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Category: places (Page 2 of 2)

‘…running wildly into Woking.’

June 7, 2013 /

Yesterday we went to Woking. Not the most adventurous of day trips on the face of it, but exciting to us, nonetheless. There’s H. G. Wells, for a start. Wells moved to Woking in 1895, the same year The Time Machine was published. He went on to write the three further ‘scientific romances’ that make up the core of his science fiction output in the house he shared with his wife Amy at 143 Maybury Road.

The most famous of these is of course The War of the Worlds, published in 1898 and set in and around Woking, with particular reference to nearby Horsell Common, which is where Wells had his Martians make their landing. I always enjoy visiting sites of special literary interest, and wandering around in the sandpits of Horsell Common was a genuine thrill. Surrey is hopelessly changed now from when Wells lived there, of course – but the peace and beauty of Horsell Common remain. Standing in the dappled sunlight between the trees, it’s still possible to get a sense of the shock and wonder Wells surely aimed to generate by setting his novel of alien invasion here, and our visit to the Common has made this landmark work come newly alive for me. I also greatly enjoyed seeing the ‘Woking Martian’ sculpture by Michael Condron in Woking town centre. It’s a work of great beauty and elegance, and for me it seemed to capture the spirit and the imaginative world of Well’s novel perfectly.

Our main reason for visiting Woking yesterday though was this little chap:

Django, son of Duke

But more of him later this summer.

(You can see Chris’s amazing photo of the Woking Martian and read his thoughts on our Wellsian pilgrimage here.)

 

Conned

April 3, 2013 /

We had a great Eastercon. Spending time with so many wonderful friends and colleagues is always a pleasure and a privilege, and chats with Ian Whates, Pete and Nicky Crowther, Andrew Hook (at the con just for one day with his lovely partner Sophie and gorgeous little girl Cora), Simon Ings, Alison Littlewood, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Gary Couzens, David Hebblethwaite, Chris Beckett, Neil Williamson, Mercurio D. Rivera, Jaine Fenn, Paul McAuley, Justina Robson and Ian Sales among many others were what this, as every other, Eastercon was mostly about. But there was also the town of Bradford itself, which surprised and delighted us in so many ways – the National Media Museum and Omar Khan’s curry house both stand out as highlights. Then there were the three days we spent after leaving Bradford, exploring Whitby and Scarborough (Scarborough we fell in love with) and the North Yorkshire moors. A special week – busy and productive and enriching.

The news of Iain Banks’s tragic illness, which we heard on the radio as we were driving home this afternoon, came as a deeply saddening shock, at odds with the sunlight.

At Whitby Abbey - photo by Chris Priest

Scarborough time traveller? Photo by Chris Priest

Grave of Anne Bronte, St Mary's, Scarborough

Pendle etc

September 23, 2012 /
Approaching Pendle Hill
From Ilkley Moor

The Parsonage, Haworth

Ribblehead Viaduct

The Devonshire Inn, Skipton

We’ve been spending the past week exploring the Yorkshire/Lancashire borderlands, a part of the country neither of us had previously visited and that we found incredibly inspiring, both in terms of landscape and literary heritage. I’ve loved the work of the Brontes all my life, and in spite of the tourist trappings that are Haworth’s inevitable burden I felt very much moved to find myself inside the parsonage, stepping into the space where Anne and Emily and Charlotte read and wrote and discussed their work. The rooms of the house are surprisingly small. They have presence, or rather there is a presence, still tangible, within them, especially in the dining room, where the sisters read aloud to each other most evenings.

Unlike Haworth, the village of Mytholmroyd, where Ted Hughes was born, is – aside from the blue plaque beside the front door of No 1 Aspinall Street – completely untouched by tourism. It has grown in size of course, but the village Hughes would have known and remembered is still plainly visible, easily mappable. The warmth of the place (as with so many northern townships), its tie to the land, is palpable. I’ve known for a long time what it looks like – I was fifteen or sixteen when I first saw a photograph of the small terraced house that is Hughes’s birthplace – but still the impact of finally being there, of standing in the street outside, was considerable, a special moment.

Pendle Hill, Ilkley Moor, the journey by rail from Settle to Appleby, the Devonshire Inn at Skipton (where the opening chapters of The Space Machine take place) – these were all special moments. Most of all just the sense of space, both literal and imaginative, of high and narrow roads that might lead anywhere. The Forest of Bowland – an isolate domain of heather moorland and woodland trails – was a revelation.

A way-too-good-to-miss book sale in Skipton (silly prices) meant we returned with considerably more in our luggage than we started out with. I came away with Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, Annie Proulx’s Bird Cloud, Nicola Barker’s The Yips, Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. I was also able to pick up Philip Almond’s new book about the Pendle witch trials, The Lancashire Witches. So that’s me sorted for the next couple of months. And when Chris has finished with Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton I’ll be reading that, too.

An amazing week.

Now that we’re back, I’ll be giving What Happened to Maree a close going-over – there are some line edits and other bits and pieces I need to attend to. After so many months of working on the book in isolation, having it read by another – Chris is, of course, the one reader I can trust absolutely – has somehow released it. Now, finally, I’m getting a sense of the novel as a whole – what it is, how it reads, what I meant by it – and I’m happy to say I’m feeling very excited.

Aspinall Street, Mytholmroyd

The old church, Heptonstall

Singing Ringing Tree, Burnley

Winchelsea

June 27, 2012 /

So she parked on a street adjacent to The Lookout (by the Old Strand Gate) where there was a famously stunning view over the marshes below (the Royal Military Canal, the long road into Rye, the remains of Camber Castle, Winchelsea Beach, Dungeness – the power station and the lighthouse, both twinkling vaguely in the Channel – even France, on a good day), and led him by the hand (although he insisted on leaving the boy behind – ‘as a precaution’) to take in the vista.

The wind was biting and it was threatening to rain again. Dory gazed down, in silence, for several minutes, yet no matter how hard he tried (and he was trying – the powerful wave of his reason crashing, indomitably, against the sheer cliff of his instinct), he seemed incapable of feeling any kind of rapport with the landscape.

‘But where’s the great forest, Elen?’ he finally murmured.

(Nicola Barker, Darkmans p439)

The extraordinary thing is that when I first read Nicola Barker’s magisterial novel Darkmans in 2007 I had not yet encountered this landscape, nor seen any of the places named in the paragraphs above. Now that I am getting to know them, to assimilate them as imagery as well as fact, I find that Barker’s novel – which I loved and admired from the first – resonates with me all the more deeply.

Darkmans is a piece of work. In an interview she gave around the time of its publication, Nicola Barker talked about how she went into a kind of suspended animation during the final months of writing it, cutting off the internet, wearing ear muffs to block out all exterior noise. I found myself understanding and applauding. Real writing takes everything, precludes all other mental activity, all outside stimuli.

It means forfeiting the quotidian world – at least for a while.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Darkmans today, about how much I admire it – those unruly, renegade sentences, that don’t-give-a-stuff disregard for competent orderliness (and ordinariness) that conceals such stern craftsmanship, most of all that vertiginous, daredevil way of commandeering the fantastic – and how much it still continues to inspire me.

The scope of its ambition – and it’s an ambition realised – is enough to prevent any writer from sleeping at night.

It’s one of those books I like to keep close by, like a lucky charm.

This road sign, whose history I haven’t investigated yet, can be seen just before the turnoff path to Winchelsea station.

I can’t help but feel there has to be a story here somewhere.

Climbing towards Winchelsea Beacon.

Tram Road, Rye Harbour.

Lincs & Lancs

May 20, 2012 /

We’ve spent most of this past week in Lincolnshire. Now well into his second draft of The Adjacent, Chris suddenly decided he really needed to visit the WW2 bomber bases at Coningsby and Scampton, territory that formed one of the main settings for The Separation and that features strongly again in the new book. And so we set off. I always derive huge benefits and excitement from visiting parts of the country that are new to me, and when the relatively simple act of travelling to somewhere unknown is combined with such weird and arresting experiences as sitting in the pilot’s seat of an old Canberra B6 or standing beneath the windows of the room where Guy Gibson and his squadron received their mission briefing for the Dam Busters raid, then these happenings pass from memorable to significant.

‘Bomber County’ is quietly, unassumingly beautiful, a place for hiding out and holing up. But reminders of what you might even call the bombing industry are everywhere here, and make thoughts of war and anger over it inescapable. Wandering around the vast hangars filled with historic aircraft and crash site excavations trying to get my own take on everything I came back again and again to the thought that once a war has been fought what we are mostly left with is twisted and rusting machinery and the stories, which become legends, of the courage and forbearance of those individuals who fight or suffer war’s oppressions and privations. The rest – the politics and rationale behind every war – is ultimately proved mendacious or misguided.

An intense and intensely valuable couple of days, not least because for a writer it’s impossible not to want to respond on some level. Trips like this yield stories, inspirations that are often different from those that seem more immediately discernable.

The trick is to wait.

Returned to the news that Dietrich Fischer Dieskau has passed away. I can scarcely believe it.

A wonderful book with a very personal take on WW2 is Daniel Swift’s Bomber County, the story of one man’s search for his lost grandfather and the lives and experiences of the Allied airmen as revealed through poetry. I really can’t recommend this highly enough.

Fischer Dieskau is probably most famous for his interpretations of Schubert, but his repertoire was vast, his knowledge and understanding of the German Lied completely unique. Fortunately we’ll be able to go on treasuring this and drawing on it through the legacy of his recordings. I’ve been listening to him this morning in a recording of ‘Firnelicht’, a song from a little-known Lieder cycle called Berg und See by Othmar Schoeck. The song is about a Friedrichian ‘Wanderer’ as he thrills to the strange radiance, the particular light of the mountains. Thinking about Fischer Dieskau today, the words of the last verse seem particularly appropriate.

What can I do for my country before I go to rest in my grave? What can I give that will outrun death? A word perhaps, perhaps a song. A still, small Shining.

(The words are by Conrad Meyer 1825-98.)

Was kann ich für die Heimat tun,
bevor ich geh im Grabe ruhn?
Was geb ich, das dem Tod entflieht?
Vielleicht ein Wort, vielleicht ein Lied,
ein kleines stilles Leuchten!

Turing’s plaque

April 2, 2012 /

Blue plaque for Alan Turing at Baston Lodge

I’m now into the final 5-10,000 words of the first draft of the novel. I was hoping to finish the draft this week but I don’t think it’s going to happen. This final little chapter is very important, and trying to get it right, even with 95,000 words already written, even in first draft which I know will all be changed anyway, feels like bearing a heavy weight uphill. It’s an exciting challenge though, and I relish those. I know what I have to write, just not – yet, quite – how.

During the afternoon I took a break from the actual writing and went for a stroll in the part of town where the chapter happens. There’s nothing like roaming around the houses for setting loose a storm of ideas, for me anyway, and at the very least I now have a renewed sense of place at the forefront of my imagination. My walk took me past the house where Alan Turing spent his childhood. It’s a sad story – Turing’s father was based in India so Alan was semi-adopted by a friend of his, the retired Colonel Ward – and I can’t help feeling that such a sensitive little boy must have retained some sense of displacement, even though this was the only life he knew. The British establishment’s later treatment of Alan Turing fills me with an anger so raw that the only appropriate way of channelling it would be to filter it through a story, something I would very much like to try and do one day.

In the meantime I have this place, and the honour of sharing space with a unique mind. Baston Lodge, long since converted into flats, sits silently in a quiet corner of an unsung town. The writer Rider Haggard lived just down the road. This lunchtime there was no one about. I stood outside on the pavement, thinking about Turing and about my story and trying to imagine myself backwards into 1913.

Baston Lodge, St Leonards on Sea

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