How Related am I to my Characters?

I often wonder when I’m creating characters how much they are related to myself; how much they are kin or palimpsets of myself in various guises, my relations? So I ask myself this question in the lead up to the publication of Pond Life, a time of frank confrontation with my material; a time of conversations with your publisher and publicist (if you are fortunate to have one); a time for considering potential reviewers and readers; a time of uncomfortable subjunctives, of questions.

But then everything about writing floats through a set of future tenses because a book never feels as though it is finished: there are always unanswered questions and reservations; a large dollop of doubt getting in the way of the declaration: ‘The Final Draft!’ All writing is a process of moving onto the next subject, the next question or problem you wish to puzzle over; the next life you might consider. Pond Life is structured around a biographical life-cycle: the rather empty life of my spinster, Edith Cull of whom I am very fond. Fond: a word my grandmother used. Fondest wishes. One of my favourite greetings; but what does it really mean? How much do they care for you those who use such terms? How much do you care for them?

I have always been fond of asking questions. I ask a lot of questions. I always have; it is a method. If you ask questions of others, of life, you will quickly find material.

And always there is this question for the writer: how well do I know my character. How well do I know Edith? Is she but a version of me? I look back at those question marks and think how ugly they look and wonder would Edith notice as I do how much they aggravate my reading brain like small insects biting at me; and then I wonder, what sort of questions would Edith ask?

Edith’s main question takes a long time in coming and it is the pivot of the novel. She asks Mr. Jarvis at the chemist whether he might be free the following Saturday to go out. She hasn’t got as far as where they might go out, although she has been developing the idea of going on a picnic; an idea adopted from a film she has recently seen whose romantic plot she longs to incorporate into her own life. Edith loves cinema; she loves films for their plots because she is hungry for plot in her own life - and so Edith has been planning this question for some time but she delays the asking because to ask would be the beginning of Edith being a person in the world with attitudes and needs, with an approach to living.

Up until that point she has existed as an understudy in her own life. Living in the shadows of her small cramped twelfth floor flat which ought, considering its position, to overlook the sea, Edith has been auditioning for a life. Miss Cull: a very minor character in a small provincial seaside town. She lives by the sea but she has no sea view, one of her several chronic disappointments. Edith spends mornings climbing up upon her draining board and clambering into her sink, craning her neck towards the blue expanse in attempts to expand her horizons. This, in sum, is the gist of Edith’s cramped choreography. She goes to the cinema to find more life to feed upon; to find a romantic view.

I began writing Pond Life during a period when my own life had became radically curtailed. In August 2021, following the AstraZeneca vaccines, I found myself unable to move much or see as I used to; my entire mode of being in the world was altered and continues to be altered. Now, after four nearly five years I realise I am rapidly losing my capacity to see, hear, hold, move, speak, eat, possibly think. Things are unravelling; brain-threads. And yet, I have new ways of seeing and moving; I have a smaller life with reduced methods. I see the world more closely; I like to think I am more attentive but pain is distracting. Pain has its own telepathy, a unique form of transport. I try to find it interesting, this new method of being; these new ways of moving or not moving about; this chronic, often severe pain; this cramp to put a small word to it.

In the summer of 2021 or thereabouts I began to adopt the character of Edith Cull, and then her fictional counterpart, Dorothy Fortescue, whose life is also curtailed but not in the way Edith’s is by lack of money. Dorothy’s life is shrunk back by grief and by her social position as lady of the manor. Dorothy has a sweet and loyal husband while Edith has no husband but both hover like moths in fantastical twilights making strangely expressive patterns.

Adopting meant taking on their voice, gestures and mannerisms, their modes of being. I watched Edith and Dorothy constantly in my head as they moved about the place within their private spaces. Like an obsessive naturalist I was mentally filming these women’s lives. And so I spent a lot of time staring out of the window of my narrowboat onto the river; the river became my cinema screen as did the walls of my boat as the shapes of the willow trees fell upon the pale surfaces creating mysterious dancing filigree shapes. I spent hours, weeks, months immersed in a world of light and shadow, of greens and blues and greys, of soft and harsher tones of light. I filmed and refilmed these organic subjects as I regarded them until the shape of a story began to emerge from a series of small, private moments I then expanded into a form of melodrama. I invested a great deal of feeling into something that does not happen: the terrible, often horribly clumsy blows of romance.

I took on the role of director and producer of a film whose subject was a small set of species existing within their natural environment: enironments in which they found themselves sometimes quite stranded and flailing about like the flies trapped inside the delicate gemetric webs woven into my portholes.

I fell into the habits and habitats of my characters. They are related. Dorothy has a habit of daydreaming: she falls into prolonged states of reverie. I began to do the same. Edith has a habit of producing elaborate mental fantasies encouraged by her secret on-screen life at the cinema. Any chance she has, which is to say whenever she can afford it, Edith is buying herself a seat at the local cinema.My question as a writer was how far would she go with her on-screen fantasies? And how far would Dorothy translate her aesthetic reveries behind the topiary into an actual plot: her feelings for Pond Man, the man who comes to fix up a garden pond for her; to landscape her garden. How far would she act it all out: the desire of her daydreams?

I was sure that in order for these characters to exist they must have lives of their own. And indeed they do. They exist separately from me which is the only reason I managed to film them. These women are not me but far closer to a species of person I first noticed in my childhood; a kind of person I grew up alongside in a down-at-heel seaside town; a town which had once been a fashionable resort but was crushed in the 1970s and 1980s (the process had begun before I was born)by the rise of the consumerist middle class lifestyle machine: holidays abroad, shopping out of town, second homes. The upshot of these new consumerist lifestyles was the decline of local businesses as locally made items were replaced by mass produced goods. The creatures I grew up alongside were local; they lived small proximate lives but their modest lives were being replaced by lives led outside of town in London. These London lives we imagined as children were grand; the sort of life my glamorous Aunt Jayne, a trained solicitor, led. The sort of life Aunt Caroline who lives in Kensington hotels enjoys in this novel.

But it was Edith who became my protagonist and my primary species. It is her feelings that generate the melodrama of the story. Miss Cull works as a supply teacher; she only receives income because she agrees to supplement somebody else’s life, somebody else’s schedule: the horribly bossy Mary Braithwaite who stands in as a form of town crier. Mary is the domineering narrator. She is a version of me left to my own devices. And she is the voice-over device in the film upon which much of this novella is based: David Lean’s magnificient Brief Encounter which puts to screenNoel Coward’s beautifully structured on act play, Still Life. Mary is the species who could potentially squash Edith: kill her off.

Which leads me to my next conceit: insects. Living on a narrowboat on a side stream off the River Isis in Oxford I live in close proximity to spiders and moths, gnats and hornets, bees and wasps, snails; insects are the native population of this place. I live alongside them but this is their place; they are the true citizens, and in Pond Life they stand in for the smallness of our domestic and local lives because Pond Life is a avowedly provincial novella. It is interested in small lives and small things as was George Eliot and it is in part inspired by Eliot and then the imaginative language of Virginia Woolf. This is an unapolegetically literary novel and, encouraged by Eliot and Woolf, I flit off on associative figurative flight paths, travelling through metaphors and figures as a way of expanding the smallness of the lives I present. To use another figure, I create a series of small philosophical ponds or extended reflective moments where I consider marriage and mortality; the continuation of life after death; the extinction or renewal of organic life.

As a species of life Edith Cull is underthreat. She has little in this world to cling to and so she is slipping from her rock. Edith remains unseen by many and she is seen by Mary only because she is useful to Mary’s life: as a cover on her days off.Mr. Jarvis fails to see Edith except as a pesky woman who keeps returning to his shop. Edith’s errand to to the chemist to get her glasses fixed is a desperate bid for attention and a way for me as a novliest to consider the failure of our society to care for the small people. The people whose lives will never be archived or digitised; of whom there will be no record; who will simply slip through the gaps of a pane of glass - figuratively speaking - as do the many moths that flit in and out of my narrowboat on spring and summer days. Undoubtedly, I am also considering my own demise and the rapid progression of whatever this condition I now live with; I keep company. It shall remain nameless because the diagnoses I receive are crude and approximate, flawed and reducing: they miss the point, they miss the person. Diagnoses (I have had several) belong to the world of medicine and science and that particularly unsatisfactory marriage whose relationship is fuelled by budgets, funding, the supply of large sums of money: namely, the pharmaceutical industry whose language is prescribed fear and panic and not healing.

And so all the questions asked and all the answers given are related to that particular flow - the white pills bobbing along - and it a very narrow channel and likely to come with damage to the vessel (as it already has) perhaps even to capsize her completely. I am hoping for a second vessel to come along, other means of floating and flowing (there are always other ways of being and treating treating; of finding meaning)—- meanwhile there are still the words — they continue to move along, my life force.