Listen with Helen...and Susy

Above: "An Audience with Helen Grant & Susy McPhee"

I haven't found much time for blogging recently because I have been frantically trying to finish the revisions to The Demons of Ghent, which is the sequel to Silent Saturday and the second book in the Forbidden Spaces trilogy set in Flanders. I've also been very busy preparing for and participating in the Crieff High Street Arts Festival, about which I blogged recently.

I'm glad to report some success on both fronts - The Demons of Ghent has now gone to the copyediting stage, and the High Street Arts Festival went off very well, with lots of exciting creative exhibitions and performances at nearly 50 locations in Crieff.

I participated in two events at the festival - the first was "Meet the Author" at S.Campbell's newsagent and bookshop on the High Street. I was one of a line-up of authors that included local poet Patricia Ace. This cutting (left)  from the Strathearn Herald includes a pic of me at this event together with Trudyann Gauld from the shop, and book fan Kate Walsh, who had heroically come all the way from Dunblane to attend!

On Saturday evening I took part in "An Audience with Helen Grant & Susy McPhee" at the Drill Hall in Crieff. This venue was very kindly loaned by local business Vivace Lichtman and wine for the evening was sponsored by Harrison's Fine Wines of Crieff. Helen Lewis-McPhee kindly volunteered (well, okay, she was press-ganged) to interview us, and we also read from our books and answered questions. 

If you'd like to listen to a podcast of the event you can find it here: Audience with Helen Grant & Susy McPhee. It includes a reading from Silent Saturday by me, and - excitingly - an excerpt from Susy's brand-new book Back to you, which is so very brand-new that the reading was done from a print-out of the manuscript! Susy and I also talk about location, whether we ever base our characters on real people, and whether writers are constitutionally morbid! 

The sound recording was made by Kona MacPhee, local poet and techie. The editing and uploading to Soundcloud was done by me, a feat which took many hours and a lot of swearing yesterday. I probably should use video tutorials before I throw myself into new software (in this case Garageband) but I prefer the time-honoured method of bumbling through it and occasionally screeching for one of the teens who inhabit the house to come and tell me what to do next. 

Whilst I was struggling with MP3, my daughter meanwhile took delivery of a second-hand sound system she has wanted for ages. There seems to be some reverse audio evolution going on in the Grant household, because whilst I have been doing my best to do everything digitally, she was desperate to get a turntable so she can play vinyl records. As we have moved about a lot in the last 15 years (Spain, Germany, Belgium...) we have had to have regular turn-outs of old stuff, so our old turntable and nearly all our old vinyl records had been donated to charity shops. I had however hung onto a single LP: the soundtrack to The Singing Detective. Whilst my daughter was just getting to grips with the new turntable ("It goes round!!! How do you make it move to the next track?" etc) I refused to let her play my LP in case it ended up scratched. Instead she had to make do with some dodgy K-Tel records from the charity shop. I'm quite glad I insisted on this, after hearing her accidentally playing I don't want to dance by Eddy Grant (1st track on an LP) at 45rpm... Eventually, however, we put my precious LP on and spent the rest of the evening listening to Ella Fitzgerald and the Inkspots, Sam Browne with the Lew Stone Band, etc. The very last song on the B side was Vera Lynn singing We'll meet again. Listening to that wartime favourite with the familiar but long-forgotten hiss and crackle of vinyl sent shivers down my spine. Some things still sound better on vinyl. 

Anyway, as a result of sitting up until midnight listening to stuff that was cutting edge in 1940, all of us woke up feeling the worse for wear this morning. Having packed everyone else off to school/work I am supposed to be getting on with book three in my trilogy: Urban Legends, but it's hard going on five and a half hours sleep. I think I'd better have more tea first...

Welcome to Crieff High Street Arts Festival!

As I mentioned in my last post, I am going to be taking part in the upcoming and first ever Crieff High Street Arts Festival, taking place on 24th and 25th August. The Festival is the brainchild of local artist June McEwan and it is largely thanks to her energy and enthusiasm that it is taking place (June is an energy bomb - as I remarked once, we should forget fracking and just connect June to the power grid).

The Festival is going to help put Crieff on the artistic map - but if you don't know where it is on the ordinary map, it's a town in Perthshire, Scotland, set in gorgeous countryside and home to such interesting things as the Famous Grouse distillery and Crieff Hydro. Well worth a visit if you're within travelling distance, and the Festival could be the very excuse you need to make the trip!

All sorts of events and exhibitions will be taking place over the weekend of the Festival, including an acoustic music workshop, taster sessions in spinning, ceramics and felting, an exhibition by the Strathearn Arts Society and a mandolin and guitar concert. More details about the Festival are available here: Crieff High Street Arts Festival

Of course, locally-based writers (of which Crieff has a surprising number) are getting involved too. On Saturday 24th August I am appearing alongside Susy McPhee (author of The Runaway Wife and Husbands and Lies) at the Drill Hall on Meadow Place, for "An audience with Helen Grant and Susy McPhee."

Above: Susy McPhee

The event starts at 7.15pm and entrance is free! This is largely due to the generosity of local businesses who are sponsoring the event. The venue itself (below) is being offered by Vivace Lichtman. Wine for the evening is being sponsored by Harrison's Fine Wines and nibbles by McNee's of Crieff. A very big THANK YOU to these brilliant sponsors! 

The evening will involve not only the "audience" itself - a chance to hear me and Susy talk about our inspirations and, as Susy puts it, "what it's like living for so much of the time in a world we've created inside our own heads" - but also an opportunity to ask questions and buy signed copies of our books. It will be fun and glam and we'd love to see you there if you are within travelling distance! 

 

If you are attending, please confirm this on Facebook, here: https://www.facebook.com/events/284636921673995/ It is a big help with planning for the evening if we know roughly how many people are coming! 

 

Above: sponsors McNee's of Crieff and Harrison's Fine Wines!

In which I do some "real" work...

I haven't blogged recently because I've been frantically trying to finish the edits on my next book, The Demons of Ghent, to be published in 2014. Writing, sadly, is not all lying on chaises  longues sipping absinthe and idly noting down the occasional stroke of creative genius in a moleskine notebook..! I've been very busy trying to get some major changes made without too much slippage in the deadline.

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by," said the late great Douglas Adams. Well, that noise makes me feel very twitchy (control freak, moi?). Anyway, I more or less met the deadline, but now I am having to wade through a massive pile of tasks that were neglected whilst I was working on the edits. One of the big things is the preparation for the upcoming Crieff High Street Arts Festival on 24th and 25th August. I'm doing an event at that, about which I will blog separately later.

Anyway, I also found a bit of free time today to help my daughter with a temporary job she has, delivering leaflets door to door in the town. There is a certain sort of fascination in jobs like that, I think.  When I was a student I did the Christmas post a couple of times to earn a bit of extra money, and this reminded me of that. The actual "work" is pretty mundane - you just carry a bag of leaflets around and stuff them through each letterbox. However, that's not all there is to it.

For starters, there is a certain kind of door to door etiquette. When I approached most of the houses I didn't see a soul. When I did see someone working in their front garden, I made of point of saying hello to them so that they didn't jump out of their skin when I passed by. But in some houses there were clearly people on the other side of the windows. I pretended not to see them and they (I suppose, because I wasn't looking) pretended not to see me. The only exception I can recall to this was when I was doing the Christmas post on one particularly nasty snowy day, with no gloves on because you can't sort letters whilst wearing mitts. I walked up the drive of one cosy-looking house with all the Christmas lights on, whilst snow drove into my face and melted down the back of my neck, and the occupants sat snugly in the front room laughing and pointing. Grrr. But yes, you are probably right; I should have forgotten that by now...

Then there is Man's Best Friend, of course. We didn't see much of him today, though we did hear a bit from him. At one house we put the leaflet through the letter slot and it was instantly greeted with what sounded like an entire pack of very small dogs yapping their heads off. I am not sure there will be much left of the leaflet by the time the owner sees it! There was nothing however to rival the Hound that used to lurk on the post round I did all those years ago. The old postie who trained me warned me about that particular dog. I never actually saw it (well, not the whole of it) but whatever it was, it sounded like MacReady's description of the alien in The Thing: "weird and pissed off." Also enormous. A mastiff perhaps, or some kind of tyrannosaurus. Whenever it heard me approaching the door it would hurl itself against the other side, growling and snapping, and the minute I put anything through the letter slot, it would seize it savagely. I find it hard to imagine that the owner ever got a single piece of post that hadn't been shredded by its enormous teeth. Once I opened the letter slot and looked through it instead of putting a letter through, and I could see right down its throat.

The other endlessly, er, fascinating aspect of door to door deliveries is the varying accessibility of people's letter boxes. I probably make life more difficult for myself by refusing to walk across people's lawns in case they come out and shout at me. But I am amazed at the convoluted routes some people's paths take from the street to the front door: up the drive, turn right, cross the entire front of the house, turn left around the side, then left again up the steps... They remind me of those penitential mazes that mediaeval monks used to trudge around. My daughter and I whiled away the walk between houses by debating which was the most difficult to get at. I think the prize went to the one which had a drive, followed by a gate with a latch, followed by a garden and then one of those letter slots about three inches off the ground, so that you have to grovel on your knees to put the leaflet through. And it also had those brush thingies inside the letter box, which make it very difficult to poke a flexible item through, especially if the hinge of the cover is a snappy one. It was rather like that monstrous dog again, only with the teeth on the outside and the fur on the inside.

Anyway, it was fun. Sort of. And I got some fresh air after being cooped up with a hot laptop for weeks. My daughter will also be fantastically fit by the time she has covered the entire town. So that is also good. There is just one final thing to add. To the people of Crieff, those of you who have those letterboxes attached to the wall at the end of the drive, right next to the street: we love you. x

Who's Karl?

Just recently I've been plaguing my parents with request for old family photographs. I wanted to get my hands on a particular photo for this blog, and the majority of the family pictures are at my parents' place, some 400 miles away in the south of England. When I was a child, most of the photographs from my father's side belonged to his parents, my grandparents. I can still remember where they were kept: in a drawer in the fairly hideous dark wood Art Deco sideboard in their house in Rayner's Lane. That sideboard, though ugly, was a repository of all kinds of treasures, including a black tin tray with pictures of cocktails on it and matching magnetic coasters - I thought that was terrifically sophisticated at the time. 

Anyway, most of those photographs now belong to my parents, so I had to prevail upon them to take time out from their busy schedules to look through them. Luckily my sister volunteered to help, and we had a merry afternoon during which she posted some of the ones she found to Facebook so I could look at them. There were so many and they were so interesting (even the ones that were clearly not the one I was after) that in the end we resorted to skyping each other, and she waved the photographs at me via the webcam. Here's one of them:

This is a pantomime staged during World War Two. That's my grandfather in the centre of the back row, the only one in uniform (I think he was the stage manager or something so escaped the indignity of having to wear a frock and a blonde wig).

I love exploring the past - not just the past of my own family, though I do find that especially interesting. "Exploring the past is like planning a trip to a foreign country," I told my Dad, who was somewhat bemused by my urgency to find the picture I was after. "Well," he remarked, "it should keep you occupied, it's a BIG country."

Sadly, the photograph I was looking for failed to surface, although I am hopeful that it may turn up in the end; some other pictures were also missing which suggests that somewhere in a forgotten and dusty corner there is another package of photographs waiting to be found.

The one I was so keen to share was a postcard-sized portrait photograph in black and white or sepia, taken around 1930. It showed a man with rather angular features standing at a slight angle to the camera; he was dressed (I think) in a light-coloured trench coat over a dark suit. He may have been wearing a hat too. This, according to my grandfather (now dead some years) was his German friend Karl, whom he knew before World War Two. My grandfather was a silk buyer for Chatillon, Mouly, Roussel Silks Ltd of Mayfair and sometimes travelled to Paris on business, so possibly he got to know Karl there. That is absolutely all I know (or surmise) about Karl. In 1931 my grandfather left that firm and he spent the rest of his career working in insurance, which was considered a much steadier job. No more foreign jaunts after that until he went back to Europe as a military motorcyclist in World War Two, and by then he and Karl were on opposing sides. So far as I know, they were never in touch again.

That photograph always intrigued me. Not, perhaps, as much as the one of my great-grandmother Louise in pearls, lace and velvet ribbons, or the one of my maternal grandmother posing on a beach in a very modest bathing costume and with a parasol - but it intrigued me all the same, to the extent that when I wrote The Glass Demon I put Karl in it. "Uncle Karl", Lin's German relative, is my grandfather's Karl, miraculously transported from 1930. The book is set in the early 21st century but Karl still has a rather old-fashioned (though suave) look: "I unlocked the door and opened it to find the tall angular form of Uncle Karl, looking like a 1940s private eye in a tan-coloured mackintosh with the collar turned up. Uncle Karl had a stern face, all square jaw and razor-sharp cheekbones, but he generally had a twinkle in his eyes which showed that his bark was worse than his bite. Now, however, he looked severe..."

I'd love to be able to show you the photograph of Karl. I don't believe it's gone forever; I'm 99% sure I have seen it since my grandmother died and her house was cleared. However, my father and sister went through all the photographs they could lay hands on, and the only one they could find of an unidentified man of about the right age was this one (below left).

I don't believe this is Karl, unless either this or the lost photograph happens to be uncharacteristic of him. I'm still hopeful that the lost picture may turn up. In the meantime, Karl - at any rate, my Karl, as I remember him from the lost picture - exists only in my memory - and in the book. I'm glad he has a role in that.

Whilst my sister was posting likely photographs on Facebook, my other sister, seeing them, posted, "Who's Karl?"
Who's Karl? Well, now you know.

Haunted Homes

It rained heavily today, and school sports day had to be postponed, leaving me with a bit of time on my hands; so what better way to spend it than browsing amongst all my old books again?

The book pictured left is a great favourite of mine: The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain by John H. Ingram. First published in the early 1880s, this is the fourth edition (1888). I found it years ago (probably decades ago, I think) in a junk shop by the side of a road somewhere in rural Scotland - I don't remember exactly where. This was long before we came to live here, so it must have been on one of our hill-walking trips.

Haunted Homes is a collection of "true" (as opposed to fictional) ghost stories, organised alphabetically by location. The preface declares that the book has not been compiled "with a view of creating un frisson nouveau*, but to serve as a guide to the geography of Ghostland - a handbook to the Haunted Houses of Great Britain."

It also claims to supply exact details where most people can only give a vague account of any particular apparition, ie. it is trying to be as scientific as possible. However, at the end of the preface the author says that if he had ever believed in ghosts, compiling the book would have cured him of "such mental weakness". So I must say I think he is being disingenuous when he claims not to be trying to give his readers a frisson; if he thinks it is all bunk then the only purpose is to entertain!

Anyway, the book is a fascinating read. It includes some fairly well-known "hauntings" such as Glamis Castle and Rainham Hall, but also a host of others that I had never come across before. Some of them are standard fare: misers haunting the hiding-place of their hidden hoard or people appearing to their relatives when they were known to be far away at the time, and later being discovered to have died at the instant of their appearance. Others of the stories are more disturbing.

There is, for example, an entry for a country house coyly described as "Yorkshire: ----- Hall" which has a very creepy little ghost in it. A young woman stayed with some cousins who lived in a mansion in North Yorkshire, in the summer of 1879. Between three and four in the morning she heard her bedroom door open and shut, and then the rustling of some curtains close to the bed. For several minutes the young woman had a strong feeling that she was not alone, and then she saw someone standing at the foot of the bed: "the figure of a little girl in her night-dress - a little girl with dark hair and a very white face." The young woman tried to speak to her, but couldn't. She reports what happened next as follows: "She came slowly up on to the top of the bed, and I then saw her face clearly. She seemed in great trouble; her hands were clasped and her eyes were turned up with a look of entreaty, an almost agonised look. Then, slowly unclasping her hands, she touched me on the shoulder. The hand felt icy cold, and while I strove to speak she was gone."

The young woman's hostess (presumably her aunt) encouraged her to think that the whole thing must have been a very vivid nightmare. It was not until after she had left the house and gone to stay elsewhere that her cousin told her that the apparition of the little girl had been seen by other people on three other occasions, but that the young woman's uncle had forbidden his children from telling her this, because he thought it would frighten her too badly!

The thing that I personally find most chilling about this account is that on all the previous occasions, the little girl in the nightdress with her dark hair had only ever been seen from the back, looking out of the window, running up the staircase, or on one occasion simply standing by the table in a room. The young woman who recounted the story said, "I am the only one that has seen its face."

Brrrrr!

* a cheap thrill.