VISITING STONEHENGE, 1958
When we came first it was
old stones
standing in corn.
You reached it by a dusty, rutted track
and the wide white and golden downs
were born aloft by sky and skylark song.
We picnicked with our Thermos in the wild grass
on outspread rugs, devouring sandwiches my mother made,
lay back and watched the forming and reforming clouds,
the cricket's prance, the fleeting flight of butterflies and bees.
When we came first it was
old stones,
mute, mysterious, from somewhere lost in time,
untold by science. You could run your fingertips
along each deep striation, feel the sun's warmth,
the shadow's coolness, sense
our planet's poise, its massive substance
grabbed and grappled with
by our hands.
PETER DAVEY - ARTIST, WRITER AND POET
Sunday, 15 December 2019
Wednesday, 20 November 2019
OUR CHARACTERS - WHERE DO THEY COME FROM AND WHERE ARE THEY GOING?
One of the joys of writing is that it gives us a chance to play God. It allows us to shut ourselves up in our cosy little room with a cup of coffee and create a world which we (almost) entirely control while the ‘real’ world spins alarmingly out of control all around us. I say ‘almost’ because even our imaginary worlds sometimes run amok.
One of our most vital functions as God is to give birth to our characters. Fortunately we are spared the mess and pain of actual childbirth, for our characters just pop up fully formed and fully clothed (unless you’re E. L. James) and going about the business of enacting our story. But where do they come from?
Most writers will answer that they somehow emerge from the very fabric of the conception, like living organisms miraculously forming out of the primordial soup. Speaking as one who prefers writing realist fiction set in the contemporary world, the seeds of most of my novels and stories have come from events in my own life or the lives of people I know. It is generally true to say, therefore, that the characters have been loosely based on the protagonists in those dramas, but only very loosely. For once he or she has been born, a character tends to take on a life of their own and often ends up unrecognizable as the real-life person who inspired them, their characteristics often redirecting the plot.
Authors of science fiction, historical or fantasy novels may find their characters emerge in a different way. Historical novels often contain real historical figures who have been fictionalised – something which is possible since, however great the body of learning surrounding them, it is usually contradictory and they can thus be safely remodelled by the novelist. But whatever genre the author works in, I’m sure they would find (if they’re honest with themselves) a person, or people, they know - or a combination of people - at the root of their character. Scratch beneath the surface of your witch or vampire and you’ll probably find your parents in law.
Then comes the task of naming our babies. My wife’s cousin has two teenage boys called James and Sam, whose names I always confuse (to everyone’s acute annoyance) since, to me, Sam looks exactly like a James and James like a Sam. It is bizarre how certain names seem to suit certain people, and I am not sure how far this is subjective or objective. In our novels, of course, we are free to call our characters what we like and if they look like a Sam we can call them Sam or we might call them something entirely different to make them less predictable and more memorable. Sometimes the character seems to be born with a name attached and sometimes it’s right and sometimes it isn’t. I certainly find that my characters acquire their names very early on in the process – seemingly out of nowhere – and then I’m stuck with them. To change a character’s name two months into writing a first draft seems almost impossible. You’ve got to know them intimately by then and to change their name would be like changing your child’s name when it’s five years old just because you’ve got bored with it.
This is also true of the character’s physical appearance, although I usually find that the images I have in my head are rather vague and I like to keep my descriptions equally vague – apart from some precise but sparing pointers. To state that a male character has, for instance, ‘wide, hazel eyes with bushy eyebrows, a long straight nose and full sensuous lips’ is, I think, a mistake, partly because it’s hard for readers to retain all those details in their mind’s eye and partly because those features may remind them of someone they dislike.
Which brings us to another vital aspect of character-creation – the role of the reader. For a character is not wholly a creation of the writer, after all, but a collaboration between the writer’s and the reader’s imaginations. If the writer says nothing about a male character’s height, for example, the reader will tend to supply a man of average height – or a bit taller if they happen to like tall men. If the writer only mentions a character’s eye or hair colour, the reader will tend to extrapolate physical attractiveness since – let’s face it – most of us like our characters to be easy on the mind’s eye. And it is the reader’s experience, after all, which ultimately matters.
I think this is why problems arise when books are made into films. It’s not simply that the character the reader has formed and grown to love in their imagination may not look anything like Angelina Jolie or Johnny Depp or Sir Ian McKellan but that these celluloid creations have a different essence, a different constituency to literary characters. This is also true when a writer introduces a ‘real’ person into the narrative as a cameo (Tony Blair, the Queen for example) because the glaring reality of these people in our minds eye throws the literary creation out of focus.
Any writers who are kind enough to read this post will probably say I’m just stating the obvious, but I thought I would state it anyway. The great characters of literature – Jane Eyre, Mr Darcy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, James Bond to name just a few among thousands – have become so much part of our cultural consciousness that we sometimes forget that they don’t exist, that they’re just figments of someone’s imagination. Yet the workings of those imaginations – and those of all writers – remains endlessly fascinating and one of the great mysteries and miracles of human creativity.
Saturday, 6 July 2019
SUMMER POEMS (from 'Glimpses')
PENTRIDGE
Three
trees
upon a far
hill,
a road leading to them
green
green.
Hot fields of corn had drawn us onwards, upwards
and the clouds cried and skies
soared with buzzards
and earth below lay wide beneath our feet
and distant seas bore ships of sunlight
vanishing. I thought only
how to understand, enshrine,
in each moment of this life,
this moment.
SMELL OF SUMMER
Smell
of summer
smell
of dry
dung, the fleeting dragonfly
alighting on my jeans
smell
of barely beaten air
eyes
beaded by a mirrored sun
not meeting mine
smell
of dry
earth, of husk and dust and death and briefest
life
NORTHIAM HAIKU
In the churchyard, here
behind the hedge, lie flowers
for the dead, dying.
IN A MARSH CHURCH
Cries of sheep and rooks,
the drone of tractors turning hay,
reach here where cut flowers in a plastic vase
have not been changed
and Christ is always crucified
in dim glass.
MIDSUMMER NIGHT AT TYNEPITS COTTAGE
The curtain stirs
against the bright west
a moth purrs
WASHMORE HILL ON THE BERKSHIRE DOWNS, JUNE
Wind moves
unhindered on these open, empty hills,
its ripples, tides and currents
echoed in the convolutions of the turning corn;
now deepest green is swept with silver grey
and warmer green with russet, russet gold
and gold with cream.
The downs are swirling, seething like the sea
about a stillness held within the grain
of everything.
IN AN ANCIENT WOOD ON FAWLEY DOWN
Sunlight only
penetrates, transforms
this tangled mound of thorn,
the wild clematis.
One leaf
bears all the sun's radiance,
bears all the shadows of the earth
about itself.
ENTERING A WOOD ON THE HIGH DOWNS. SUMMER
Sudden coolness
sanctity
each footstep snaps the silence
vision
bone
a stone
engrained by sunlight;
ancient Liddington
a speck beyond the farthest far horizon
silhouette
of cones, of branches,
foliage
PETT LEVEL. JULY 5th
A heron
just
riding on the wind
TRAVELLING IN AUGUST
West
a hot wall of light
snapping ears of corn stand static
in the throbbing air
iron tracks converge, evaporate
among convolvulus and buttercups
setting off,
the journey stretches into possibilities,
the rockhard road
leads into mirages
AUGUST
Cobalt shadows
crosswise
over white dust
the harvest valley
out beyond this cage of coolness
burns
THE ESTUARY
Dead
land,
a shattered window rattles in the wind
where gulls rise
above the dead water and the dead sand;
dead land,
the city murmuring
across the sea exhales its columns curling
to the clouds;
the earth burns -
one ship
specked upon the blue
emptiness
IN A WOOD ON THE DOWNS
Thorn on thorn on thorn,
this web of sunlight holds
the spider spinning in its universe.
Saturday, 29 June 2019
WINCHELSEA STATION, MARCH
Spring
is the thorn burning
in the dark wood,
the sky's chasm
slashing green across the hills;
spring,
the freshly gleaming
speck
of each unfolding leaf, each blade of corn
incised upon its own shadow.
Spring
is the crow suspended gold above the cold
field,
furrowed trunks aglow beneath the hedge;
dogwood, willow, bending booming writhing
in the east wind, the sky soaring,
driving sleet.
ON A WALK WITH TERRY HULF
Secret lanes near Snargate,
hazy February afternoon;
pausing, twigs of hawthorn mesh in sunlight,
moving on, the mesh dissolves, resolves;
someone has cut some firewood,
stacked it neatly,
leaving it to moss and woodlouse;
here the fence is broken, through the hedge
some bullocks stand around a field
motionless; beyond lies kale
and beyond
the empty Marsh.
FEBRUARY - TWO HAIKU
Dying winter sun
glints and glows on thorns probed
by frail infinity
One sheep sharp upon
the skyline; winter sunlight
floods the scarred valley
7/2
Crows calling
in the vast hollow
of the sky
DUNGENESS
Wind
in rigging,
gulls
erupting,
crash
and boom
and thump
and hiss
of sea;
the shingle shimmering
beneath our feet.
LONG-TAILED TITS
Sudden sunlight,
sounds that barely brush the silence,
flitting silhouettes on webs of twigs
with pencil tails
everywhere
then gone
in bouncing, chirping squadrons grouped
on gleaming clouds; a mist before the sun,
a crow
calling on a cold
February day.
PARTING AT ST PANCRAS STATION
(Before the refurbishment)
Iron
and its monstrous sweep
defining emptiness
the echoed
throb, roar
of voices, sliding feet
to dim glass
against the sky's
gape.
February winds
on empty platforms
coal, diesel,
not in words
the cold
absolute reality of things
MEMORY AND MEMORIES - THREE HAIKU
Notes float through blossom
from his old pipe - drapes drifting,
slipper beating time.
Wooden stairs climbing
to the dark loft, scent of hay
and dry apples gone.
Where does time carry
all the substance of our lives?
Even stones dissolve.
THREE RUINED CHURCHES ON ROMNEY MARSH
HOPE, ALL SAINTS
As you reach,
through wiry, waving grass and scattered trees,
this rubble henge against a vacant sky,
it forms a church's shape.
Forgotten Hope
now shelters only huddled sheep and ghosts,
restructured only in imagination
on a mound among some roofless walls and stones.
MIDLEY
Wild grasses wave
where knees once bent in prayer,
bones are scattered on the harrowed earth
where bread and wine were shared.
EASTBRIDGE
As the daylight fails,
as the ruined tower darkens
on the fading clouds,
as the blackbird, scolding,
swoops among the bushes,
in remembered voices and in silence
comes the moment of reconsecration
on this empty land.
SLOW-WORM ON THE ALLOTMENT
lifting
of a sheet of plastic,
flash
of silver-bronze;
the surreptitious slithering away
from light and scrutiny -
a length of living braid, her tiny head
in glimpses probing, parting weeds,
so clean
within her home of rotting compost,
gone
DAWN AFTER SNOW
The room
dignified by pale light,
a bird chirping very softly
on a neighbour's lawn;
by the vanished path,
tips, stumps of things
beyond the window.
Earth
new, poised
to be discovered
by the cold
sun
A DREAM
Such a small
thing to ask
such a large
thing to gain
simplicity -
the surf breaking on the sand
the cry
of gulls
Wednesday, 10 April 2019
IN
PRAISE OF BOB
One of the joys of allotment gardening is that it forces miserable, anti-social old sods like me to emerge from their shell and connect with other miserable, anti-social old sods. The fruits of this reluctant intercourse, I’ve discovered, is a wealth of wisdom and practical advice, not to mention free plants and, as the seasons roll by, some firm friendships. Sometimes – for a coy and quivering veggie-virgin like me – one of them might become a kind of mentor and a role model.
Such a one, for me, is Bob
– Bob Wheel. We have so much in common, Bob and I – we’re both short, old and
ugly with bad backs, although Bob, despite his shortness, is built like an
outside convenience of brick construction with hands like JCB shovels. He
always wears a cap or woolly hat with faded camouflage fatigues and his slow,
thoughtful conversation is punctuated by repeated attempts to light an inch of bedraggled
roll-up dangling from his lips. He speaks a dialect of Hastings more ancient
than Basque, and our early encounters were fraught with a number of communication
hiccups. Opening up about his life, he told me he had once been an ‘odd
carrier’. What on earth, I wondered, is an ‘odd carrier’? Someone, presumably,
who works in close conjunction with an even carrier. I twigged when he added,
‘Some o’ them odds weighed over a hundredweight. Buggered my back.’ On another
occasion he advised me to improve my land in winter by digging in a bit of
‘arse shit’. While I was wondering what other kind of shit there is (apart from
the obvious) he added, ‘or kay shit’.
His allotment is a joy
to behold – the soil rich and dark and fine, his veg obscenely robust and
plentiful, his paths fitted with black matting covered in woodchips and not a
weed in sight. And where I have but one composter, this cheeky bastard has five. On seeing his plot, I instantly lost
all desire to become as great a writer as Marques or as great a painter as
Picasso, my one aspiration being to make my allotment look like Bob’s.
I felt so flattered
that he took me under him wing – probably because he felt sorry for me –
offering me boxes of plants that he’d raised at home as well as copious
quantities of veg that I hadn’t dared to attempt – like sweetcorn and beetroot.
That first summer, truth be told, we ate almost as much of Bob’s produce as my
own. It was in June, however, that he showed his true colours. Since I can’t use a
strimmer because of my back, I have to rely on hand weeding, and things got out
of control, the couch and nettles and hogweed on my paths and borders were running
wild to a point that I was being threatened with THE LETTER. The Letter – or the formal notification from
the Parish Council to give it it’s full title – is the one thing (apart from pigeons,
caterpillars, clubroot, slugs and blackfly) that strikes dread into the heart
of every allotmenteer, the formal warning to shape up or ship out, basically. I
went into denial, hiding my head in the sand but, after a few days away in Dorset,
I wandered over to my allotment dreading what ravages nature might have wrought, only to find that the weeds had all been strimmed and raked away.
I knew the phantom strimmer had to be Bob and when I challenged him about it,
he told me to fuck off, which confirmed me in my suspicions.
Imagine my concern then
when my guardian angel, who’d practically lived on his allotment over the
summer, suddenly disappeared with the swallows in autumn. Of course, there’s obviously
less to do on a plot in winter than in summer, so people do tend to
disappear. What concerned me, though, was that Bob had left his leeks, beans
and sweetcorn unharvested, his beanpole trellis had collapsed into a heap and
weeds were reclaiming his perfect tilth. It seemed so out of character to allow
this to happen and, since he’s the same vintage as me, I was terrified he might
have fallen ill or even – I hardly dared think it – returned to the great compost heap
from whence we all came. I asked round the town to try to find out what had happened to him but
since he lives in Ore – a world away – the news was scant. Someone claimed to
have seen him drunk outside the Carlisle pub in Hastings but I knew that couldn’t
be Bob – it wasn’t his style.
Then, one gloomy
afternoon in early March, I was bent over my digging when I heard the words, ‘You’re
doing that wrong, you old fucker,’ and looked up to see a beaming Bob – large
as life and twice as ugly – standing outside my gate. I felt so relieved to see
him and deeply touched to be greeted in such an affectionate way. I was sure Sir
Michael McCauley-Smith CBE – another allotment neighbour who uses his plot as a
place to smoke cigars in peace – had never been called an ‘old fucker’ in his
life – at least, not like that.
Bob flung open the gate
and lumbered over, scooped up and handful of soil in his JCB shovel hand and
held it up to his nose. ‘It smells good,’ he proclaimed, chucking it back on the
bed, ‘You’ve done well, Pete.’ I needed no greater accolade than that.
I didn’t ask him what
had happened to him over the winter and he didn’t tell me. All that mattered was
that he was alive and well and back on his land.
*
I’m afraid this
blogpost hasn’t dispensed any useful horticultural wisdom but hey, you can get all you need of that from Monty Don, when he isn't gazing adoringly in the mirror. The only message is to value one’s
fellow allotment-holders and not be a miserable old sod.
A peaceful, rural scene or a candidate for THE LETTER?
Thursday, 4 April 2019
IN PRAISE OF BROAD BEANS
With the gardening year progressing,
I’ve decided to share some of my horticultural ignorance in a few blogposts
loosely based around my allotment. This one was supposed to have been posted in
early March so it’s probably a bit irrelevant now.
One thing I did take a chance with was broad beans. Love them
or hate them, broad beans are tough old buggers and, if you can find a spell when the ground’s not too sodden to
get them in, they don’t mind taking their chances with the vagaries of the
English spring. I have to say that broad beans aren’t my favourite vegetable,
being one of that generation that was put off them (and most other vegetables,
especially cabbage) by our darling mums who, despite their genius with roasties
and Yorkshire pud, would boil the veg to within an inch of its life as though afraid
it might jump up out of the pot and attack them. Not to mention School Dinners
care of the School Meals Service – a kind of Meals on Wheels for Children and a
hangover from the war. Their piece de résitance
was spam fritters (or spum fluppers as we used to call them) though they did do
quite a nice high-density chocolate pudding with pink custard. What has all
this to do with broad beans? I hear you ask and the answer is nothing. The purpose
of school in the fifties, it seemed to me, was to systematically destroy any
budding passion for anything – nature, classical music, Shakespeare – and vegetables.
it’s taken me most of my life to discover that cabbage, for instance, doesn’t
have to be a slimy green sludge but – lightly cooked with a little butter and a
pinch of sugar – a delicious and nutritious vegetable. The same is true, to
some extent, of broad beans. The trick is to pick them young before they turn
into leathery old pouches and not overcook them. Also, if you lightly boil them
then put them through the fart machine (as we’ve affectionately dubbed our
ageing blender) you can make them into quite a presentable dip – a bit like
guacamole and even less appetising.
First Germination!
Of course there are all sorts of fun things you can do off
the allotment at this time of year, like sowing French beans, leeks, courgettes
and all sorts of other things indoors in pots or seed trays then annoying your
partner by filling up every available inch of windowsill with them.
Alternatively, you can just sit in a rocking chair, drinking a cup of tea and
mumbling wise old rustic remarks like ‘Get a root of Glossop-weed in your
tilthing and he’ll be there till Wythantide.’
In my next blogpost, I shall describe my sod.
My office is doubling as a greenhouse!
Friday, 20 April 2018
“It
held my attention from the very first page to the last.”
“I
gave up a night’s sleep to get to the end.”
In February of this year, my novel Fraud was published by Signal Books of
Oxford. The action is set in the present day and follows the fortunes of four
principle characters – a beautiful, troubled Hollywood actress, a young editor
who is also an aspiring writer, a middle-aged unsuccessful author and his
solicitor wife. It extends over six years and it is suggested at the outset
that the star – Nicola Carson – has some dark secret in her past that is
contributing to her ‘troubled’ mental condition. This is the pivot around which
the plot revolves.
In early April, on a warm, sunny evening rare in
this dark and inclement spring, Fraud
was launched from The Rye Bookshop in Rye, East Sussex, at a gathering of
friends and family which brought joy to my heart since I was the centre of attention
and received lots of compliments about my book. I was especially fortunate in
having my brother-in-law, Nick Snelgar – himself a published author – give a
short speech. In it, he invoked the image of the campfire in prehistoric times,
with primitive, pre-literate people hanging on the storyteller’s every word.
Over the years I’ve been writing, I’ve become more than ever convinced that the
story – and the power and beauty of the words in which it is delivered – is the
most important aspect of any work of fiction. Of course you have to have vital,
well-rounded characters, a sharply-drawn setting and possibly some profound,
universal observation about life, but without an arresting story – that
constant stimulation of the need to know what happens next – the attention of
the audience wanders, whether they be modern readers or hunter-gatherers, and dissatisfaction
ensues. The storyteller would not be given supper by the tribe – in fact, he or
she might very well become their supper. I was thus delighted to notice, among
the numerous readers’ reviews on Amazon, the frequent recurrence of expressions
like “page-turner”, “gripping read” and “riveting”. “It held my attention from
the very first page to the last,” said one. “I gave up a night’s sleep to get
to the end,” said another. That is the highest praise I could have hoped for.
When it comes to characters, I’ve always felt drawn
to those who are flawed, whose lives are not easy and whose situations are
often determined by misguided decisions or circumstances beyond their control.
I am less interested in people who are super-successful and seem to have
everything sorted, though I suspect there are far fewer such people around than
one might imagine. Scratch beneath the surface of the most super-duper people
and you generally find some dark secret or some flaw or failing they’d rather
you didn’t know about. Even Nicola Carson, who appears to have everything –
beauty, talent, wealth and adulation – is a mess inside.
I’d like to think that, in the course of what is
hopefully an arresting, amusing and entertaining story, some ironic
observations are made about the nature of modern life – indeed, all life – or,
at least, some questions asked. My main concern, however, is that reading Fraud should be an enjoyable and
uplifting experience – not a chore or a challenge. There are already enough of
those in life!
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