Not giving a pig’s patootie: an interview with Laurie Graham on the pitfalls and pleasures of reviving old characters - Michelle Lovric

Every novelist has her own personal history, her cast of characters that stretch way back into her writing past. Laurie Graham, a former History Girl, never dreamed of writing sequels to her two early novels, Perfect Meringues and The Future Homemakers of America. She thought that those characters were in their graves: gone, but fondly remembered.

But in recent years, she’s been asked to pick up the stories of Lizzie Partridge the 1990s TV chef from Perfect Meringues and Peggy Dewey the 1950s Airforce wife in Homemakers. In each case she’s moved the characters on twenty years from their last appearance.

Writing this way raises particular problems, not least that Laurie hadn’t thought to future-proof Lizzy and Peggy. She was left with a desire to go back and rewrite the originals, to make better starting points for sequels. But it can’t be done. What’s published is published.

 Another problem is being forced to re-read old work …

I have had the pleasure of interviewing Laurie about the art of revivifying old characters …

 How does it feel to reread your old novels?

Initially it was so painful that I kept putting it off for tomorrow. I had to force myself to sit down and do it and indeed I was horrified by some of what I read. I couldn’t believe that my old editors had let certain things go through. But there was a good side to revisiting old material: I discovered that I’m a better writer now than I was twenty years ago.

In what way?

I am more ruthless. I can now see in my early books instances of self-indulgence and sloppiness. With occasional downpours of clichés!

But all writers are desperately self-critical, aren’t they?

Not all, I fear. But we should be. Of course it’s a perennial tussle between having the confidence of your convictions while writing with the dreck-detector switched on.

 I know that where twenty years ago it might have broken my heart to cut things that really needed to go, now I don’t hesitate. If the voice in my head says ‘really, Laurie? Sure about that, are you?,’ it goes, immediately. Stuff can always be retrieved from the cutting-room floor but funnily enough, it never is.

So the new Lizzy Partridge book is just out. It’s called Anyone for Seconds?, which is a double pun, in that it is a second helping of an earlier novel’s protagonist?

Yes. And I very much hope that no reviewer is going to say ‘No, thank you. We’ve had our fill of that.’

Tell us about the original Lizzie – and the new one.

Laurie in 1998

What has been interesting for me is that when I created Lizzy I was going through a very difficult period of my life: divorce, single parenthood, penury. Quite coincidentally (or was it?), when reviving her, I was going through another difficult period: grief, loss, penury again. So Lizzie has been a sort of mouthpiece for me, the most autobiographical of my protagonists. In Perfect Meringues she was in her forties and the single parent of a stroppy teenager. In Anyone for Seconds she’s a grandmother, though not of the knitting and baking variety. She was sharp and funny then but she’s sharper and funnier now, having reached the golden years of not giving a pig’s patootie.

In Perfect Meringues she was a daytime TV cook who loses her slot to a one-recipe wonder who’s sleeping with the show’s editor. Lizzie bows out in the glorious blaze of an on-air food fight. When I dramatized the book for Radio 4 I had the great pleasure of scripting the fight for Imelda Staunton who played Lizzie and Lesley Joseph who played her nemesis, TV anchor Kim.

I was an enthusiastic cook myself in the 1990s so I enjoyed dreaming up menus for Lizzie. Wind on two decades and Lizzie, like me, rarely cooks. She’ll dine, as I have been known to do, on a slice toast eaten leaning over the sink. And her grungy, eye-rolling teenage daughter, has grown up, scrubbed up and become a career woman and a helicopter parent to her own son. Drawn from life? I name no names. Anyone for Seconds? is a work of fiction.

Laurie now

How did you work on this technically?

 Having forced myself to sit at the kitchen table to read the first book, I was relieved to find that it wasn’t so very bad. It actually made me laugh a couple of times, which was encouraging. Most important of all, I still liked Lizzie and her entourage. I was happy at the prospect of spending another year in their company.

 On that first reading, I foolishly didn’t make notes so during the writing of the sequel I had to keep going back to the old text. If only novels had indices.

My usual process with a novel is to wait for a voice but in this instance I already had the voice. What I needed to do next was a cull of characters. Who should reappear, who was for the chop? Lizzie’s mother, Muriel, now approaching 90, was a likely candidate for an early exit, but I found I couldn’t dispense with her. Muriel, just like my own dear departed Mum, is so key to understanding what drives Lizzie. So Muriel was spared and the guillotine fell elsewhere.

There’s always the question of a love interest. Lizzie had a happy romantic ending in Perfect Meringues, as did my own life about the time I was finishing writing the book. But ‘happy ever after’ often turns out to be ‘happy for the time being.’

I decided that should be Lizzie’s lot. Alone again, wiser, more resilient and, no longer actively looking for love as she was in her forties, she is, strange to relate, more likely to find it.

What are the main differences in society in the 20 years between the two books?

Only two decades and yet the world is hardly recognisable. When I wrote Perfect Meringues, I didn’t own a mobile phone. I just about had a computer, a beast which took up half of my small study. In the sequel, though Lizzie is way behind the technological curve even she has a mobile phone.

From the point of view of Lizzie’s character, political correctness is the most significant change in the world she inhabits. She, like me, finds it oppressive and at times risible, and she resists having her thoughts and speech policed by her vigilant daughter, Ellie. Each of them is a creature of their time. Ellie, born in the 1970s is as baffled by post-war baby Lizzie as Lizzie is by her own mother, born in the 1920s.

What was the hardest thing about reviving Lizzie?

This may sound odd but I think the thing that caused me most concern was how a sequel would be received. I didn’t want my readers to think I’d run out of new ideas. On the contrary, I still have plenty of ideas. Sadly my publishers haven’t been as enamoured of them as I am so they must lie dormant for the time being. I just didn’t want people to think I was scraping the authorial barrel. Let’s rather call it a bit of perfectly legitimate grave-robbing.

Laurie Graham website

Michelle Lovric website

at left, The Horrors of the London burial grounds, being a correct account of the horrible disclosures made by gravediggers : with the manner of cutting up dead bodies, and other horrible transactions, 1840, courtesy of Wellcome Images 

Regrets of a Failed Bell Ringer, by Laurie Graham

I’ve always had a thing about church bells and a brief, unsuccessful career in the bell tower of an English village church forty years ago did nothing to dilute that love. Since then I’ve relished the chaotic clanging of Italian bells which announced ‘Habemus Papam’ and the strange allure of Russian monastery bells, but my heart is always drawn back to English bells. They are part of the soundtrack of my childhood. 

Holy Cross, where bell-ringing defeated me

I was doomed to failure as a bellringer chiefly because numbers mean nothing to me. On the page they jump about before my eyes. In my ears they might as well be a recitation in Togalog. PINs were invented to torment me and, cruelly, the skills of change-ringing are as beyond me as tightrope walking. And simple change-ringing is child’s play compared to method ringing with its wonderful eccentric peal names. Grandsire Caters, Erin Triples, Stedman Cinques (named after Fabian Stedman, a 17^th century campanologist). 

There was another reason I never took to bell-ringing: a warning tale told to all rookie ringers about what can go wrong if you don't develop a feel for the rope. You can see what I mean. But apart from the risk of getting  airborne in an undignified manner it was all very convivial. Historically bellringers have had a reputation for enjoying drink, mustering at the local pub before and after practice, and sometimes, tsk tsk, keeping a stash of ale in the ringing chamber itself.

 

Times have changed and some bell-towers now find themselves on the defensive. There are villages where blow-ins have complained about having their Sunday lie-in disturbed and and have succeeded in getting the church bells silenced.  A case of statutory noise nuisance, apparently. Have these people no sense of history? Bells were once the 24-hour rolling news service of a community.  Three strokes rung three times told (and tolled) the death of a man, rung twice it signalled the death of a woman, once, the death of a child. Bells rang with urgency to signal an invasion, half-muffled for a funeral or fully muffled for a solemn day like Good Friday. How strange that in an age when people allow their William Tell Overture ringtone to disturb the peace of the world without giving a damn, they object to church bells.

I feel in illustrious company with my love of bells. Charles Dickens (The Chimes),  Lord Tennyson (Ring Out, Wild Bells), John Betjeman  (I heard the church bells hollowing out the sky, deep beyond deep, like never-ending stars.) But it’s to an American, Henry Longfellow, that I turn for my customary December sound clip. He wrote his poem I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day in 1864. His wife was recently dead, his son had been seriously wounded fighting for the Union. Longfellow’s lines run the gamut from despair to hope, and all inspired by the sound of church bells. Here is a very lovely version of it.

This is my final post for the History Girls. You'll still be able to find me at my website but

from next month my place here will be occupied by historical novelist, Katherine Clements.  So thank you very much for having me. Welcome, Katherine. Merry Christmas. And, well, that’s all folks! 

  

A Dark Night in Ballykissane, by Laurie Graham

Ireland’s centenary year of commemoration of the Easter Rising is already underway. It began, officially, with a re-enactment of the event widely regarded as the rallying moment for republicanism: the funeral of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa in August 1915.  This past August, at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, the Irish President and the Taoiseach led a ceremony of wreath-laying and recitation of Padraig Pearse’s famous graveside oration. The fools, the fools, the fools! They have left us our Fenian dead and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace… 

Padraig Pearse's graveside oration

‘Iconic’ has to be one of the most overused words of the 21^st century but when it comes to Irish nationalism Rossa and Pearse are certainly considered worthy of it. 

I have no political axe to grind. British rule in Ireland was unquestionably harsh and terrible acts were committed on both sides in the fight for Ireland’s independence, but as a blow-in, resident only five years in Ireland, I can’t help but take a long, cool view of the heroes and bogeymen and legends of the Easter Rising. Perhaps I can say what an Irishman wouldn’t: that the rebellion of 1916 defeated itself with a catalogue of snafus and misunderstandings.

The first thing to explain is how O’Donovan Rossa came to be buried in Dublin at all given that he was supposed to be exiled from Ireland after serving a prison sentence for treason. Rossa’s ‘exile’ was winked at. Though he settled in New York in the 1880s and drummed up funds there for a Fenian dynamiting campaign in Britain, he returned to Ireland several times and on one visit received the Freedom of the City of Cork.  When he died, in a Staten Island hospital in 1915, the Irish republicans recognised a publicity opportunity.  ‘Send the body home’ they said. ‘We’ll give him a hero’s funeral.’  Indeed it was practically a state funeral and is seen by many as the Easter Rising’s moment of conception.

One of the schemers behind Rossa’s crowd-pulling obsequies was John Devoy, a man perhaps better known for collaborating with Germany during World War I  -  on the basis that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’  -   and running German guns into Ireland. Or trying to.  Devoy’s name is linked to the Fenian calamities of Good Friday, 1916.

John Devoy

A party of men set off from Dublin by train. Their destination was Kerry and their mission, ordered by Devoy, was to make contact with a Fenian cell in Killarney, drive to a wireless station on Valentia Island and steal radio equipment with which to send a fake signal to the British navy warning of a German attack off the Scottish coast and so lure any British vessels away from Tralee Bay where guns and explosives, essential for the planned Easter Rising, were to be brought ashore from a German ship.

Everything that could go wrong did go wrong.  What the Dubliners didn’t know was that Roger Casement had been arrested in Tralee that morning. The local police, knowing of Casement’s connections with Germany, suspected something big was afoot and were out in force, setting up road blocks and questioning drivers. The plan to break into the wireless station was aborted and in the confusion of changed plans the two cars carrying John Devoy’s Dublin men got separated. Without wirelesses they had no means of communicating and in the dark April night the driver of the second car took a wrong turn and drove off Ballykissane  pier into the River Laune. All bar one of the car’s occupants were drowned.   

Ballykissane Pier Memorial to the Drowned

And as if that senseless loss of lives were not enough the landing of the arms and ammunition failed anyway. The men charged with bringing it ashore went to the wrong rendezvous point, the German vessel waiting offshore was apprehended by the British navy, escorted to Cork and scuttled, and the Republican cause lost 20,000 rifles, 10 machine guns, and a million rounds of ammunition.

It was but the first of a series of bungled missions, confusions and poor planning that contributed to the swift defeat of the 1916 Rising.

Worldly Goods, by Laurie Graham

So what’s in your coat pocket? And are you, like me, also hauling around a shoulder bag that feels like it’s full of rocks?

When a person is found murdered there can be few things more eloquent than the possessions found on them. This was especially true of the women killed by Saucy Jack in Whitechapel in 1888. They all lodged in doss houses and whatever they possessed in the world they either pawned for a bit of cash to tide them over or carried with them at all times. 

Polly Nichols

I’ll begin with Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols, officially the first of the Ripper’s victims. I believe there’s a strong case for making Martha Tabram his first victim but as I’ve been unable to find a police record of her possessions I’ll say no more about her in this post. 

It was a late August night when Polly Nichols was killed, thundery and not particularly cool. Nevertheless she was wearing an ulster overcoat, a dress, two petticoats, stays, a pair of flannel drawers, a bonnet and spring-sided boots. In her pocket she had just three items: a comb, a handkerchief and a piece of mirror. Where Polly had been lodging, at the White House on Flower and Dean Street, a piece of mirror would have been a prized possession. 

Twelve days later Annie Chapman was killed. 

Annie Chapman

Her clothing was similar to Polly’s  -  a coat, a skirt, two bodices, two petticoats, wool stockings, a neckerchief and a pair of lace-up boots.  Multiple petticoats were the norm. They kept you warm while you trudged the streets and anyway, where else would you keep them when you never knew where you’d be sleeping from one night to the next? The contents of Annie’s pockets were even more wretched: a scrap of muslin, two combs and two unidentified pills screwed up in a piece of old envelope. The post mortem revealed that Annie suffered from advanced tuberculosis for which, of course, there was then no remedy. The pills could have been anything. Hooper’s Female Pills, Dr Bateman’s Pectoral Drops, it’s anyone’s guess.

Lizzie Stride

Three weeks later the Ripper struck again. September 30^th, the night of what has become known as The Double Event. First, Lizzie Stride, out drinking and looking for trade. She was wearing a fur-trimmed jacket, a skirt, two petticoats, a bodice, a chemise, stockings and boots, and a bonnet.  Sometime between leaving the lodging house and meeting her killer she had also acquired a nosegay which was found pinned to her jacket. Did Jack give it to her? We can never know.  In her pockets: two handkerchiefs, a thimble,  a scrap of muslin, a length of wool wound onto a card, a small key, a stub of pencil, two combs, a spoon, and a few buttons.

Kate Eddowes

And then Kate Eddowes, killed the same night, on Mitre Square. She is for me perhaps the most vivid of all the Ripper’s victims with the varying fortunes of her life and her relentless decline. The list of her clothes and personal effects makes for the saddest of inventories.  A cloth jacket, a skirt, three petticoats, a man’s vest, a bodice, a chemise, stockings, boots, a neckerchief, a bonnet, and three tie-on aprons or pockets as they were then called. In the pockets: two clay pipes, one small tin containing tea, one small tin containing sugar, various pieces of fabric with pins and needles, six scraps of soap, a comb, a teaspoon, a length of string, a button, a thimble, a pair of spectacles, one mitten, and an old mustard tin containing two pawn tickets. 

  

The worldly goods of a forty six year old woman who had worked every day of her adult life. Imagine.

The Night in Question by Laurie Graham is published by Quercus.