IN THE BEGINNING
I’ve just had a great chat with Parul Bavishi, cofounder with Matt Trinetti, of the London Writers’ Salon. Which, by the way, is one of the best writing organisations around. We discussed how my writing career started and it gave me the inspiration to write this post.
As the Bible says, or at least it does in some translations, In the beginning was the word. I should point out that I initially found it hard to utter any words in the English language. Until I was a very old toddler, I spoke a language which only my brother could understand. Stanley Unwin, the professor of gobbledygook, may also have comprehended my verbose outpourings. I sometimes wonder if even I understood it.
Thankfully I learnt to speak shortly after but I was eleven years old when I first realised that I could write well. At Newbold Green Secondary Modern School Mr Johnson, an inspired teacher, asked us to write a story about Bonfire Night. I wrote from the point of view of the Guy and remember puzzling how a Guy – made of bits of rag – could narrate a story and how it would end. The poor Guy naturally ended up on the bonfire and his final words to his readers were AAAGH. My other English teachers were Miss Hobson who introduced me to a wide range of fiction and Mr Dunkley who gave me the confidence to try new things.
One of these things was that I decided to be a writer. At the University of East Anglia, I was encouraged by people like A.E. Dyson, Malcolm Bradbury and Lorna Sage who praised me for my style. Malcolm Bradbury suggested that I go on his new creative writing MA but I decided to go into the real world instead. Stupid of me.
The inspired young author, 1973
I spent the next couple of hundred years writing and submitting novels to publishers and agents. But it was 1983 when I sent a short story to a radio station in Nottingham that I thought I might possibly, with a following wind, make it as a writer. And, oddly enough, I chose to write about a Guy Fawkes contest.
Here’s the opening:
THE GUY FAWKES CONTEST
I suppose it was a bit of a coincidence that Auntie Nellie came round the last week of October when The Wizard of Oz was on at the pictures. You know, that soft film with witches and tin-men and some yankee lass singing her head off about rainbows. It were the sort of film that I wouldn’t be seen dead going to, and neither would our Eric.
But our Eric always used to get at me Auntie Nellie and bring her chest on bad so that she started gasping for breath and having all sorts of convulsions in the front room. So mum decided that she ought to get our Eric out of the way before Auntie Nellie came. She offered him a pound to go to see the Wizard of Oz. Our Eric said it were boring. So she gave him two pounds fifty and told him to take me.
We’d no sooner got to the end of our street when it started chucking it down. We raced down to Woolie’s but there was no one there. So out we goes into the blooming rain again. We ran down to Juddy’s who was our Eric’s best mate. And blow me, we got to his house and his mum said that he’d gone out, that he’d gone to see The Wizard of blooming Oz.
The story won a prize and featured on the station. I thought I’d finally arrived as a writer. More fool me.
My next near success came a decade later when Robert Hale the publisher said he liked my writing but not my plotting. I never thought to phone him and ask how to improve it. Bigger fool me. The manuscript languished in a drawer for 25 years although it found its way to freedom and was published as Apprentice Spy.
Chapter 1 England 1576
I should never have given in to temptation. A was a young travelling player and bored almost out of my mind. We were performing a dreadful play at the home of a at the private house of Lord Brampton, an empty-headed lord whose weasel of a father had been particularly successful at scavenging the pickings of the church left over by old King Henry.
Brampton was slumped in the centre of the audience, a great slug of a man, his clothes strained to near breaking point by his belly, his ruff half-covered by fleshy jowls. As if this was not a disagreeable enough sight, he topped it all with a face best suited to leering from church roofs. It was a large face, flat and formless, with pig-like eyes and drooping mouth. His sparse ginger hair was unkempt and his complexion pallid and blotched. The two qualities this face displayed were an uncompromising stupidity set off by a habitual arrogance.
To one side of this beauty sat a strained looking female I took to be Lady Brampton and to the other, two young girls who I guessed to be the daughters of the house. I looked at her ladyship. Hello, I thought, you must have given very generous hospitality to some young lad twenty years ago. For mark my words, these two luscious young peaches could never have sprung from Brampton's root.
In 2008, I won first prize in the Kenneth Grahame Society short story competition. It was the first of my stories I saw in print and I began to finally settle down to a writing career. At last, 35 years after really starting.
I self-published my first book, The Flame of Resistance and wrote a number of books set in the years before the Norman Conquest of England.
And then, as I tapped out some desultory words on my laptop, I found I was writing what became my first best seller, A Love Most Dangerous. For some reason I still don’t understand - and it may be best not to investigate too deeply - I wrote it from the point of view of one of Henry VIII’s mistresses.
THE COURT OF KING HENRY 1537
To be a servant at the court of King Henry is to live with your heart in your mouth. This is so whether you are young or old, male or female. Some, of course, have more cause for concern than others. I am young and I am female. So the danger to me is considerable.
The danger is the more acute because I am pretty and the Queen is in the last month of her confinement.
Henry has divorced one wife and executed the second. But that is far from the whole story. A string of shattered hearts lies strewn across the land like pearls from a necklace broken in rage. Aye, it's true that complicit fathers, brothers, uncles and even husbands have got rich by leading their women like heifers to the courtly market. It is the women who give the most and suffer the most grievously.
Unless of course, they are clever.
It does not do to be too clever. Anne Boleyn taught us this. For make no mistake, King Henry is more clever than any man in the kingdom now that Thomas Wolsey is dead. And he is as subtle and wily as even the most cunning of women. Anne's head rolling from the block is testimony to that.
The trick is to show your cleverness to just such a degree that Henry is intrigued by it but not threatened. The second trick is to intimate that your cleverness is at his disposal even more than your own. And the third trick? Ah, the third trick is to be willing to bed the great beast of appetites and to know when to do it.
I’m now writing about a period I knew very little about, Britain after the Roman legions left. Here is the beginning – although no doubt it will change as the story proceeds. I’m thinking of calling the book Swords at Twilight, in homage to Rosemary Sutcliff’s Sword at Sunset, her great book about Arthur of the Britons. Or maybe I could be a cad and a rotter and nick her title.
WAR FLEET
Deva Victrix (Chester) April 448
Marcus coughed as he crawled through the low space. The dust and ash hung in the air, seeped into his lungs and coated his legs, hands and clothes. The space remained hot from the previous day and his hair and skin grew slick. He almost gagged. He must be close to the source of the stink. He’d noticed it for a while and hoped it would fade but with each passing day it got worse.
He moved more slowly now, peering through the darkness, reaching tentatively ahead of him. He placed his left hand down; it sunk into something soft and slimy. He could not control himself, he threw up. More stink, he thought bitterly, but my doing now.
He reached for the sack he had brought with him and began to slop in the rotting matter. A vile stench rose up and enveloped him, he yearned to turn and escape. But he would only have to come back later if he did, better to hold on and complete the task.
He doubted he had got every last piece but when he had gathered most, he squirmed backwards dragging the sack with him. Considering it seemed mostly liquid, it was surprisingly heavy.
‘Have you got it?’ Nikias asked.
For answer, he thrust the sack at him. The older man opened it and peered inside, turning his head away immediately. ‘By all the saints, this must have been in there for weeks.’ He peered inside once again, swiftly. ‘A badger by the look of it. They smell evil when they’re alive but now.’ He shook his head and whistled.
Marcus had stopped listening. He was staring at his hand, dripping with gore.
‘You’d best wipe your hands,’ Nikias said, not unkindly, throwing him a rag.
‘Must go,’ Marcus mumbled, desperate to breathe fresh air. He stumbled out of the villa and ran to the pond in the centre of the courtyard. Without even glancing around, he fell to his knees and plunged his hands into the water. The badger’s fur, its rotting flesh and guts slipped from his hands, although seemingly with reluctance.
‘What do you think you are doing?’ cried his master from a corner of the courtyard.
Marcus groaned, stood up and stared at the ground. ‘I thought I saw one of Lady Justina’s trinkets in the pond,’ he said. ‘I was trying to retrieve it.’
Rufius Falco marched across the courtyard, thrust Marcus aside and peered into the pond. ‘I can see no trinket,’ he growled. ‘But I see a lot of filth.’ He gave an accusing stare. ‘Are you responsible for this?’
‘I suspect some of the fishes died, master. The weather is unusually cold.’ Out of the corner of his eye he saw Nikias tiptoeing past the door with the sack, putting his fingers to his lips.
‘Get a net and clear it out,’ Rufius said. ‘And why are you so dirty, boy? You’re covered with dust. And what’s that stench?’
He did not wait for an answer but strode back indoors.
Marcus scooped the scraps of badger from the pond and took it to the refuse pit. Nikias had beaten him to it; the sack sat balefully on the rubbish below.
‘It will defeat even the stink of the pit,’ Nikias said. ‘I’ll scatter some ash on it to try to mask it.’ He grimaced. ‘Go and wash, lad, and change your tunic.’