundance in 2006.

There is a mutual dependency between the digital environment and those who inhabit it. And this is where publishers feed, either directly or via the agent community. That they can exploit the vanity of potential authors is a given. We are all keen for the attention of a commercial publishing contract that might take our careers in a new direction. And today there are so many more of us offering raw material: supply outstrips demand.

The online eco-system hosts all manner of writerly services from software and online courses, to review sites, editorial services, printing and publishing services, marketing, blog tours and publicity. The enormity of this opportunistic system, enhanced and amplified with a host of social media channels, means that anyone who fancies their chances as an author can present themselves as such. Authors are the raw material, rather than their work. Those who are good at the online gig (and patient enough to get good at it) are rewarded by traditional publishing in the end. Top selling titles based on blogging and websites with huge followings are massive successes. Publishers put money into these writers, knowing that their risk is mitigated.

The fall in authors’ average earnings between 2006 and 2022 reflects the brutal facts of supply and demand. Today’s economic landscape is much less favourable, as the ALCS data shows. There are so many more active authors and agents in our industry now and most will work for much less money than was likely in 2006. Back then there were far fewer writers actively pursuing success, and publishers were far hungrier.

Mainstream publishers today can and do focus on what are likely to be successful products, usually from credentialled writers. Mostly publishers are very good at doing this, as the astonishing turnover and profit figures confirm. The writer’s profession is about opportunity and yes luck. But luck has nothing to do with the inclination of mainstream publishers to turn away from reduced risk investments. That is never going to happen. Luck plays a part at all points in the publishing supply chain, from the writing and commercial attractions of a work, through to whether or not the paper costs for printing it on is within budget. The reliability or not of ‘luck’ is precisely what makes it luck. And there is nothing lucky in the success of top selling titles. They succeed because publishers put the money behind them to make sure that they succeed. As with celebrity tomes, the publishers of work that started life as a high profile blog already have a defined market.

Earning a living as an author has never been easy. Oscar Wilde wrote in a letter to one Mr Morgan that ‘the best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend upon it for their daily bread’. That was in 1885 and today’s publishing economics keep it that way.

The relationship between authors and publishers is changed. Publishers no longer want to recognise that support for authors is their responsibility. And why should it be when raw materials for new products are so readily available, the risk so much less and the profits so much more? The traditional contract between authors and publishers is broken. Authors need a new more compelling and sustainable model, one that authors themselves should dictate. This ought to mean opportunities for ambitious publishers keen to disrupt and reinvent their industry. Let’s hope it does.

The randomness of book publishing

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This is a quick summary of how my first book got published in 1997. It’s a story of great success and it’s a story of why I cannot get anywhere today.

It began in 1996 at a time when I believed unwaveringly in my life, my marriage and my ability to achieve just about anything. Red ribbons all round. My then husband had gone up to town for a meeting about websites or some such. He came home with the information that some guy would be sending me a letter about a book. “He asked us to write it as well as doing the website. We said you might be a better choice, because you write about technology.” “Oh” says I, “thanks” says I, adding that “I can’t do anything at the moment because I’ve got too much on.” Over supper then-husband said the Icon Books guys were interesting and that he enjoyed dealing with bright people. He said that they were pleased to hear that I was a journalist.

Two days later an envelope came in the post. It contained a compliment slip that said “further to our chat with Todd …”. There was also a cheque for £1500 and a contract for a book tentatively called The Internet for Beginners. The text was to be delivered in six months time. I think it was six months. There was a lot of words in the contract and stuff about royalties and translation rights and territories and so on. I read it carefully and it seemed reasonable enough. It really had no special meaning for me, it was just another commission. My biggest concern was delivering however many thousands of words they wanted within their deadline. It would mean real research, lots more reading than I usually bothered with and much time devoted to a single project. That was far from my usual habit of writing short articles following a loose brief and to a deadline. This internet project had serious potential to get very dull.

Deadlines are the only way that stuff gets done, so needless to say I didn’t start writing Introducing the Internet until about a month before the text was due, and that was only because I had nothing else to write that was more distracting. The book’s editor was Richard Appignanesi and the illustrator was Zoran Jevtic. Fortunately all the reading paid off and the manuscript was delivered on time. 10,000 copies were printed and immediately another 10,000 flew off the press. Impressive I thought, that so many people wanted to know about the internet and the Worldwide Web. Embroiled in the miseries of the end of what had once been such happiness, I gave the book no further thought. But then royalty statements and cheques started coming it. Translation rights and sales, all that. Still, wallowing in cold sorrow and an uncertain reality, none of it meant much to me. I did press interviews acknowledged reviews, spoke on the BBC, all in a dark sad haze distinguished only by its depth and persistence.

It is only in the last couple of years that I have come to appreciate just how unique my experience with Icon was. They did offer to publish whatever else I fancied but the person making the offer was such a serious sleazeball I didn’t bother. The book spent time in the Sunday Times nonfiction chart and was translated into various languages, so it was undoubtedly a success. I forgot about the book altogether until recently. Looking at it again, given how old it is, it surprisingly still works. 

More recently, after slogging away with the odious crowdfunding process, Unbound published my first novel in 2019. Thank you Unbound for that and all the fish. Unbound’s marketing and author engagement can best be described as derisory, so it is unsurprising that The Draftsman has sunk without a trace. What a contrast to the internet book. Now I look back in amazement at my experience with Icon and their …for Beginners series and wonder how it happened. But I know how: as a jobbing writer at a time when publishers sought out authors, I was lucky. And so were Icon. That is how these things work. Today the world of authoring is a much more crowded one and the serendipity that brought together Icon Books and Laurel Brunner is infinitely more random. Maybe that’s why life as a writer has these days become so weird. But weird is good. It’s how we spot the normal, at least what might be.

Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting by Penelope Mortimer – A review

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This book was originally published in 1958, but it’s a story we should all revisit. Not that Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting is peerless prose or a wild tale of derring-do. It is neither. Rather, this book is a glimpse of a place in time where men and women were on the edge of massive, generational change.

The approaching transition was from the cosy but fragile reality of the traditional, nuclear family to something much edgier. In this new something people divorced without stigma, lived together without being married and sat on each other’s laps in public. Women were on the verge of all the freedoms that sheer tights, short skirts and the contraceptive pill conferred. They were ready to turn away from conventional social constrictions and personal repression, towards something much more dangerous and risky. 

But in 1958 that was all yet to come. Postwar 1950s Britain was still a seriously limited world, a world where rationing hadn’t finished until 1954 and where Hitler’s ghost still cast a long and menacing shadow. People were subdued and passive, locked in the same class cage as before the war. With Naziism defeated the only war they faced was the Cold War, something too abstractly horrific to truly get their heads around. In this fifties world people clung to traditional roles, to old and dessicated habits because anything different or new was too terrifying. The thought of any kind of upheaval or change was direct trauma.

For most people, ideas that there could be alternatives to pre-war expectations, to new freedoms and roles, had an irrational power to instill fear. It was just too much to think about. Read the novels of Kingsley Amis and the poetry of Philip Larkin and amidst the brilliance you read a celebration of the ordinary and the pre-war status quo. Popular stories, novels and plays were about the quotidien, the unquestionable joys of the steady and reliable British routine. And we had a burgeoning of fantasies and escapism like The Borrowers and the Lord of the Rings presenting alternative safe presentations of struggle and triumph, to replace the horrors of war that had been on the doorstep.

Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting does none of this, but it does challenge the cosiness of the ordinary lives people were encouraged to live and any escapist fantasies they might have had. The decade was marked by economic growth and technological advance. Economic growth made the life of a housewife more exciting because she could shop at will for household appliances and stuff for herself and her family. Technology made life more convenient; television added scope for idle entertainment. But such advances also encouraged people, especially women, to question shifting individual expectations. They wanted to better understand what it means to have a fulfilled life and how to go about having one.

Penelope Mortimer’s Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting is clearly drawn from her own life’s experience as a wife, mother and housewife, and of her own frustrated intellect. In sparse and economical prose she presents a middle-class, white family living in what would once have been described as the stockbroker belt. Ruth and Max  Whiting have three children, two pre-teen boys who go to boarding school and an older daughter in her first year at Oxford. An unplanned but approaching birth is the reason for the daughter’s parent’s marriage in the first place, although Angela doesn’t know this. Angela thinks she’s in love and then she too falls pregnant. The young man in question is a carbon copy of her father at about the same age and situation in life.

Abortion wasn’t an option for Ruth and Max, but it has become unquestionably possible for Angela and Tony, even though it’s still illegal. This odious young man has contrived a personna of male authority, hiding his selfish and sleazy character without even a smidge of awareness that he is doing so. He has no moral compass, no sympathy for his girlfriend, no question of any response other than minimising his culpability. All this is carefully hidden behind a mimicry of traditional expectations of male behaviour, bluster and the puerile affectations of youth. That he wants to live up to the responsibility for getting himself and Angela out of a dreadful situation is fine in theory. But as he acts out the part, he lacks the moral courage or even the slenderest shred of nerve to face the horror of the proposed solution. Or its cost. In this regard perhaps not much has changed since the fifties.

But Ruth has been there before and can understand what needs doing, although how to do it is a harder problem. Her daughter’s child, although it will be aborted, becomes fictionalised in Ruth’s imagination. These imaginings are proxies for Ruth’s own future, although she wants to believe that the child will never be born. Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting takes its name from the nursery rhyme which plays on a tiny music box, Ruth has bought for a neighbour’s little girl. She decides to keep it and it becomes a talisman, a reference throughout the novel for Ruth’s need for something reliable and consistent. A bit like how women are these days with their mobile ’phones, the music box gives her something tangible, a reference point. It’s a reminder to keep her feet on the planet. Solving the pregnancy problem for Angela and imagining her unborn child’s fictitious life, together jolt Ruth forwards so she appears to slowly move away from her own nervous collapse. 

Nervous collapse was hidden too in the fifties, just like abortion, poverty, failure, affairs. Many of these are still hidden along with anything else that could be considered embarrassing or in need of response. But people today have far higher trust that their frailties might be accepted, their expectations realised. They have far more routes and support for resolutions and towards achieving their goals. Opportunities to express oneself through words, images, sound and any other form of narrative one might think of abound. The internet fuels a perennial explosion of ideas, expressions and opinions, reverberating endlessly, every moment of every day. Central to this inexhaustible supply of content is an obsession with self and individual identity, with the desperate need to express a unique persona and universal validity. Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting is a reminder that such luxuries are relatively new for most ordinary people and especially that they have been very, very hard won. We, men, women and other, have travelled a massive journey and Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting shows us a tiny bend in a very long road. That’s why we should read this book again.

Chapter 6 A visit from social services and a missing person’s report – Part 5

Laurel Lindström Leave a comment

The doorbell rang, breaking the already fractured image of this grand funeral slowly coalescing in Brenda’s mind. It was Mimis with the bill for his boiler work and as Brenda wrenched open Audrey’s front door he smiled and said: “That door wants planing.” Brenda watched as Mimis hovered on the doorstep without saying anything further. She wasn’t quite sure what he was waiting for, until she noticed the bill in his outstretched hand. Reaching for the envelop she said “thank you. I am sorry Audrey isn’t back yet”, and stayed still watching the man and out of nowhere wondering about the poetry thing. So she asked him. “Do you really write poems?” Mimis had never felt so excited in his life, but he was also gripped by an urgent panic. “Yes. No one else knows. At least, I mean you are the only one who knows. I don’t really talk about it.” Clearing his throat and shifting backwards down the step he smiled eyes wide and headed for his van suddenly energised that someone might actually consider him a poet instead of a boiler man. “Maybe I’ll bring you something to read”, he called over his shoulder. ”We could go to the park and I can explain them.” Explain them? Brenda waved half-heartedly and called a careful “yes, that would be nice” and wondering what’s to explain in a poem. And Mimis got into his van and drove off, a waving hand flung out of the window in careless farewell. Brenda, yet another bill in hand slammed the front door hard, left the bill in the kitchen and took herself slowly down the stairs to the basement. Lying in the dark she ran through the bills once again until she fell into a half-sleep, where Mimis’ bill grew into the size of a bedsheet. The details it showed in giant letters were fuzzy and feint, and the space at the bottom of the invoice was empty.

Mimis is indeed more than a boiler man, but being a boiler man has given his adult life structure and stability, quiet, a living. Being more than that might have carried some incipient risk. Ever since he came to London as a small child his life had been dramatic, and for Mimis drama was a normal part of his childhood. His English mother had died shortly after they moved to the UK from Thessaloniki. Hippies with their little boy and an adoring Yiayia and Papou in tow, his parents and grandparents had come to London in search not of drama but of calm. The loving couple willingly left behind the chaos and violence that had been their Greek reality for the chaos and confusion of London, with a foreign language and a little boy to raise thrown in for good measure. An English bride wasn’t really what Yiayia and Papou had wanted for their son, but life over death on a protest line was definitely preferable for all of them. And without her who knows where their lives in Athens would have taken them. Nowhere safe for sure. Their love for little Dimitrios was boundless. They cared for him through all the school plays and gatherings, and through their son’s working life driving a cab whilst framing ideas for ousting the generals in charge in Greece. He would share his ideas every evening over dinner, smoking, eating, and rattling conversations in noisy Greek. Mimis had tried to follow his father’s rants but his little boy Greek could not keep up. And the shouting made him anxious so he instead would put his head in Yiayia’s lap and wait for it to stop. When Papou died and his wife swathed herself in endless black and tears, Mimis feared she would soon follow. With only his dad and grandma, it was hard for Mimis to keep any connection to Englishness despite his successful disguise. He spoke flawless English but confused, vulnerable and excessively popular with the girls at his school Mimis’ spirit was Grecian. His schoolfellows gawped at those soft shining brown curls and his matchless eyes, the perfect complexion, olives and cream, those endlessly long eyelashes, his grace and muscularity. Excessively popular, excessively sensitive, uncertain and gullible. A broken heart at 17 was enough to leave him emotionally traumatised and wary, reluctant to interact with his schoolmates. Despite his grades, uni was out and instead he trained as a fixer of boilers, became superbly skilled at superficial chat and took no interest in any sort of commitment to any strangers. Mimis cared for his ailing father, looked after their house and after Yiayia died Mimis cooked pasticio and koulourakia for his dad. He followed Yiayia’s recipes from a broken book with pages marked and stained, persistent reminders of festivals and celebrations long since forgotten. The book was his connection to a life long gone but still vibrant and he always remembered that Greek Easter, like many other magics comes in its own time.