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.      





 

HARVEST FESTIVAL - WINCHELSEA STYLE

 

(Warning - this blog post is rather sanctimonious)

 

To me, harvest festival is one of the most beautiful events in the church calendar. This is not just because it occurs in autumn, when the earth is resplendent with shades of gold and russet and the air suffused with the scent of wood smoke, but because it evokes such powerful memories of my childhood growing up on a farm and of our little village church which was always crammed to the rafters with every sort of produce imaginable – from local farmers, from local fruit growers, from gardeners, from retired gentlemen with just a greenhouse and elderly widows with just a flowerpot. It was the time of year when the ladies of the parish went to town creating ingenious corn dolly swags and upside-down flower arrangements and everybody joined in the task of making the church look spectacular for the harvest festival service. Whether one believed that nature’s bounty was endowed by God or some other deity or simply by some unnameable force, one couldn’t help but be amazed by its sheer energy and profusion, by its colour and beauty and variety. The festival brought together the entire community in celebration of something very profound – an awareness that, however far technology has brought us from our Neolithic forbears who first tilled the soil, we are still creatures who need to eat, who rejoice in growing things and who should be grateful that, unlike so many of our fellow humans, we are not going hungry.

Now, in extreme old age, I have the good fortune to have pitched up in Winchelsea, East Sussex - England’s smallest and arguably most beautiful town. Yet this is a community very different from the one I grew up in. Its residents – to put it politely – live a very long way from the source of production or any notion of material need. When I mentioned to a neighbour who’s a big noise in the church that I always love Harvest Festival, she informed me that they were not going for huge displays of fruit and vegetables this year but for a more ‘streamlined’ approach. When I asked why, she explained that nobody knew what to do with ‘all that stuff’ afterwards. EXCUSE ME? You don’t know what to DO with a cornucopia of fresh, delicious, locally-grown produce? Talk about a First World problem! It is yet another homage to the God of Tidiness, the inertia of rule by petty, parochial committee, the triumph of convenience over conviction. It’s the same attitude that condemned an unhappy friend of ours who drank herself to death to have her ashes strewn at the farthest limits of consecrated ground, next to the compost heap, and which decreed that the epitaph on Spike Milligan’s grave – ‘I told you I was ill’ – should be written in Gaelic as it was thought unseemly that a joke which anyone can understand should be placed on a headstone.  I don’t mean to target Winchelsea exclusively in this criticism – I’m sure it’s an attitude which prevails in country villages throughout the land. 

 

 

A 'streamlined approach' - the harvest festival display in Winchelsea Church. The oranges, lemons and bananas are, of course, locally grown. Sussex is noted for its banana production.

 

My three and a half followers may remember that I wrote a blog post back in March about the allotment we had taken on. I can now report that, having battled with rabbits, slugs, mice, caterpillars and other assorted pests, we have managed to wrest a few vegetables from this barren parcel of land. It has been a rewarding, if sometimes frustrating, experience, but I have often found myself thinking, while working, of the millions of poor farmers and smallholders throughout the world who have to support themselves and their families from similar patches of land and for whom the discovery that all their seedlings have been decimated by pests is a disaster of life-threatening proportions, not just a minor annoyance.

So I would suggest, in conclusion, that our parochial worthies with their ‘streamlined’ approach should dwell on this thought and adopt a more generous, appreciative and open-hearted attitude to this thanksgiving festival – even if it means a little inconvenience. 

 

 

Some of the produce from our allotment - maybe not shapely enough for Waitrose but delicious nonetheless

 

 

 

One of my monsters. I offered a similar one to the harvest festival but it was rejected on the grounds that it might distract the ladies of Winchelsea from their worship

 

  

 

 

 

Allotment Gardening!

 

(or, one man's journey to hell and back)

 

 

A few weeks ago I jumped on the bandwagon which everyone seems to be jumping on – allotment gardening. For the benefit of my thousands of overseas followers (well, one) let me explain that an allotment is a small plot of land on a publicly-owned site, usually on the outskirts of a town, where – for a peppercorn rent – a cloth-capped factory worker can supplement his meagre wages by growing some veg for his family. Or it was. That notion is now well and truly out of date – the cloth-capped worker’s allotment, like his terraced house in Osney or Islington, having been nabbed by up-and-coming young doctors and barristers and execs wishing to 're-establish their primordial bond with the earth' etc. etc.  and similarly transformed. Nowadays the talk over the Prosecco and pistachios is not of the new extension to the Tate Modern or Mark Rylance’s latest Lear at the Globe but of rhubarb and rocket and asparagus and all the fun and nutritious things that can be done with them once you have the mandatory juicer and are ‘au fait’ with all the right recipes!

When I say I jumped, I was actually pushed. By my son, Joe. He’s been home from his adopted China for a few months and, clearly dismayed at finding his middle-aged parents in such a shameful state of inertia, announced one morning that he had rented us an allotment for a year. It only cost £20, he added breezily, and there was no hurry about paying him back.

Initially I was furious though careful not to show it, so pathetically excited was he by his initiative. He took us to see it – whereupon I was even more furious. This patch of land may have been officially an allotment but in reality it was a wasteland, not having felt the prick of a gardener’s tyne in years. One end was a mountain of compost sprouting shoulder-high nettles, the other a jungle of brambles and couch grass. And it was already April. If we did ever manage to wrest any produce from this wilderness, it would be in about the year 2022 by which time we’d almost certainly be dead. Joe informed me - with rather sheepish optimism - that the presence of nettles indicates a high nitrogen content in the soil.

I considered hiring a rotovator but decided that would be economically counter-productive. We’re British, after all, so if we were going to do this thing, we were going to do it the British way – i.e. the most difficult way possible, in true stiff-upper-lip style. So we set to work, swinging off every day with our scythes and spades and mattocks slung over our shoulders like the Seven Dwarves.  It was back-breaking work – we suffered, we despaired, we wept, we became addicted to Co-Codomol and Voltarol, we heaved and turned the sodden sod only for the sun to beat down on our sod and turn it to concrete. As we hacked at the rock-hard lumps of earth with our hoes and mattocks in an attempt to break them down, we felt we should be chained at the ankle and wailing some rhythmic lament about the agony of our lot and our hope of a brighter future in the next world.

Then I saw the light! The light in question being the simple realisation that allotment gardening has sod all (pardon the pun) to do with growing vegetables. Well it has, obviously, but it comes pretty low on the list of priorities. The main priority is to give the impression of growing vegetables. This can easily be achieved by accumulating loads of ‘gardeny’ clutter – stacks of flower-pots, sheathes of beanpoles, a wheelbarrow, a hosepipe, a composter and, of course, lots of seedpackets and little sticks to stick them on. And the pièce de résistance – an erection comprising steel hoops and polythene which may be providing shelter for tender seedlings but probably isn’t. And, most important of all, some picnic chairs and a table. For the real purpose of an allotment – I’ve now discovered – is to have somewhere to escape to. That cheery cry, ‘I’m just off to the allotment for a couple of hours!’ translates as ‘I’m just off to spend two hours doing absolutely f*** all while drinking tea and gazing at the landscape and occasionally mumbling some gem of spurious rustic wisdom in a West Country accent such as, ‘That east wind will dry out the tilthings nicely,’ or ‘If you can see the tower of Icklesham Church by lunchtime, he’ll be raining come eventide.’ In short, an allotment is a place to establish a private empire.

Ironically, I found my new “fuck it” approach to allotment gardening so liberating that I actually reached a point one day of thinking, ‘What the hell, I may as well plant something.’ I began with potatoes – ‘spuds are a good way to break up virgin land’ – another of my gems of rustic wisdom. I planted some courgette plants –which were promptly enjoyed by the local slug population; and some peas and summer cabbages which were promptly enjoyed by the local pigeon population. Then, one balmy Sunday, I went mad and, in a kind of orgasm of optimism, sowed French beans, dwarf beans and carrots and planted out leeks and rhubarb. One bean broke the surface about two weeks later and I haven’t been so excited since I became a father. It’s now been eaten by something.

So, to sum up: we have potatoes, potatoes and… er, potatoes. And some leeks. And some splendid courgette plants with no courgettes on them. I may celebrate with another blog post if anything else comes up but, then again, I may not. You’ll have to excuse me now – I’m going to fill my thermos, make myself a sandwich and go and do a couple of hours on the allotment!

Watch this space (or rather, this barren patch of weed-infested wilderness) for updates!

 

This is how our allotment looked when we took it on

 

 

Our allotment now!

 

 

Courgettes and spuds!

 

 

The height of allotment chic. My neighbour Peter uses his plot for growing vines, asparagus and globe artichokes. This is the standard I aspire to (not)

 

 

 

At least we have a nice view

 

 

 



 

 

Positively the Last Word on Brexit

As the day of the great referendum approaches, Britain finds itself baffled, bamboozled and bored to buggery. For what now seems an eternity we have been assaulted by so-called experts warning us of the terrible consequences of leaving the EU and by so-called experts warning us of the dire consequences of staying in. Immigration, jobs, trade, recession, house prices and public services are the main topics that are being whacked about like wildly wayward tennis balls. These are all massively complex issues which have been massively over-simplified and ‘emotionalised’ in the debates. I’m not going to go into them in detail yet again because everybody’s heard enough of them already. Suffice it to say that the British electorate are not so naïve as not to realise there’s a lot more going on here than our membership of the EU. Poor old Cameron is wetting his political panties while that nasty, dangerous lunatic Boris Johnson and his bunch of gruesome cronies are jockeying for power. If we vote to leave, a general election could be in the offing – so yet more of the same. Please God, no!

As to the most emotive issue – immigration – let me just say this. I don’t approve of it. Not at all. Okay, my mother was part-Welsh, part-Irish, part Hugenot. My father was part Jerseyman, part French. My wife’s Australian. Her Polish-Jewish grandparents fled to England to escape Nazism, were welcomed and built a new life here. Her father came here on the Kinder Transport, was welcomed and built a new life here. Our children are a jumble of racial genes – as are most of the British nation – but I still don’t approve of immigration. Oh, and while we’re on the subject, I feel strongly that we should have denied entry to the Iberians, the Celts, the Romans, the Angles, the Saxons, the Danes, the Vikings, the Normans, the Hugenots, the Hanoverians and the citizens of our former colonies, leaving Britain to its rightful owners – the homo erecti who invented afternoon tea and cricket. Oh no, hang on, they walked here from France when the Chanel was a land bridge. Damn! We should’ve built an immigration-proof wall from Kent to Cornwall! And we should send our Royal Family back to Germany.   

In that wonderful comedy series ‘Frasier’, Frasier’s dad – a jaded, retired policeman – tell his son he needs “a bite of reality sandwich.” I think that’s what this debate urgently needs. The reality: Our very existence as a species is threatened by global warming and depletion of the planet’s resources. Consumerism is running riot in the wealthiest nations while the Third World sinks deeper and deeper into poverty and deprivation. The gap between rich and poor is ever widening even in the First World. Multinational corporations are becoming wealthier and more powerful than nations – a process intensified by TTIP. The West’s arrogant mishandling of the Middle East since the end of World War One is coming home to roost in ways which are unimaginably horrible – both for the Arab nations themselves and for the rest of us. Over vast parts of the planet, half the human race – women – are being denied education, dignity and their rightful place in society. The most powerful job in the world – President of the United States – is in danger of being occupied by a raving lunatic who makes even Boris Johnson look sane. China – a vast totalitarian state that has never known democracy – is now a world power. Since the thawing of the Cold War, the world has become a powder keg which could ignite at any moment. Meanwhile Britain clings pathetically to its mezzotint memory of Empire, as evidenced, for example, by the squandering of precious billions on our very own nuclear weapon which even military experts agree has no strategic purpose whatsoever.

The LEAVE campaign speak cosily of “wanting our country back” and “making our own laws for ourselves.” We don’t make our own laws for ourselves anyway – our laws are made for us by an elitist government which most of us didn’t want (due to our archaic electoral system) and which has one agenda: to dismantle the NHS – our most precious possession – to bleed our cultural life and public services dry by “necessary” spending cuts and recreate a world in which the ‘Haves’ can lord it over the ‘Have Nots’ for all eternity. Our parliamentarians of all parties - as proven by the expenses scandal – are every bit as corrupt as anything you can find in Brussels. While individuals cling heroically to their beliefs and values, our society as a whole has lost its moral compass. What we – and the world – desperately needs is leaders of real moral courage and moral vision but instead we are governed by lightweight amateurs whose vision does not extend beyond the next election. In what kind of crazy world is our health service run by a man with absolutely no medical training or our education system by someone who has never known the hell of teaching Shakespeare to a class of thirty fifteen-year-olds?   

What, I hear you ask, has all this got to do with our leaving the EU? Well, not much really, I suppose. Just this: Given all that we’re facing, given all the challenges, would it not be better to maintain unity and co-operation where it exists, to try to work towards a better world from within a large body of nations than from a position of isolation? Of course there are faults and problems with the EU but in our inter-connected world it is naïve to imagine those problems won’t affect us even if we leave. It’s just that we won’t be able to do anything about them because we will have put ourselves in a position of powerlessness. It’s argued that we can’t do anything about them anyway but that’s actually not true. Much is made by the LEAVE campaign of our powerlessness within the EU as though we’re somehow helpless victims of our European oppressors. A lot is also made of the threat that, by remaining, we will someday lose our national identity and become absorbed into some vast, featureless federal Europe but that seems to me nonsense. Countries like France, Germany, Spain and Italy maintain intimate ties with one another and are not even separated by seas, yet they all maintain a distinct and individual national character.

You will probably have gathered by now that I am going to vote to Remain in next week’s referendum. I wouldn’t presume to try to persuade anyone else to do the same. Everyone will vote as they see fit. We’re still a democracy, after all. More or less. Let me just leave you with one sobering thought – one that will strike terror into the heart of even the most ardent LEAVE campaigner. If we give up our membership of the EU, we may not be allowed to compete in the Eurovision Song Contest!      

 

{I've received so many of these this year from obnoxious friends and relatives describing round-the world trips, safaris in Africa and glittering personal achievements, so I thought I'd reply with one of my own.}


A Christmas round robin letter from the Davey Family!!


Hi All !!

It's been a totally amazing year for the Davey family! So here's a quick rundown of all the daft, crazy, whacky things we've been up to in 2015!

Back in January we bought a new tumble drier! Yay!! It's brilliant! It gets the soggiest garment dry in no time at all. In fact, it's so effective that I once took a pair of shorts out and bunged them straight on (I tend to go "Commando" with summer shorts) not realising how hot the zipper gets! Yikes!! My other half couldn't think what all the screaming was about! I'm still bearing the scar!

 

Our amazing new tumble dryer!!

 

 

In March my mother-in-law Pat, who's 96 and normally rather low-key socially, suddenly decided to throw a surprise 90th birthday party for her friend Hazel Bevis, which really was a surprise for Hazel since her birthday's in July. Nonetheless she entered into the spirit of things with gusto, blowing out one of her nine candles (one for each decade) while we all sang Happy Birthday to You! She was so excited by the whole occasion that she passed out and we had to call an ambulance!! I shouldn't laugh really, but I just can't help myself, it was all so ridiculous! The lovely paramedics came and pumped her full of oxygen and she was fine, so happy endings all round then!!

 

The highpoint of April was when I had someone's finger up my bum! No, really! Before your filthy minds get carried away with the idea, let me hastily add that the finger in question belonged to my GP who was giving me what's tastefully known as a DRE (Digital Rectal Examination). He was so astonished by what his digit discovered up there that he immediately sent me off to a urologist who stuck HIS finger up my bum (My poor bottom!!) I have to say, though, that having his finger up my bum was a lot pleasanter than the GP's (not that having ANYONE'S finger up one's bum is ever pleasant, I hasten to add VERY EMPHATICALLY!!) - just relatively so. I was then sent off to Eastbourne for an MRI scan which was quite fun since it was performed by this stunningly beautiful Asian radiologist who asked me in dark, sultry tones if I'd emptied my bladder recently. As I was lying nervously on the slab waiting for the machine to swallow me up, she suddenly thrust her hand deep inside my pocket and I thought for one wonderful moment that she wanted to have her wicked way with me! It turned out that a 5p piece had got stuck in the lining of my trousers and was driving the machine crazy!!

 

But enough of that rather distasteful subject. What else? Oh yes, I was summoned to do a massive stint of Jury Service in July and August (BOR-ING!) so we didn't actually get away on hols this year, though we did go to a funeral in Oxfordshire which was fun. Speaking of funerals, my neighbour Alan Goodrich died of a massive heart attack while watching a murder mystery called 'Rosemary and Thyme'. I've never seen it myself but apparently it features two very annoying ladies who are supposed to be gardeners but spend most of their time investigating very unlikely murders where the killer's signature style might be, for example, to stuff his victim in a rhubarb forcer with a marigold stuck in his privates. Not that that's relevant to poor old Alan's unfortunate demise, of course. I feel so sorry for him because he's now got to go through all eternity not knowing who did it!!

 

Oh, and we went on a long weekend to Norfolk where we saw this hilarious sign!!

 

 

 

We just couldn't stop laughing! So English!!

 

Oh, and we also visited Wenlock Abbey where we saw this AMAZING topiary in the shape of Basil Brush!!

 





 

Another high point of the year was when we took mother-in-law to see a very energetic performance of 'Hamlet' by the ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch on live stream. Her comment in the interval was that it was 'a bit gloomy'. Her other comment was that the dress Ophelia was wearing during the mad scene 'didn't do anything for her at all'. When Lyndy remarked that the poor girl had been driven insane, she replied pointedly, 'Just because you're melancholic doesn't mean you have to look a mess'. Her generation had standards, even when you're committing suicide!!

 

 

My whacky mother-in-law being taken on a "church crawl" which she loves!

 

So that's about it really! Our amazingly beautiful and talented children continue to go from strength to strength in their chosen professions. Joe is still in China, teaching and doing Tai Chi and writing a hilarious novel called 'The Legend of Frogfish' which I, for one, think is a masterpiece. Kitty is an English teacher in Battle. They both have lovely partners but we don't have any grandchildren yet. We do have a grand-cocker-spaniel, though, called Archie, who belongs to Kitty and her partner Ben, who we look after frequently (Archie, not Ben!!) and which brings us constant joy - though he does have some dietary issues which make him a little aromatic at times, but then I'm sure grandchildren have those too.

So it just remains for me to wish everyone an AMAZING Christmas and a happy, prosperous and, above all, peaceful New Year!!

XXXXX

 

A freezing Kitty under a "Mr Whippy" cloud!

 

Joe attempting to strangle two lovely Chinese people - a rather worrying tendency he's developed.

 

 

Archie, our surrogate grandchild!

 

 

Winter, Fairfield Church

 

Darkness deepening

enshrines

each grain of plaster dust

the dead cranefly on the window sill

 

Driving rain

and wind rumbling

enfold

what man has left for God

in unstained glass and glimpses

over wide ripples

into emptiness

December, Fawley Down


From here
the downs look flat

their cold lines
converge on Liddington

one strip of pink
beneath a roof of cloud

these hills know
that snow is coming

even now
the earth folds in upon itself

no sound
of birds