I’m starting to do some background research for the story School Lane, a true story about a man I met who was had been in the Hitler Youth and objected to being called a Nazi. I wanted to find out more about German villages and the Eidelweiss Pirates so I turned, as you do for everything these days, to Google. All I wanted to do was find some pictures that would show me a German village, so I could imagine the mood of it in my head. Richard Curtis played one song over and over again when he was writing films, so I thought I could allow myself this one small indulgence. I don’t do this a lot. Honest, guv. It was just the once. For research. For this book and that. To see what was there. That’s the only reason I was looking at pictures like that, straight up, as they used to say on The Sweeney.
There were, as you might guess, a lot of photos of Aryan maidens. I presume they were, anyway. They put me in mind of a story I heard from a man who used to fly P51 Mustangs out of Leiston airfield in WWII. After the war he got a job as a press photographer on a newspaper, back in the days when things in small American towns were much the same as they were in James Stewart’s film Harvey. I know this country. I drove around the MidWest in a Chevrolet. I didn’t watch attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, it’s true. But I did see Nancy-Jean practising on the football field with the squad in the rain, one Saturday morning in Indiana. That was a long time before anyone had the idea they didn’t want to be one, like Ms St Vincent. Still, she was 30 when she sang that and the other girls were getting a little embarrassed.
You need to focus
Still wanting to be a cheerleader.
One day he had an assignment to go and photograph at some girls High School out in the nowheres for some sporting event or other back in the mists of time. All the girls lined up outdoors, some twenty or so cheerleaders asked to stand stiff and straight in the Florida sunshine. Being young girls they started fidgeting and chatting to each other and he couldn’t get exactly the picture he wanted. It was just turning into one of those days.
One of those nights.
Eventually he had to ask the teacher if she could ask the girls to please stay still so he could just click the shutter and get the job done. Pleasant though it was looking at cheerleaders that fine morning he had other stuff to do. Certainly, the teacher said.
“Stand still girls, the photographer wants to focus.”
No-one ever owned up to being the cheerleader who said, “What, all of us?”
If you’ve read Not Your Heart Away (and if you haven’t then you can just click here and let me know what you think when you’ve read it), you’ll know it’s got a ghost in it.
Claire’s house, the imaginary house in the story, (based on but not exactly like a real house and ditto a real person I knew lived in, but with bits borrowed from other houses, other people’s stories) was haunted, she believed. The real house I had in my head when I wrote it wasn’t, not that I ever heard. But the ghosts in the book were all told to me about other places, by people I didn’t think were fools or liars.
Ashton Court, where my grandmother was in service.
In Service
Claire’s ghosts in the book manifested themselves in three separate incidents, the scattering of flowers, the servant’s stairs and the naked woman on the landing that Ben is never sure is real or not or Claire’s mother or not.
When my grandmother was about twelve years old she went into service, working at the local Big House, Ashton Court in Bristol. It wasn’t about choice. Her father was an alcoholic and when he wasn’t drinking he had things to do at home which resulted in eight or nine children to support, which he couldn’t do. In exactly the way David Cameron and his privileged friends think is appropriate for those of lowly station a twelve year old girl had to do it for him because there was no state support system, the same way there won’t be one again.
This was back before 1914, and in true Downton Abbey style the people who owned it liked to have flowers arranged throughout the house. Except in one room. It ought to have a name, the Green Room or something, but while I’m sure it did I don’t know what it was. Flowers were never put there. On the rara occasions they were then the next day the windows would be standing wide open and the flowers scattered all over the floor. It wasn’t Hugsy the dog. It wasn’t in the same house at all.
The back stairs
The servants stairs was a story from another house too. Claire’s house had two staircases, like most of those big old houses; one for the family and one for the servants, back in a time when almost everybody had servants, skivvies, maids or boys. I suspect at least half of it was simply charity and the other half the need for help when there were no washing machines and gas-fired boilers or hoovers. Whatever it was, if you had a big house you certainly didn’t want to bump into the staff on the staircase so they had their own stairs, the back stairs, cheaper, steeper, narrower.
A girl who used to work for me told me about a trip to a friend’s house which had exactly the same kind of arrangement. They thought they had a ghost there and thought it generally confined itself to the back stairs, so the family didn’t use them. Another friend showed me her own back stairs, as it were, and given the choice you would’t use stairs like that anyway. They were incredibly narrow, the treads were short and the steps seemed to be in the wrong place, apart from which there was no handrail or bannister. They had the look of something made for a slight teenager, or maybe like the clothes from long ago that you see in museums, they were made for people who were just smaller in those days. But uncomfortable, not because of any sense of spookiness, but because the staircase was hemmed-in, claustrophobic and it felt as if it would be easy to miss a step with my big modern feet and end up haunting the place myself. Predictably, the first friend had a party and the boys decided to be brave, despite being told not to use the back stairs. Four of them did, deliberately, with a great show of taunting the ghost. All four ran out in tears. None of them would say what happened. It put a bit of a damper on the party.
Portscatho village.
A girl on the stairs
The naked woman on the stairs story happened to someone I used to know in Portscatho, in Cornwall. In one of my more excruciating memories from a fairly extensive catalogue of embarrassing events, I went down there with a girlfriend one summer when the world was young. Claire’s prototype just happened to be working nearby, but that was not part of this story. I did say it was a bit cringy.
One of the early pioneers of the gentrification of Portscatho, my friend’s father had retired from the Navy as a Commander and bought himself a house overlooking the harbour, just about a hundred yards from the Plume of Feathers and the village square. Mark was a good-looking boy with a convertible Triumph Herald and a future beckoning after he graduated from the School of Mines so he lived there instead of on campus. One morning his father demanded a quiet word.
Why for god’s sake, if Mark had to invite these bloody floosies back, could they not at least have the decency to put some clothes on before they paraded around the landing? It’s not me, Mark, it’s your mother. I don’t see why she nor I should have to put up with this in our own home. I don’t want to have to have this conversation again.
All very well, pops, as Mark said. Except he hadn’t invited anyone home. So far as he knew, he was on his own that morning. We all, Claire’s human form, my girlfriend, me, Mark and his local mate Johno hung around the house for a day or so while his folks were out. I was reading the paper in the front room on my own. Claire came in and sat down. I wanted to be cool, so I read a couple of pages of the newspaper before I put it down to talk to her. Except there was nobody there at all. It happened a lot there, Mark said. It was no big deal.
I’ve said before. I’m not very creative. I just steal other people’s stories. But I’ve been wondering about the truly fictional Claire and her ghosts at her fictional house and whether they were ghosts of the past, as she thought, or ghosts of the future, that what was haunting her wasn’t the past at all, but the fright of her world crumbling underneath her feet, as it did for so many people in the 1980s in so many different ways. Our legacy. Our times.
Jason King, my spirit guide.
For years I had a recurring dream about a flat I was going to buy. I’ve never seen it except in my dream. It was decorated in a heavy, dated way, white paint and green walls, the kind of place Jason King would have been happy in, but cheaper, much more Barons Court back then than Kensington. Every time I went there in my dream I could hear people doing everyday things, having a meal, washing up, talking to each other as they did it, but faintly. I could never see anyone.
I always called it the Haunted Flat dream. I can describe the layout of the place to you still, if you like. The stairs were just like the landing in the old Boys block at school.
I always assumed I was looking at the flat to buy it, at different times. I could tell by the leaves on the trees I could see through the window and I would have bought it, apart from the fact it was haunted. But then one morning when I woke up I wondered if there was a real flat, one I’ve never seen. And whether the people who’ve lived there over the past twenty years and more sometimes wake up convinced something has visited them in a way they can’t explain, that they share their place with something else from another time, past or future.
In a scene from Not Your Heart Away Liz and Peter, Ben and Claire visited their very first grown-up restaurant on their own, in an imaginary Stratford on Avon in an imaginary time, based on imaginary people who bear absolutely no resemblance to the younger selves of a respected barrister, a local newspaper editor, me and a California schoolteacher whatsoever it is submitted m’lud, where their dinner was interrupted. For the idiot Ben, who constantly deluded himself that the sexual revolution meant that 18 year-old girls would do the asking (oh Ben, think how much more fun you could have had…) that dinner was one of a string of humiliations and disappointments that we look back on and describe as a good preparation for life before we turn away and silently curse the wall when no-one’s looking. Or maybe that’s just me.
For the old man with the accent who interrupted their dinner and apologised for spoiling it, the man who was indignant at being described as a Nazi just because he’d served in the Hitler Youth, it was something else. I’ve said before, I don’t think I have an awful lot of imagination. I listen to stories. I jumble them up and glue them together into another, bigger story, but everything I’ve ever written happened to someone real. Just not usually one person, or one person at one time. Something I saw or heard or someone else’s story. That old man’s story for example.
It happened one summer’s afternoon in Kings Langley, just outside Watford. I didn’t have much to do. We were either between jobs or more accurately part-way through one, where everything that could have been done had been done and now we had to wait until other people had done other things so more things could be done. We locked the doors and got our mobile phones and walked down through the fields, across the river, across the canal, over the footbridge over the M25 and up the hill to the pub at the top of Kings Langley, near the Rudolf Steiner school.
A short, thickset, shaven-headed man was having an argument with a much older, white-haired, aquiline-looking man with an accent. Look, I said wittily, that’s Rudolf Steiner. I know. It just pours out of me, doesn’t it? It hardly ever stops. But I was wrong. The old man’s story was much more interesting, because here he was, here and now, the way most of them aren’t now, because this was fifteen years ago and all flesh is grass.
The old man was furious at being called a Nazi, just because he’d been in the Hitler Youth. He was conscripted. He had had no choice. Every single German boy was conscripted into the Hitler Youth. No-one had ever heard of the Eidelweiss Pirates, or the few that had didn’t talk about them. I’ve since met an Army Major who had dinner with one of the survivors, but I only heard about the boys who skipped out of the Hitler Jugend a few years ago. The old man I met thought it was great. His eyes were shining as he remembered the songs and the campfires, the flags and bugles, the friendship and the pure fun of the big rallies in the woods. He wasn’t the boy who sang Tomorrow Belongs To Me at the end of Cabaret. He didn’t have to. Millions of people felt like that, before the guns began again.
He went to school in a little German village in the hills and one day in April 1945 the SS arrived in a big car. They took all the boys from the school up the lane to a field where they’d dug a bunker, where they handed out oily new machine guns and helmets and grenades and told the boys to defend their village and the Fatherland. The American invaders would arrive to spoil and loot within the hour. Meanwhile the SS felt they had pressing business to attend to the other side of the hill, in Switzerland. Can’t stop. Love to. See you soon. Oh actually, we won’t. Take care.
The schoolmaster was as he usually was, the leader of this troop of Hitler Jugend. He marched them down to the playground and lined them up on parade to inspect them and their brand-new factory-fresh MP40s and Panzerfausts. Then he beat them senseless. He made them throw every last gun, grenade and bullet in the ditch then sent them home weeping. He saved all of their lives. As the old man said, when the Americans arrived standing in jeeps behind .50 calibre Brownings, a gun so powerful that that if you get one pointed at you there is nothing on a city street it will do you any good to hide behind, they would have shot everything and anything. ‘They looked like they would poop their pants,’ he said.
A friend’s father landed in Normandy on D-Day. He walked to Germany from there. He would never talk about the German he killed. He only talked sketchily about the German boy in uniform who tagged along with his regiment for food and company, after they’d checked his pockets thoroughly. He left two pictures, both of them young German boys in uniform, both way under 20. I don’t know which is which, or whether either of them are those two boys, nor what became of them.
Soon there will be no-one left to tell these stories. They will still tell them in other places, in future times. But the tellers won’t be people like us. We won’t understand. We’ll say oh, that’s what they do in these foreign places. They always have. It’s tribal, isn’t it? But we’ve done this too, not so long ago. That’s what School Lane is about. Now all I have to do is write it.
It’s today. The twenty first, Midsummer’s Eve, half-way through. Tomorrow we can all start saying “Aye, the nights are fair drawing in” and the long slow quiet walk towards the dark.
I know. It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going. I don’t know what phase the moon is in right now but it’s doing something odd. It makes me walk, sometimes. When I was 18 or so I’d have a passion to drive on full moon with the lanes and fields bathed in silver and silence. There’s a view I remember, coming over the top of s little hill and the road stretching out towards Bratton and the White Horse in the moonlight that will be with me until I die.
The path through the marshes.
It’s wet this morning on this longest day and a kestrel perched on the phone line outside my window. In Sweden they’ll be having parties tonight. In lots of places they’ll mark the mid-point of the year. For me it’s a quiet, quite a sad day, the day the year starts to die, the day after which it all literally goes downhill. I took a walk along the river yesterday afternoon, about four miles there and back, out along where the tied had ebbed away and the swallows landed on the mud, something you don’t often see them do anywhere at all.
It’ll be hotter in July and August than it is now. There might even be a bright and sunny start to October, the way I remember starting university when I bought a pair of red Kicker boots and a new alpaca sweater and wore them both, together, without blushing. But the year’s getting older now, past its midpoint. So let’s make the most of what we have now. We won’t be here again.
I was hunting the job ads, like you do, when I saw this:
Paid Role For Creative Writer
Macro excellence
Seeking up and coming creative writer to become a part of the film project.
We have a very exciting script and are in current talks with a Funding Firm in London with keen interest.
The creative writer should be able to come on board and help furnish the script to the macro excellence we are looking for. The ideal candidate should be expected to write in the cutting edgy genre.
The Treatment and character development have already been completed, so what we require is someone to help flesh the script out. The project is still in the planning stage.
What are you waiting for? Send your CV and a sample script (no more than 5 pages) to the email below.
The Creative Writer will be working alongside the original creative writer and director of the film.
THIS IS A PAID ROLE
Where to start?
Up and coming? Well, I can give it a go, but let’s look at the property first. You haven’t got a screenplay, you’ve got a synopsis and the characters. In other words, all you’ve got is some ideas for people you saw in the street and what you think they might do if they were trapped in a New York lift with a chemical weapon and a string vest. Nobody’s bought an option on the film or you’d have funding. So far, so what? That’s why you want a writer. Then you might have a screenplay.
Macro excellence
What worries me is what language it’s supposed to be written in. I don’t know if I can write macro excellence. Because I don’t know what it means. Nobody walks down the street saying things like that because even the bloke selling the Big Issue would laugh at them. “Come back to my place, baby. I think I can promise you some….( drop voice an octave and do not rush this bit) ....macro excellence.” Can you see it? You’d be the only person that could that night.
Cutting edgy genre
You sir, are an unprincipled cad. And your cat’s ugly.
But it’s the next bit that really worries me. Can I write in the cutting edgy genre? Cutting edge used to mean really like now. And really like now then is like Filofaxes, ties that look like a piano keyboard and Su Pollard; you can sort of get it and its harmless enough but you wouldn’t do it anymore. Maybe cutting edgy is different though, like an arch Noel Coward looking for another dime bag, Sherlock Holmes when the Duke of Dumfries says no way dude, you still owe me for all the Charlie for Vicky’s Jubilee bash.
Come on. All they want is someone to ‘flesh the script out,’ or change it from an overall plot with some characters to an actual story where you know who says what and how they get to the place where they say it. That’s not hard, is it? So what’s the problem? Well, there’s a few of them. It’s in West London for a start, 150 miles from me which is a long commute especially when you have a tendency to forget your packed lunch. It means working with the original creative, who obviously isn’t that creative or he’d have written the thing already instead of just extended notes. And there’s no money, so it’s being run on someone’s trust fund.
The shrill repetition of ‘this is a paid-for job’ bothers me too. Instead of what, an unpaid job? That’s not a job. It’s either voluntary work, like helping out at the Red Cross jumble sale, or it’s internship, the kind of socially acceptable totally illegal because it breaches minimum-wage legislation slavery for people with rich mummies and daddies that you can eat between deals. That’s what this is. Keep the poor poor. They’ve got the creative writer who isn’t creative and the film director without a film but Pops will fix it. It’s Tim and Jonty’s Gep Yah, isn’t it?
So like WTF, I don’t think I do these kinds of abbreviations. Maybe I’m just too cutting edgy.
If you’ve ever read this before you’ll know I’ve been trying to write a screenplay. Accepting I can do it has been one of the major hurdles, like probably anything in life. And as often in mine, I’ve been ignoring the evidence that I can.
Back in March the BBC Writers Room had a competition for screenplays. I’d never written one. I spent four weeks hacking the text of Not Your Heart Away into some sort of shape and utterly amazingly, I was one of the winners. We got to pitch to Cascade, the statutory nobody-gets-more-than-10-minutes on your feet chance to not stick a cigar in your mouth and say ‘See, it’s like Four Weddings meets The Others, I can smell the popcorn!’
The language of the dead
The first draft was ludicrous. 320 pages when it should have been 150. I didn’t have enough time to do much about it but I thought if it got through someone else would edit it down anyway, so I just concentrated on getting the book into a screenplay format. It wasn’t a format I was familiar with in terms of layout and the look of the pages aside, I just didn’t know how to transition from one scene to another and put far too much in.
Cascade didn’t bite. I know. How rubbish is that? My very first pitch of my very first screenplay and they didn’t go for it, even after they asked for a copy of the book I signed for them.
They asked for more scripts, which I’ll do but first I have to get this right. I found the wonderful Celtx software that magically not just provides a template for formatting but converts one format to another in about thirty seconds, instead of having to type the whole darned thing out again, and I watched and read No Country For Old Men over and over again. And no, I don’t see any irony there at all but thank-you for asking.
A friend of a friend in the business has really amazingly kindly offered to lend a hand with this so I sent her the heavily redacted version. I’d hacked it down so much that it didn’t work, coming in at 137 pages instead of the target 150 ish, leaving out four key scenes I don’t think it can do without.
But more than that, it left out the story. Yesterday it came to me how to make the story whole. The film is a little different to the book. First reader’s comment was encouraging.
“This is good. It would have been better if you’d written it ten years ago. You might have missed the time for this.’
That can be fixed. NYHA is set in 1980, but it could be any time once the music and the cars are changed. It could even be a horse and cart. The story in the book is much the same, but how it is told, by whom and when is slightly different. It’s still Ben and Claire’s story. But now it leaves you asking if they can only tell each other in the language of the dead.
After the free weekend promotion for Not Your Heart Away one or two people actually downloaded the book. To sound like a school assembly for a moment, the kind Ben and Liz, Claire and Poppy and Peter would all have been bored by and utterly familiar, you know who you are. It is those people I want to talk to now. The rest of you are here because of those people and I want you all to think about that.
When you read it, whatever you think about it, please, just please review it. All that means is write down what you think about it. It’s made some people wistfully happy. It’s made other people cry. When I read it I feel restless, as if I want to go to the places in the book. I went to all of them once.
Location
Every location I wrote about is a real place. But you can’t go there. No-one can. The pub isn’t a pub any more. Claire’s house is a spa for Olympic athletes (no, it really is. I never, ever appreciated quite how big it was until I found that out). At Ben’s house the garden was split into two and sold off and the house went for pennies in 2012. Everything changes. Even love. Maybe especially love.
So rather than maundering off down that track, write down what you think about it. Then post it up to Amazon or Goodreads or wherever else you can think of, please. Even if you don’t like it. Just say why.
See? I could have been a teacher. Gissajob. I could have been a teacher. I’ve got a tweed coat and cord trousers. I can say no running in the corridors, how many times have I told you, I am not in the habit of handing out detentions but you need some time to think about what you’ve done. I don’t want to see you again.
I’ve got empathy, too. I know what it’s like to be on the end of those words. After all, plenty of people have said that last bit to me.
Matron! Well if that doesn’t improve the SEO ratings I don’t know what will.
I haven’t eaten manufactured foods for a long time. I don’t buy ready-made pizza, pies, humous or pretty much anything already made. As a friend’s father used to say about shop-bought cake, it’s second-hand.
When you make things yourself you know what’s in it. You know what short-cuts you took, the flour you ran out of half-way through, the water you put in instead of milk, all those kind of everyday things that aren’t exactly cheating but mostly aren’t because you know about it. And I don’t want someone else’s compromises.
A lot of people are going to read this and say ‘that’s alright for you, but I haven’t got time.’ They were a bit short of time a hundred years ago too, with a child every other year and no electricity most places. I don’t have a television. That saves me a huge amount of time. I get my once a week fix of The Sweeney on my laptop.
No More Vodafone Day
But yesterday I had something to celebrate, getting out of a mobile phone contract with Vodafone, who decided that although they’re investing £2.5 million per day in a 4G network that will stream even more useless X-Factor celebrity-based crap directly into people’s heads they can’t find the pennies to give me a phone that works if I don’t hold it out of my bedroom window, which is picturesque but arguably inconvenient. Stupidly, I celebrated by buying some Jamaican spicy buns. It made me realise why I don’t buy this stuff. It’s never what it says.
When I think of ‘spicy’ I think of cinnamon, anise, nutmeg, musk, a very non-Ipswich world of exotic tastes and mystery. I did warn you it wasn’t a very Ipswich imagining. And oddly, these spicy buns, with their statutory four bits of ‘mixed fruit’ per bun just weren’t like that at all. The herring in mustard sauce wasn’t much better either. It wasn’t the worst breakfast I ever had. That was hotly contested between a $4.95 All-You-Can-Eat somewhere in Illinois and the La Plaza hotel in Brussels, which probably just sneaked the coveted award for feels-like-hangover-stomach-although-you-weren’t-drinking-last-night. I think it was the boiled mini-sausages that did it, back when I still ate stuff like that.
I looked-up the La Plaza on Trip Advisor to see what it’s like now. It was nearly ten years ago I was there, in a huge, wood-panelled room that seemed like a set from a 1940s noir movie. I wrote about a fictional house that might have been haunted in Not Your Heart Away, where Claire was convinced that she was being watched long after Tex Beneke sang: “I know there’s something following me that I can’t see” in A Little Man Who Wasn’t There. That hotel was the only place I’ve chosen as an adult to sleep with the light on, in case the jackboots and the grey uniforms walked again.
If you don’t have a Kindle you can still get it. Go to the Kindle website and you can download the reader software, again totally free. It’ll work on PCs, Macs and anything else you’ve got.
Why Am I Doing This?
Because I care. Ha ha! Fooled you!
Because I want as many people as possible to read this book, to talk about it, to review it, to say to their friends “there’s this really good book.”
So that’s what I’m giving. Now your turn. If you download it would you please just do this tiny thing for me? Review it. Say what you think about Not Your Heart Away on Amazon, on Goodreads, anywhere else you can think of. If you like it, say why. If you don’t, I’d still like you to say why.
So far there’s only been one intellectual “sounds like s**t” from someone who hadn’t read it and then went on to demonstrate his intellectual dexterity by asking if the title was written by Yoda (laugh? I broke ribs laughing…) and then bravely changed his status on Facebook to avoid any discussion of his proclamation.
If you can do a review in a little more detail I’d love to hear it. Meanwhile Bernard Levin, that restraining order still stands.
AE Housman. Bath. Dorset. Love. Not Your Heart Away. Spam.
These are the key words flagged up in bold in the search engine tags, presumably bold and bigger because I’ve used them more than other words, like MBA or Midnight At the Oasis. I don’t know much about Search Engine Optimisation, just bits and pieces. Use tags. Put links in to other websites, preferably ones who are going to do the same to yours. Include random
Headings
in the text. No, I don’t know why either. It just does.
Does it make a difference? Well yes. Type in Not Your Heart Away in Google and me and AE Housman are top of the bill. In a manly way, obviously. Nothing (embarrassed cough), “unhealthy.” Read in the abstract though, that tag list sounds like the kind of thing people wearing pyjamas shout at passing cars on city streets. It all made sense at the time.
I wanted to find out more about German villages and the Eidelweiss Pirates so I turned, as you do for everything these days, to Google. All I wanted to do was find some pictures that would show me a German village, so I could imagine the mood of it in my head. Richard Curtis played one song over and over again when he was writing films, so I thought I could allow myself this one small indulgence. I don’t do this a lot. Honest, guv. It was just the once. For research. For this book and that. To see what was there. That’s the only reason I was looking at pictures like that, straight up, as they used to say on The Sweeney.
