Dreaming of a White Christmas...part 1

Memories of a West Country Christmas. I grew up on a farm in south Gloucestershire in the 60s. It was a way of life that has gone forever.

When I reached home, red cheeked after the mile and a half walk from the bus in the cold sharp wind, I could smell a warm spiciness in the kitchen. My mother was making the Christmas puddings. The mixture was waiting in the large china bowl with the wooden spoon, ready for me to give it a stir and make a wish - and taste a little bit. I helped spoon the mixture into several smaller china basins and my mother tied large pieces of cotton cloth over the tops making a handle from the ends. Tomorrow the kitchen would be a warm haze of steam while they sat for hours in the large galvanised steamer, the water at a steady simmer.

Christmas had begun, but it was still an achingly long time to wait for an eight year old. Gazing into the toy shop on the way home from school where I changed buses I'd already picked out some items for my Christmas list; mostly things to add to my toy farm and miniature garden. I planned what to buy for my three big sisters and new baby brother and wondered how far my savings would stretch.

The next day there was more mixing and tasting: the cake. My mother always left plenty of the rich and fruity mixture in the bowl to be scraped out and eaten raw. At the weekend my eldest sister, Judy, would carefully ice and decorate it with coloured lines of icing spelling 'Happy Christmas' and green marzipan holly leaves and red berries. The smell of the cake baking was complemented by the fresh aroma from the annual crate of oranges. Each brightly coloured fruit was wrapped in tissue proclaiming its provenance from an exotic sunny country. This year there was a crate of apples too. Every evening each member of the family would choose a fruit to be eaten after tea in front of the roaring log fire.

Mince pies, with the mince oozing out, were baked and stored in tins for visitors. Stu, the postman, his pipe clamped firmly in his teeth while he rode his rounds on his Post Office bicycle came laden with cards and the occasional parcel, but he still had time for a cup of coffee. The sweet aroma of his pipe tobacco lingered in the air after he had gone.

Judy retrieved the Christmas decorations from the musty cupboard beneath the stairs and examined them, selecting those she deemed fit for another year. This year she added baubles and tinsel leftover from her Christmas window display at the department store where she worked as a display artist. The crepe streamers might just do once more. Strings were pinned into the sitting room’s old walls to hold the numerous cards that were arriving. Those from our mother’s friends and relations in Australia came in the first batch, their pictures of koalas and kookaburras contrasting with robins in the snow and carol singers outside quaint English churches.

The arrival of the Christmas tree brought a new aroma into the house; its sprucy scent  mingling with the rest. The fairy lights, as always, didn’t work the first time but patient testing of each minute bulb to find the culprit was rewarded and the colours shone out once more. This year Judy made a star for the top of the tree, declaring the fairy doll to be too old-fashioned. Our father came in from his farm chores with two fine bundles of mistletoe cut down from apple trees in the orchard. While my sisters hung the smaller one from the light fitting in the centre of the sitting-room he fixed the large one to sway from the ceiling in the hall. Everybody helped cut the holly bearing bright red berries and arranged it around the room, with shrieks when fingers were stabbed by its dark shining prickly leaves.

The whine of the bench saw in the shed started up every evening as our father cut more logs to be piled up in the log baskets for the winter fires. Ash logs burnt the best. Sometimes I would watch, not needing to be told to stand well back out of  danger, as the sharp teeth tore into the wood. The logs smelt of woodland walks.

The Possibilities Are Endless....

In 2005, 45 year old musician, Edwyn Collins, had a major stroke. He spent six months in hospital struggling with mobility, memory and communication problems. Suffering from dysphasia his only words were 'yes', 'no', 'Grace Maxwell' (his wife's name) and a recurrent utterance 'The possibilities are endless.'

I was lucky enough to win tickets to the première of the film The Possibilities Are Endless at BFI on Southbank on October 11th, courtesy of InterAct Stroke Support, which I blogged about here in honour of my friend Annabel, an InterAct reader, who died four years ago.

As a speech and language therapist I have worked with many people who, like Edwyn, are dysphasic after a stroke so the film had a special resonance for me. My friend who accompanied me to the première had set up a number of activity groups for dysphasic people in Vancouver and further afield in British Columbia, Canada.  I was pleased that Connect and Speakability were given mentions in the Q & A session after the film - these two charities give great practical support to dysphasic people, although I cannot omit saying that the chief support for anybody who has a stroke in UK apart from family and friends is, of course, the NHS.

I have witnessed numerous journeys of recovery; some amazing, some much more mundane but all required hard work and perseverance. Most people don't get their stories heard but at last here is a documentary that follows one of them. You can read my review of the film for InterAct Stroke Support here.

View the trailer.

For more info on the film see Possibilities Facebook page here

Facing the Dragons

Last night I received a call from Rosie Canning.

'You've won,' she said. For a moment or two I wondered what on earth she meant. 'The Dragons.'

In May, The Finchley Literary Festival held a Dragon's Pen event where 14 writers each had 5 minutes in which to pitch a novel or short stories to three formidable dragons. In reality, Gillian Stern, Cari Rosen and Mary Musker were all very supportive of our writing with great immediate feedback, minus any fire breathing. One writer would be selected for some mentoring.

I am thrilled to be chosen as the writer who will now be able to receive some mentoring and have replicated Gillian's very kind words in her email.

We three Dragons are delighted to let you know that Lindsay Bamfield has won this year's Finchley Literary Festival's Dragon's Pen for her novel-in-progress Do Not Exceed Fifty.

Lindsay writes extremely well. Her narrative voice is engaging and convincing and we were impressed with the flow of the story, the immediacy of the voice, the structure of the narrative and the tone of her dialogue. Her internal and external observation is excellent and we found ourselves drawn in to Xanthe's life, eager to know if her quest to 'find a man' works out. There is an effortless tone to her writing - a fiendishly difficult skill to pull off.

Lindsay will now have the opportunity to be mentored by Gillian Stern, an editor and writer for Bloomsbury, Orion and Penguin.

In addition, we are also awarding a runner-up spot to Anne Oatley, for her novel-in-progress Blue Devil. We were excited by the strength and originality of her writing, which is taut, intriguing and surprising. Anne will also be given the opportunity to be mentored by Gillian.

We loved being Dragons and over the next couple of days, will be sending some feedback to all the writers who entered. Thank you for having us and we hope to be back next year. 

Gillian, Cari and Mary

I'm really looking forward to the next step, which will be quite a new experience for me, although of course, Greenacre Writers members have critiqued my work in the past which I found very beneficial - as well as sometimes challenging. Their input certainly helped me be able to present something worthy of the Dragons.  

 

Congratulations to runner up Anne Oatley. We are both very fortunate to be selected as I know we were up against some pretty formidable opposition.

 

Signing off so I can go and practise jumping so I won't be exaggerating when I say I'm over the moon.

Do we own our characters?

All writers of fiction create characters. Some we love, some we hate, some we kill off. We do with them whatever we wish but once their stories are read by others, what then? Do we still own our characters or do we give them freely to our readers? 

We know that fiction will be interpreted differently by readers and so our characters will be viewed in a number of ways. No matter how well we have written them, readers will react differently to them depending on a multitude of factors. 

When a chapter of my work was being critiqued, the critique group agreed that the plot needed a shake-up. Someone made a suggestion which horrified me. Because I knew my character would never do that! She just wouldn’t. I had assumed from the way I had crafted her that this would be a given! However whether my writing was poorly executed or my critic’s understanding of people was limited is a separate issue; I was able to make changes to the chapter with my character true to herself. 

But supposing this writer was to write a sequel? (Assuming the original was ever published, of course.) What might my character end up doing?

I have just read Longbourn by Jo Baker. Written from the point of view of the maid in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, I began reading the book with great interest. However by the middle I found it less convincing. The backstory seemed to me somewhat implausible (although I am aware that, without giving any story away, the situation at the centre of the plot often did happen). While I was reading, all I could think was what would Jane Austen think of the story ascribed to one of her main characters? Would she be horrified or would she say, ‘Well, yes, it doesn’t surprise me at all.’ Jane Austen was not unaware of the issues raised – they are mentioned in more than one of her books, but would this particular character have behaved in that way?

I looked up readers’ reviews on a well-known book site. They were mostly positive but one who gave it a one star rating said of this character ‘he would never have done that.’ The reviewer’s indignation flies off the screen and I can’t help but agree. 

There are literally hundreds of spin offs, sequels and re-writes of Pride and Prejudice: the first I read were Emma Tenant’s back in the 90s. I thought they were awful but I can’t really remember why other than I didn’t think this writer really understood the behaviour of people like the Darcys. I also recently read Death Comes to Pemberley and was totally unimpressed. PD James devotes a lot of the book explaining and justifying characters’ behaviour in Pride and Prejudice – if we have read it we know why they behaved in the way they did. Jane Austen made it quite clear. It adds nothing to our understanding of P&P, and in my opinion, the murder story is a very weak plotline.

The Austen Project has commissioned six well-known authors to write updated versions of Jane Austen’s six completed novels. Sense and Sensibility by Joanna Trollope, and Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid have been published so far with Pride and Prejudice by US writer Curtis Sittenfeld coming out shortly and Emma by Alexander McCall Smith soon after. Will characters conceived in the late 18th and early 19th century make successful jumps to the 21st? Will these versions add anything to Austen’s characters or will they diminish them? 

Moving away from Austen, one writer who does give an interesting read is Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea, her story of Bertha Mason, who became Mrs Rochester and ended her days as the madwoman in the attic at Thornfield Hall. Here Bertha is granted a voice which she is denied in Jane Eyre.

I quite liked Sally Beauman’s Rebecca’s Tale, her story of Daphne du Maurier’s eponymous Rebecca who is also denied her own voice as she is already dead. But I wonder what du Maurier would have made of this assessment? Rather more, I suspect, than of Susan Hill’s sequel, Mrs De Winter, which lacked much insight at all. And let’s say nothing about Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlett, the appalling sequel to Gone With The Wind.

I’d be interested to hear your views on sequels, prequels, re-writes and spin-offs.

How is your mental health today?

In the week that we learned the sad news of Robin Williams' suicide, the media has been full of issues concerning mental health and mental illness. The strongest messages are that mental illness can affect anyone and must not be stigmatised and the need for greater support for those needing help. Early intervention is key and can literally mean the difference between life and death and, perhaps even more importantly, can enhance the quality of life.

I have lost three friends to suicide. All three were intelligent, articulate, talented and well-liked men, but who carried burdens they could not shake off. Could they have been helped to prevent their deaths? Like most people who know someone who has taken their own life, I asked myself if I could have done more, could anyone have done more and the answer is still 'I don't know.'

H. had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in his first year at Cambridge University. All too common a scenario. He didn't complete his degree but after treatment went on to work in his chosen field in computer technology and established his own business. H. looked well, he made good money and enjoyed the good things in life. Over a celebratory dinner for my birthday, he glanced around at the opulent dining room and with his customary grin, leant forward so the rather superior waiter would not hear and murmured, 'He looks as if he'd be horrified if he knew he'd just served a schizophrenic here at the Ritz.'

At the time many people, and all too frequently the media, portrayed schizophrenics as crazy, unpredictable people who were a danger to society and should be locked up. People who were not fit to be dining at the Ritz.

H. did not fit that view but the reality was that his illness was never very far away and so he too could be a little unpredictable at times. He sometimes felt safer not venturing out and became withdrawn. He didn't let people down but always let them know that he wouldn't be joining them at their party or whatever. What he feared most was that one day he would have auditory hallucinations that would tell him to do something dreadful. 'If I had voices telling me to kill someone, I think I'd believe that was what I had to do,' he told me. The fact that he'd never experienced hallucinations did not allay his fears. The negative media depictions of schizophrenia worked to fuel them. His anxiety made his paranoia worse and that inhibited his work, his social life...you can see where this is going. When he wasn't well, H's world of paranoia and conspiracy theory seemed much more real to him than the world that most of us inhabited. 'Being sane is harder than being mad,' he said, 'because when you're obviously mad, no-one expects you to behave 'normally.' The rest of the time I have to make sure I act normal and not tell people my crazy theories in case they think I'm nuts!'

I wrote a small piece (the second half of which I later adapted and was awarded first prize in a 250 word flash fiction competition,) reflecting H's story for a mental health awareness day a while back to illustrate that mental illness can affect anyone including the good and beautiful. H. was both.

Double Viewpoint.

He glances at the opulent surroundings. His impression is one of pink grandeur. He tastes a mouthful of the exquisite dish the waiter has set before him and savours it with appreciation. For now, life is good. The past year has allowed some much needed respite, to enjoy life, take things easy. The doctor was right, he admits to himself, the medication and relaxation are a good prescription, but it will drive him mad to opt out for too long. It isn’t entirely time off; in effect he’s working uncover. He observes constantly, watching people, remembering faces, noting incidents. Even now, he’s studying those around him. Admittedly, here it’s only those with plenty of money at their disposal. He smiles at his wife, happy that she is enjoying herself - she deserves this treat. They haven’t often celebrated their wedding anniversary because he’s usually been away. To every other diner they look like a normal couple in early middle age, both attractive, affluent but quite ordinary. Only he knows the elegant façade hides a different story. Very soon his work will take over again – he’s aware that everybody thinks he’s crazy the way he works, but it has to be done. Still, the last twelve months have been fun; a weekend in Paris, punting on the Cam. Opera, theatre, concerts, good restaurants and now dinner at The Ritz. He’s enjoyed it all but it can’t last forever. Not long now, he thinks, before the real work will begin again.

She looks across at him; so handsome in his Italian suit, crisp white shirt and the beautiful silk tie they'd chosen together just a couple of months ago in Paris. Does she herself match up? He smiles back at her reassuringly. The past year has been one of glorious respite, and fun. Catching up on what they have missed in previous years. He looks well, on good form, funny, chatty, thoroughly good company but not quite so relaxed as in the last few months - not a good sign. His eyes are fixed on the piano player, that frown of concentration flickering on his brow. The one she has learned to trust as the harbinger. Has he taken all his medication? Please let him have taken it all. Seven and a half tablets are the lowest he can go before his thoughts become impossibly tangled and he goes crashing out into the stratosphere of insanity. There will be one chance only, as they make their way home, to ask him - while he is happy, communicative and still reasonable. If she misses that tiny opportunity he will spiral away. No more dinners at The Ritz, instead visits to the Priory. She appraises their fellow diners. To everyone else they look like a normal couple celebrating their marriage. Nobody else guesses they are a couple bound together, as much as they are separated, by his schizophrenia. 

After another long bout of illness, where depression also became a key factor, H. took his own life. I don't know his exact reasons but I believe the burdens he carried were simply too great to bear.

I miss his crazy conspiracy theories but most of all I miss his humour, his generosity, and his kindness. That last is perhaps the most important because people weren't always kind to him.






 

A Versatile Blogger? Me?

Thank you to Patsy Collins for nominating me as a versatile blogger. Patsy's blog is one I follow slavishly because she finds out about all sorts of writing competitions and generously publicizes them on her blog along with snippets of her writing world. A number of her posts explore the varied meanings of words which are linked to writing competitions - take a look at Patsy's blog

My next task as a versatile blogger is to tell you seven random things about myself and then nominate another fifteen versatile bloggers, who are invited to do the same. The idea is of course to introduce our readers to blogs they may not have visited.

I've been told that one's blog should really focus on a subject you are passionate about with interesting and informative posts. My blog was originally created with the intention of focusing on writing, but it has stayed into other territories. All writers must read so book-talk must be allowed on a writing blog. Working as a speech and language therapist, I'm interested in language and communication in general so that sneaks in too - but again that is related. My other passion is travel so I can't help giving that a mention every now and again. I figure so long as I'm writing about travel then it's OK for a writing blog. So really that means writers can write about anything at all and it will count as perfectly relevant for a writing blog.

Whether this makes me versatile, disorganized or just incredibly well-rounded, I'm not sure. Now seven random facts...

1) I have been to Timbuktu.

2) I have three great-nephews - but am trying not to emulate my own great-aunt who smelled of peppermints and had whiskers.

3) I have danced on the stage of the Shaw Theatre in London (odd, considering that I can't dance).

4) I drink coffee but not tea.

5) The possession that I have had the longest is a small wooden cow that my sister brought back from Switzerland when I was four.

6) I once had dinner with George Clooney.  I never tell fibs.  I might have told the odd fib here and there, but prefer to call it poetic licence.

7) I have secretly cast most of the characters for the film for my unpublished book.

Here is a list of writerly blogs that I enjoy who I have nominated:

Wendy's Writing Now, but I know that Wendy has already been nominated.
Julie's Quest
Tina K Burton
The Elephant in the Writing Room
Brightwriter60
The Literary Pig
Helen Yendall's Writing blog
Cobbled Together
Dan's Adventures in Fiction
Living the Write Dream (ah, but Samantha has also been nominated already)
Get On With It
Rebeccah Writes
My Kind of London

And two from Greenacre Writers - whose work I have had the privilege to read and even critique!

The first from Helen whose blog focuses on OCD, with a lot of interesting and informative insights, The Reluctant Perfectionist. Helen has also written a novel with this theme at its core - and which I hope will soon to be published.

And last but not least, the blog from fellow Greenacre Writers founder Rosie Canning  who writes about writing but also about campaigns to assist care leavers. Rosie has written extensively on this subject both in her fiction and various articles.

Enjoy!

Words with JAM have now published the winning stories from the 2013 competitions judged by David Haviland (fiction agent for the Andrew Lownie Literary Agency), Polly Courtney (author of Feral Youth) and Susan Jane Gilman (author of The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street). This is their second collection of work from new writers.

Words with JAM describes An Earthless Melting Pot: 'A heady mixture of stories, from romance to spine-chilling tension and from the virtual world to the extreme worlds of the self-deluded, these stories will take you to places you’ve never been before.'

A mixture of longer stories and flash fiction, I'm thrilled that my flash-fiction piece, Beneath the Arches, is included.

For more details see Words with JAM