Two live bullets and no gun - by Lu Hersey

 Since my father died, I've done nothing but deal with a ton of admin (I call it dadmin), arrange his funeral and start work clearing 97 years' worth of hoarded stuff from his house before it sells. At night I dream I'm trapped in dust filled rooms, where ghost figures flicker in dark corners, moth eaten carpets crumble under my feet, and huge spiders fall on me from web-strewn ceilings, jerking me awake at 3am. 

On the plus side, I've found some interesting things along the way. As a hoarder, my father kept practically everything. It's too late to ask him why he had an alligator skin in the wardrobe, or what the two live bullets (no gun...as yet) were doing in the kitchen cupboard. In fact his house is filled with endless threads to unfinished stories. 

Take the boxes of letters. Not just his - his mother's, his father's, my mother's and even some of his last wife's. Many are self-explanatory and easily discarded, but some leave me dying to know more. Like the one from his sister to my grandfather complaining bitterly about my mother and 'that unspeakable incident in Gibraltar'... My mother? I didn't think she was the unspeakable incident type, so WHAT HAPPENED??

Obviously there are endless photographs. The large filing cabinet in his office, entirely filled with boxes of slides, proved way too much for me. I kept some taken pre 1981 (haven't had time to look at any of them yet, and of course have nothing to look at them with) but left the rest for house clearance. Life's too short for that many slides of other people's holidays.

More interesting were some printed photos from before he started taking slides. In among some black and white photos I'd never seen, there was a picture of my parents holding two babies - only one of which was me. The kind of thing that makes you wonder if maybe you were a twin and no one bothered to tell you. 

And now there's no one left to ask.

Of course he kept every single passport he'd ever owned, along with all the address books (including his mother's, my mother's and his last wife's). I flipped through before discarding them, So many people I didn't know, and so many places i'd never visited. Like driving through towns on your way to somewhere else, and briefly wondering about the lives of all those people who live there. 

Diaries? Tons of them, mostly recent, all totally uninteresting, filled with doctor appointments and bin day reminders - but he'd kept them anyway. The one exception is a Letts Schoolboy Diary from 1939, and what makes it interesting is the content Letts considered suitable for a schoolboy at that time. The bottom of each double page spread has a box with a different, reasonably researched snippet of information on such things as mythical beasts, necromancy, demons, different types of fairies, witches, harpies and Norse gods. I found it fascinating, but I don't think he did. All his diary entries are about visits to the dentist or going on car journeys - a schoolboy life so dull, he'd given up writing in it before March was out. Seems even the start of the war didn't make an impression. 

On his computer I found the start of his autobiography, and thought that might be worth reading. Sadly it stopped before he reached the age of seven. Fair enough. Memoir writing is a lot of effort - and anyway, knowing my father, he'd have left out ALL the interesting bits.

Clothes? The dressing gown alone was one he'd had since before his first marriage. Unwashed, moth-eaten and badly stained. Ew. I think he kept all the clothes he ever owned since doing his national service. And of course he kept all his last wife's clothing, still neatly hanging in the wardrobe just as she'd left it when she died 10 years ago. Presents she'd bought, waiting to be wrapped for unknown children, long since grown up and probably past university by now.

I guess house clearance sums up all the messiness of a life. Few of us manage to tie up all the loose ends before death, and my father was no exception. Even at 97, he was planning for a future while carrying the weight of his past with him, just in case any of it came in handy. 

It's left me wondering whether to make my own house a minimalist haven, or leave tantalising half-finished letters, spicy diaries and cryptic clues to a mysterious past lying hidden in wardrobes and kitchen drawers. Fragments of stories for my children to wonder at. 

But on balance, I reckon they'd rather I went for minimalist.

Lu Hersey

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A waste of time - by Lu Hersey

 My last post was about trying to get my book out in time for Christmas, so I could give a copy to my dad before he died. Turns out it was a really stupid thing to do. Debbie (editor at Beaten Track) had to jump through hoops to finish editing in time, my print copies hadn't arrived and I ended up ordering him one through Amazon - but hindsight is a wonderful thing. 

What was I trying to achieve anyway? It's only now I realise it was vanity on my part, a final attempt to make my dad proud of me, which was totally misguided. Close to the end of life, as he opened the present, painfully and slowly, I think he was hoping for a gripping crime novel he hadn't read. He spent a good few minutes staring at the back cover trying to read the blurb, before handing it back to me, disappointed. I understand. When you've only got a few weeks left to live, reading something that doesn't interest you is a waste of very valuable time. 

What he really liked was the photograph album I'd compiled for him, and fair enough. In your final days, you're far more likely to want to look at the story of your life in photographs, so you can remember things, family and friends in happier times, than read anything at all. And so at his funeral this week, I've arranged a tribute montage of 40 photographs of his life as part of the service. I think he'd have liked that. 

Meanwhile, I now have the print copies of the book, but I've totally failed to do anything about promoting it. Maybe when the funeral is over - or maybe it's already too late. But if anyone wants the copy I bought off Amazon, let me know and I'll send it to you for free.

 

PS. It's not a crime novel. 

Lu Hersey

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The patchwork of memory - by Lu Hersey

My partner moved in with me recently, and to avoid either of us falling over furniture or stubbing our toes on unexpected boxes, we needed to clear a lot of stuff. Worse, my father has had to move into a care home, which means I'm trying to sort and clear stuff at his place too - which is all making me think minimalism is blooming good idea. 

But there are always some things you want to keep, even if they serve no practical purpose. Inside a big wooden chest I found a patchwork quilt, made long ago by my grandmother's family (seriously long ago - she was born in 1881).  Grandma was the 13th of 14 children, and I remember her telling me that anyone who visited the house when she was young had to sew a piece onto the quilt before they were allowed to leave. She said the tiny purple velvet pieces were from the mourning collar and bows she wore attached to her clothing when her father died. In fact to her, every fragment of fabric in the intricate patchwork represented a memory of a dress or blouse, or something from the household like tablecloths - a design made of memories of her family and friends, gathered by the fireside in Yorkshire, long ago.

I thought about why I wanted to keep it, now it's too fragile to use on a bed or hang on a wall. What does it mean to me? Perhaps not as much as it meant to Grandma, but it instantly conjures my memory of her  - an old woman I loved dearly, who came to live with us when I was a child. The smell of Foxes Glacier Mints and 4711 cologne. And how this patchwork quilt always rested at the end of her bed. But what will it mean to my children when I go? Even less. They might remember me telling them about my grandmother and how many brothers and sisters she had, that's all. 

Anyway, all this stuff moving has got me thinking about our memories, and the things that are important to us.

Take my father. At 96, living in a care home, his memory gets patchier by the day. After he's had a nap (he generally has at least a couple every day), he thinks it's the next day when he wakes up and demands another breakfast. The care home staff obligingly present him with one, regardless of the time - which seems like a good way to deal with someone whose reality is different and who lives two or three days in one. Like a hobbit, he has at least two breakfasts, as well as elevenses and lunch, afternoon tea and a supper or two. He also believes it's his birthday at least once every month, and I've started sending presents to avoid him getting upset and thinking we've forgotten him.

But his house, which he lived in for 50 years, refusing to move while either of his wives (not simultaneously) lived with him there, means nothing at all to him now. He never mentions it. His life is his breakfasts and birthdays, and lugubriously lamenting his forthcoming death (though he's actually not in any pain, and is well cared for). All that stuff he hoarded, that garden he worked on, those books that fill his bookcases - all meaningless to him. 

The main thing I'm learning from all this is that the things people insist on hanging onto are mostly very unimportant. Maybe keep them if they hold a memory of someone dear to you, but don't expect that object, whatever it is, to mean much to anyone else. There'll probably come a time when it won't even mean anything to you. In the end, only the people and pets you hold (or held) dear are important. (And breakfasts, if you're my dad)

For now I'll keep the patchwork quilt and maybe find some way to preserve it - a piece of folk art that people might find interesting. But the stories, like the people who made it, are long gone. That's just the way of things. How very cluttered the world would be if it wasn't.

Lu Hersey

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Death, death and more death - by Lu Hersey

 A psychiatrist friend once told me that writers are simply trying to cheat death. Leaving something of themselves behind, so they can live on, in some form, for eternity. (He obviously didn't know much about the shelf life of books, but I got the point).

The constant death and funeral news since the Queen died has made me really think more about it. Why do we write books? Was he correct? I can't help hoping the Queen kept a gossipy, salacious diary about what she really thought of people. As it is, there has been more written about her than any researcher could get through in a lifetime, and she certainly won't be lost to history anytime soon.

But what about the rest of us?

My old grandma would often exclaim, after regaling me with some story from a part of her incredibly long life, 'folk are always telling me I should write a book!' At the time, a surly teenager, I'd roll my eyes and yawn (behind her back - I wasn't that surly). Of course now I wish she had. But if you decide to write about your life, rather than fiction, where do you begin? 

Me, my mum and my grandma (who lived with us)

My great, great (possibly another great or two) grandfather on my father's side, fought in the Crimean War and took part in the charge of the Light Brigade.  He wrote a book about his experience afterwards, privately printed, and my father has the only surviving copy somewhere. There is much of interest in his account - but in the end I found it incredibly frustrating to read. He says a great deal about the appalling conditions, the general sickness, and the terrible death rate among both men and horses before they even went into battle. He details the layout of the land at Balaclava before the fighting began. But when it comes to the famous half a league, half a league, half a league onwards bit, he simply wrote: Of the Charge, so much has been written already, I shall say no more about it here...

WHAT??? You write a book about your experience in the Crimean War, you SURVIVE the Charge of the Light Brigade, riding into the valley of death where nearly everyone else died, AND YOU DON'T BLOOMING INCLUDE IT IN THE BOOK????? What an idiot!

My mother didn't have such a long life, but it was very eventful. When she knew she was dying, she started to write about it, intending it to be a legacy for her grandchildren. I recently discovered the pages she'd completed again, hidden away in a file, too painful to read at the time. It's in letter form, addressed to my two eldest daughters (she died the week before my son was born, so never met him or my youngest daughter). 

The saddest thing is she didn't get beyond page 5. She'd begun at the beginning, with her parents and what they did, and where they lived (at a public baths, surprisingly - my grandfather was the Baths superintendent) and about all the relatives that came to visit them from Yorkshire... but never got as far as what she went on to do herself. I only wish she'd had time to write more. 

Think about it. If you were to write your life story, what would you include and what would you leave out? When we write fiction, this isn't such a problem. We invent worlds, trying to express what we want to say in story form. Our books have a beginning, a middle and an end. Real life isn't usually such a tidy circle.

Your children, if you have them, might read your books, and they might not. Mine, (all adult now) are kind about my writing, but they're probably not that interested in what I'm trying to say about magic and life possibilities. At least two of them have asked why I don't write about the time I worked for a 2-tone ska band back in the early 80s, because that's the part of my life that counts as history and really interests them. And I've considered it - but only in cosy crime form, getting my revenge at last, killing off some incredibly vain, misogynistic pop star or one of their equally annoying entourage.

Why would I want to write about what actually happened in a time of decadence and excess? Sex and drugs and rock and roll? I don't think so. Of that, so much has been written already, I shall say no more about it here....

Lu Hersey

Death in the new normal - by Lu Hersey

We're all used to only seeing people on zoom, or other chat forums. We have no choice. Not in real life.  Work meetings, friend meetings, family groups - if we don't meet virtually, we can't meet at all. Sometimes it's a good thing - we don't have to travel miles, and ironically we can attend more events in far flung geographical locations than we possibly could in reality. It saves time and money. It's become the new normal. It's been a year already and despite the fantastic vaccine roll out, there's still no real end in sight.

Zoom isn't so bad most of the time. Introverted writers sometimes relish not having to be sociable. Those events you know you'd have had to attend, but you can't. Because rules. 

But at other times, you desperately WANT to be there. For me, it really hit home at my cousin's funeral. We'd had a long facebook chat the day before she died, while she was in hospital with Covid, getting oxygen, wired up to various drips. She was in good spirits despite the breathlessness and pain. We talked of summer and going to the beach. Of families. Of the past. 

The next morning, one of her sons (who's nearly my age) messaged to say she had passed. I was shocked and very upset - she'd seemed so feisty, so upbeat, less than 12 hours earlier. And of course I couldn't go to the funeral in lockdown. 

That's when I found out it's not just writer conferences and online learning platforms that can be viewed virtually. Funerals can be too. With so many deaths from Covid, it's standard practice, everything arranged by the funeral directors so you can be there, and yet not be there. 

If you've watched a funeral recently, you'll know how it goes. The master of ceremonies (funeral director, priest, whoever is leading the service), who almost certainly didn't know the deceased, introduces the order of service. Unlike the immediate family who are actually present in the room, they're aware of the camera and the remote viewers and make every effort to include you, even if you can't be seen and can't say anything. In fact, they have no idea who you are, or whether you're there or not. 

Funerals are no fun, and this was no exception. I watched most of it through a wall of tears...yet there was that other part of me that found it really interesting to be an observer and not being able to interact. What is it about the writer brain? Why was some other part of my mind thinking of all the possibilities of including online funerals in a novel? It's as though I'd become detached from reality, watching TV... but the players were people I know in real life, even if I haven't seen them in years. 

There's something very strange about observing a large family gathering when no one's aware you're watching them. I mean, you can really stare without being rude (though only from one point of view because the camera doesn't move) - you can marvel that someone you last saw when they were 14 is now over 50 and balding. Where did the time go? And your sweet little second cousin, who you'd swear was only about ten - somehow has four grown up children with her. Another second cousin, so very like his mother - keeping an eye on everyone to make sure they're okay, lifting his mask to mouth I love you to his sister when she found it hard to give her speech, so caring for everyone - yet I know he was devastated, and still only just recovering from covid himself.

My father had written a letter of condolence to the family which was read out at the service, and I'd sent him the link before the funeral so he could watch if wished. Being 93, he's a bit forgetful, and called me the day after the funeral to ask when the service was starting. That's when I found out you can actually watch the service online as many times you like (once was enough for me, but a fictional YA goth character could watch on tape-loop... I felt bad even thinking that, but on the plus side, I know my cousin would have thought it was hilarious...)

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I got to be present in some way at her funeral. And I cried buckets. But the virtual experience, however interesting to the writer brain, doesn't begin to compensate for reality. There was no chance to hug people, talk to them (however awkwardly), try to comfort them. I just wanted to be there. 

Sod the new normal. I want normal back. To be able to repeat Victoria Wood's immortal lines at the wake. '72 baps, Connie. You slice, I'll spread.' My cousin would have loved that.

Lu Hersey

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Writing for a generation that might never grow up – Clémentine Beauvais

In the past few months or years, in the light of what seems like a dramatically accelerating ecological crisis, many of us in jobs linked to education, teaching, or children’s culture and literature have thought, why are we doing this? What’s the point? What becomes of our main drive to act, reasons to exist, if the generation of children we’re addressing might never grow up to be adults? 

My first (and only) academic monograph, drawn from my PhD thesis, called The Mighty Child, was a theorisation of politically committed children’s literature. It is premised on the idea that children’s literature relies on one simple theoretical ‘fact’: children are, in today’s world, symbolically endowed with greater temporal power than adults. Children's symbolic currency is time left, while adults are defined by a greater wealth of time past. Time left provides one with a kind of power I called might, or potential, and time past with a kind of power I called authority. Children’s literature, I theorised, is one of the ways in which society orchestrates the conversion of time past into time left – of authority into might.

But over time, struck, like many others, with the alternatively depressing, paralysing, infuriating and – to a weird extent – liberating, realisation that we might actually be among the last representatives of humanity on Earth, I’ve come to rethink my relationship to writing, to children, to transmission. The panic is concrete, contextual, situated (where will we live? What will we eat? When and how will we actually die?), but the thinking is more philosophical in nature. What is the essence of children’s literature in a world where childly temporality is no longer overlapping with adult temporality, but coterminous with it?

Some might say that in this climate, the sole function of children’s literature should be entertainment, and aesthetic pleasure without purpose, as it always should be and always should have been. In a world which dies tomorrow, the argument goes, making today the best possible day for children should be on everyone’s list of priorities. That means – no to ‘didactic’ children’s literature, no to ‘edifying’ books, educational non-fiction, none of that stuff. Give them their Pascalian entertainment, and let them live a short, but happy, life.

Some might say, on the contrary, that children’s literature should now be about teaching children the wisdom of how to die, which would be a fascinating comeback to the times when children’s literature had that mission, to a great extent, as its priority. When child mortality was high, literature for the young was, of course, very much geared towards preparing readers for that eventuality – making sure they died virtuously, so that the pearly gates would creak wide open at the squishy sound of their footsteps on the clouds.

Some might say children’s literature should no longer be a priority for anyone; in fact, that its very existence is both environmentally harmful and intellectually and emotionally distracting. It destroys armies of trees that should breathe for us; every single stage of its production, from designing it to printing it to transporting it to storing it to selling it to throwing it away, is toxic. I have been acutely, anxiously aware of this recently, thinking of my own books to come, each of them with a little cloud of CO2 hovering above its covers: the lovely picturebook with bright inks and glossy paper shipped from China, the cheap paperbacks to be gluttonously devoured and discarded, the luxury hardback editions in indestructible shrink-wrapping. 

And those oh-so-instagrammable publicity packs, lovingly prepared for the purpose of being ripped open and thrown away on a Story with 24 hour planned obsolescence, the gold-glazed bookmarks, the nylon ribbons around the resin trinket, the plastic-stick lollipop, the superfluous fridge magnet, all in a nest of bubblewrap and chunks of polystyrene the size of cocktail sausages…

Some might say that children’s literature should, in fact, continue existing, should continue existing even more, albeit differently – be more modestly produced, be more politically committed still. That school, of which I am, or want to be, sees that category of text as characterised precisely by the fact that it carries within it a hope for tomorrow.

It is perhaps, we say, the most important thing that distinguishes children’s literature from ‘literature for adults’: its very existence is premised on an extreme, obsessive concern with tomorrow. Not necessarily a better, more enchanting tomorrow; just a tomorrow. As long as that faith exists, then children’s literature is imperative; it calls; it must exist too. Children’s literature, perhaps, is the literary expression of our desire and belief that there is such a thing as a day after this one for us as a species.

To what extent is this desire, that belief, maintained solely by that very performance? To what extent is it anything else than an odd kind of Pascal’s wager? I have days when I don’t think it is anything else than that; days when I am genuinely convinced that we are speaking and writing for the very last generation of children to reach adolescence, adulthood maybe at a stretch.

Some other times, I’m more upbeat, and I think – and yet, what if we do survive? or what if some of us survive who value the fact that we kept producing that discourse that we call children’s literature? Sometimes I think that I would like, even after I’m dead, for a corpus of texts to remain that testifies that, even in the face of a potential complete loss of future, we kept alive that discourse of hope for the existence of tomorrow. 

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Clémentine Beauvais is a writer and literary translator. Her YA novels in English are Piglettes (Pushkin, 2017) and In Paris with You (trans. Sam Taylor, Faber, 2018).

 

The Haunted Attic by Lu Hersey

Moving is traumatic. I know, because I moved this week. For me, the trauma wasn’t so much about the upheaval or change of neighbourhood –  it was dealing with the bodies in the attic.

Not my attic - way too interesting...

Somehow the loft had accumulated a number of dead relatives, and I had to clear everyone out. There weren’t any actual bodies of course (sorry to disappoint) - I’m talking about family history. Sentimental attachment. Guilt. More guilt. People’s entire lives in a few boxes.

I hate dark, spidery loft spaces, and have a fear of death by falling from a loft – so over the last 20 years, I’d been shoving things up there just to get them out of sight, thinking I’d deal with them later.

Bad idea. The day comes when you have to confront them all, and that time is when you move house. The loft had to be totally emptied, so I was forced to clear out the ghosts. All those things you get landed with when people die, the detritus left from other people’s lives.

Years ago, I had to translate a chunk of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle from the reign of Alfred the Great (an interesting man, who didn’t just burn cakes) as part of my English degree. It was about a visitor to Alfred’s court from somewhere in Scandinavia, telling them about the customs of his people.

King Alfred

When someone died in his community, all the dead person’s possessions were piled up in a big heap in the middle of the village. Then everyone raced to take what they wanted before the rest was burned. Alfred probably recorded this to make a point to his courtiers - that inheritance isn’t a foregone conclusion.

However, since King Alfred chose not to introduce this custom over here, we still end up dealing with our dead relatives’ possessions. If we’re lucky, these will include useful things, like treasure and property. Sadly, not in my attic. 

My grandmother was up there, confined to a box of photos of her family, a moth-eaten patchwork quilt, a horseshoe from her wedding cake, a few sad letters relating to the death of one of her children, and more on the death of my grandfather. My grandfather was divided between the photo box, and a collection of watercolours in varying degrees of awful.

An unknown dead relative from the attic, and his horse

 My mother took up a lot more attic space. After my father remarried, I got landed with all the photos ever taken of her, her books, all her dreadful paintings, and a collection of letters (which I’ve never read) between her and my father when he was away on National Service.  And all the letters she wrote to me when she knew she was dying. 

My mother with me, a long time ago...

So what we’re talking about is a lot of things you can hardly bear to look through, and leave you feeling like an emotional wreck when you do, but you feel obliged to keep. It’s all that is left of them. And that makes it very hard to get rid of.

Worse, my dead relatives were just the tip of the loftberg. There were all the paintings my children did at school. Four children can do a lot of paintings over the years. And they get a lot of school reports and bring home a mountain of school work. Two very large boxes and a trunk’s worth to be precise. Fortunately, my two youngest showed up to laugh at their old stuff and share the best of it with their friends online, and we managed to more than halve the quantity after some harsh quality control.

Lastly, there were the ghosts of my own past. Photos of people I’d forgotten existed, letters from old boyfriends, and piles of folders of ‘ideas’ (mostly pieces from magazines and old journals, all yellowing around the edges, and frankly the easiest thing in the loft to bin.) There were old computers I thought might still hold info I needed, old tvs that ‘might come in useful’, and tins of paint. Enough to paint entire mansions in a range of out-of-date colours.

My stuff was the easiest to deal with. I junked it all, entirely guilt free because it was mine to junk. My relatives were the real problem. In the end, I squeezed them into a few boxes, and the charity shop benefitted from the rest. Maybe other people will like the some of the terrible paintings. I thought about burning all my parents’ letters, but my youngest daughter persuaded me to keep them. So now they’re in a box marked ‘archive’ – and they’ll become her problem one day.  

But part of me is still tempted to dump all of it. Along with all the guilt and the sadness. As it is, I’ve spent much of the last year writing a book about people in a Mesolithic type environment who aren’t overloaded with stuff. In fact they own nothing.

It’s been very therapeutic...

Lu Hersey

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