Showing posts with label Valentine's Day. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Valentine's Day. Show all posts

A Post For Valentine's Day


This week, with Valentine's Day fast approaching, I'm writing about an old wooden coat hanger - the one in the picture above. It dates from the late 1940s, and it has, as you can see, the letter K burned onto it in poker-work. It's precious to me. I use it every day. You see my late dad made it for my late mum, and that's her initial on it: K for Kathleen. 

Theirs was a love story as intense as any you will read in a novel. Julian was Polish, from a wealthy family. They lost everything in the war, including (most of them, anyway) their lives. He came over with a tank regiment, spent some time in an army resettlement camp before demobilisation, and stayed on as a refugee because there was no place to go back to. Kathleen was a young woman with a Leeds Irish background. 

(You would not believe, or perhaps you would, how many people have recently asked me if he came to the UK as a 'prisoner of war'. But that's beside the point. I know people who did, and who also made a good life for themselves here.) 

My Leeds grandfather was an English Methodist called Joe Sunter. Except that the family were probably descended from Vikings and Joe, with his auburn hair, looked the part. The family had been lead miners in Swaledale throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, but had finished up in Leeds by way of Castleford, during the Industrial Revolution. Joe's mum had died young, and his dad had remarried. His stepmother wasn't very kind to the boys, so Joe and his elder brother George left home early, Joe to join the navy and George to join the army. George was killed at the very start of WW1 but Joe survived and married Nora Flynn, my grandmother, a shirtmaker. 

By the time my mother and father met (at a dance) and married, Nora was running a tiny stone floored sweet and tobacconist shop, next door to which Joe had an equally tiny fishing tackle shop - all within a stone's throw of the factories and mills of Holbeck. 
Mum and dad's honeymoon was in January, in Scarborough.


My dad, I realise, must have seemed impossibly exotic to my mum. He was dark, handsome, foreign and very charming. He was also, fortunately, one of the kindest men I have ever known. I don't think they stopped loving each other for a single moment. 

Dad began by working in a mill, went to night school and eventually became quite a distinguished scientist, but he always loved to make things. In fact I remember that his hands were the hands of a working man, rough and capable hands that could garden and construct things and build toys out of wood. The coat hanger, with its letter 'K', wasn't one of his more challenging efforts. But it was, somehow, like him, that he would take the trouble to decorate it, just for my mum. In the picture at the top of this post, the hanger is resting on a rather battered wooden blanket chest that used to be in their house and is now in mine - and dad painted that too. 

I've realised over the years that I often find myself writing what I call 'grown up love stories'. They aren't really romances and my characters don't always live happily ever after. Not all of them are good and not all of them behave well. But at the heart of the novels is, I realise, something positive, some recognition of the power of affection and kindness to work a little magic in the world. 

I used to think it would be enough. 
Now I'm not so sure. 


Inside 32 Whitehall Road in the 1950s. 

Back in those post war years when times were hard and my dad was labelled an 'alien', as though he had come from another planet, somebody said to my mum, 'I think they should send all those Poles back where they belong now, don't you?' 

'No, I don't' she said, forthright as only Kathleen could be. 'Seeing as how I've just married one!' 

Although in every other way I'm sad that mum and dad are gone, I find myself glad that they aren't around to see the rise of post-Brexit xenophobia, to hear tales of children being bullied for their Eastern European names, people being told to go back where they belong, the Home Office letters exhorting people to 'prepare to leave the country', the outrageous suggestion from some think tank that visas for EU migrants should be restricted to those working anti-social hours. 

Either we are all, as they say here in Scotland, 'Jock Tamson's bairns', or perhaps we should all consider going 'back where we belong' - if we can decide where we do belong.

My dad belonged to a part of Poland that is now in the Ukraine. His mother had Hungarian ancestry. My great grandfather James Flynn came from Ballyhaunis in County Mayo but he helped to build Yorkshire's roads. My grandfather belonged in the Yorkshire Dales and, long before that, in Iceland or Norway or whichever country his Viking ancestor set sail from, as an economic migrant. They were all, when you think about it, economic migrants. 

Dad always said that fascism could happen in any country, at any time and in any place. I think he was right. Nowhere is immune. But after all these years I didn't expect to feel the fear of it in my blood and bones, the way I feel it now, here in the UK.






Happy Valentine's Day to Robert Burns and his wife, 
Jean Armour! 

Read more about my new novel here.


My Love Affair With Wuthering Heights - (Happy Valentine's Day!)

Top Withens, mum just visible on the right.
Valentine's Day seems appropriate for this post about Wuthering Heights, my favourite novel of all time. But is it really a love story? Or an exploration of a fierce, ultimately destructive obsession?

I'm well aware that it is the Marmite of novels. Not everyone loves it and those who don't love it tend to hate it just as passionately. Me - I love Wuthering Heights and Marmite too, but I love the novel more.

It's one of those books, one of those stories, that seems to have been in my consciousness for ever and certainly long before I was old enough to understand what it was all about. It was my mum's favourite book and the old movie, with Olivier as Heathcliff and Merle Oberon as Cathy, was a firm favourite with her too but it was many years before I saw it.

I was born in Leeds and lived there until I was twelve. We would take the bus to Haworth occasionally and walk across the moors to Top Withens, the ruined farmhouse which was said to be the situation, albeit probably not the building, of the Heights. Ponden Hall - now a B & B with enticingly brilliant reviews - is roughly situated where you might expect to find Thrushcross Grange in the novel, although it is said to be much more 'like' the old farmhouse of the Heights. And one of these days, I will go and stay there and will sleep in the wooden cabinet bed and think about Cathy and Heathcliff, and poor, silly, haunted Mr Lockwood. It's on my bucket list.

I listened to a lot of radio when I was young - mostly because I was a very sickly child - and would spend hours, days and weeks 'dramatising' Wuthering Heights just for fun. Ironically, although I subsequently had a long and successful career as a radio playwright, and dramatised all kinds of classics including Ben Hur and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the novel they would never seem to let me 'do' was Wuthering Heights. It still saddens me and even now I'd leap at the chance.

Me in my teens, in full Bronte mode! The dog's name was Andy.
Later, as a young woman, I did a lot of wandering across the hills, although we were living in Scotland by that time so these were the Galloway hills rather than my beloved Yorkshire moors. And later still, I realised what a savage, sadistic, raw and elemental novel Wuthering Heights is. Not a love story at all, in the romantic sense. Or not any kind of love you might want to experience in real life.

Even later, when I moved on from radio and theatre plays to novels, I wrote a sort of 'homage' to Wuthering Heights in the form of a novel called Bird of Passage.  It's currently available on Kindle with a lovely cover by artist Alison Bell, but there will be a paperback edition, later this year. Of course, it isn't a retelling of the tale. How would I dare? But it is a re-imagining, and a homage to the original, in a remote, rural Scottish setting, an exploration of obsessive love and those who fall victim to it. 'A dialogue with the older book' as Susan Price said, reviewing it for the Awfully Big Blog Adventure site.


Meanwhile, in honour of Valentine's Day, I'm rereading the original, the greatest and best, Wuthering Heights. On my Kindle Paperwhite. There is nothing quite like the peculiar intimacy of reading a well loved text on a Kindle, in the dark. It's as if there's almost nothing between you and the author's mind. Far from the conventional wisdom on this, I prefer it to paper, find myself noticing things in the text that I never saw before. Even with a novel that I thought I knew as well as anything I have ever read.

Finally, if you love Wuthering Heights as much as I do, and you haven't read Emily Bronte's poems, you should try them.

Still, as I mused, the naked room,
The alien firelight died away;
And from the midst of cheerless gloom,
I passed to bright, unclouded day.

A little and a lone green lane
That opened on a common wide;
A distant, dreamy, dim blue chain
Of mountains circling every side.

The heaven so clear, an earth so calm,
So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air;
And, deepening still the dream-like charm,
Wild moor-sheep feeding everywhere.

That was the scene, I knew it well;
I knew the turfy pathway's sweep,
That, winding o'er each billowy swell,
Marked out the tracks of wandering sheep.

From A Little While 1838



















A Valentine's Day Special: Two Love Stories For the Price Of One

Cover by Alison Bell
If you haven't read the Curiosity Cabinet (and although it has definitely been my best selling novel to date I know there are quite a lot of people out there who haven't!) then I've planned a very special offer for Valentine's Day and the following week. From 13th February to 19th February, The Curiosity Cabinet will be on a 'Kindle Countdown' deal and you'll be able to download it for the bargain price of 99p in the UK and around a dollar in the US. That's a lot less than the price of a cup of coffee.  

Many - but by no means all - of my novels, involve very grown up love stories. But with this book, you'll be getting two love stories for the price of one,  two parallel stories, past and present. 

In present day Scotland,  Alys revisits the beautiful (fictional) Hebridean island of Garve after an absence of twenty five years, and finds herself captivated by the antique embroidered casket on display in her hotel. She discovers that it belongs to Donal, her childhood playmate on the island, and soon they resume their old friendship. 

Another ancient McNeill

But interwoven with the story of their growing love is the darker historical tale of Henrietta Dalrymple, kidnapped by the formidable chieftain, Manus McNeill, and held on Garve against her will and with no inkling of the reason why she has been imprisoned. 

With three hundred years separating them, the women are linked by the cabinet and its mysterious contents, by the tug of motherhood and by the magic of the island itself. But Garve has its secrets, past and present. Donal must learn to trust Alys enough to confide in her and, like Henrietta before her, Alys must earn the right to belong.


The island and its people are fictional, but the landscape is very like the landscape of the beautiful little island of Gigha which I know well. I'm told that it seems like Coll too. 

I'm always a bit bemused by the reviews of this book since they tend to be wildly differing, even when they're positive (and most of them are positive, thanks to my many lovely readers!) But it's clear from reading them that some readers see it as a tightly, tautly written book with great depths, whereas others see it as a frothy 'guilty pleasure'. In house agent's parlance (real estate if you're reading this in the US) it probably means that the book is 'deceptively simple'.

The truth is that whether you find it deceptively simple or genuinely simple, it doesn't matter, just as long as you enjoy it. I hope, at least, that you believe in Alys and Donal, and in Henrietta and Manus. Because I grew very fond of them, and of Alys's little boy Ben, as well.  

It's a book about the present redeeming the past - and also about the ways in which a beautiful and largely unchanging place with an  intense history can hold something of the past, even within its present. 

One of my readers called it a 'beautifully crafted tapestry of a book' and I'm grateful that s/he understood exactly what I was trying to do in the novel - and took pleasure from reading it. Because it was certainly a great pleasure for me to research and write it!

Why not give it a try at the links below? 

You can also visit my website to read a bit more about what I'm working on right now, and find out about my other books, especially my new - and much darker - historical novel, The Physic Garden, which has just been published as an eBook by Saraband, and is due for release in paperback in late March.