How and why did you start writing fiction?
I've been creating fictional worlds since I was a young child. Up to adolescence I had imaginary friends and invented adventures for them, but rarely wrote anything down. Sometimes I incorporated random elements from real life. For example, I remember being fascinated by the image of a melancholy little girl on a charity poster. I gave this girl a name and endowed her with magical powers.
As an adult I would occasionally write poems, sketches and stories but I never sent them off to competitions or publishers. I didn't know anyone who was a writer. Then a friend died prematurely at a time when she had a new life ahead of her and was full of plans. I realised that I couldn't go on vaguely intending to write 'some day'; if I ever wanted to achieve anything, I had to make a start and keep going.
Your first novel, 'As Meat Loves Salt', was also set in the 17th century, though a generation earlier than 'The Wilding'. What attracted you to this period?
The choice of period is also connected with my friend who died, and who turns out to have been a major influence in my life. Shortly before her death, she told me she was reading a book by Christopher Hill on the English Civil War and wanted me to read it too since she was sure I'd enjoy it. On the day of her funeral I saw the book in her home and asked her widower if I might take it as a keepsake. Up until then I had known almost nothing about the Civil War.
The passionate political convictions of the seventeenth century excited me. Most of all I was fascinated by what Hill calls the 'Cromwellian Underground', which included people with extraordinarily egalitarian ideas, considering the period. It seems to me that nowadays, the jargon 'thinking outside the box' often means finding a way of taking even more away from those who already have little. Here were people who had been brought up to believe in the Divine Right of Kings, and that inequality and poverty were God's will, who nevertheless were 'thinking outside the box' of such constricting beliefs. They were debating land ownership, suffrage, the class system and gender politics.
With my head full of these intoxicating ideas, I went on an Arvon course, and as I sat quietly in the garden at Lumb Bank I saw Jacob Cullen for the first time.
The Wilding is set during the Restoration. I wanted to move on to the period after the Commonwealth but not to write about the court of Charles II, fascinating though that is. I was more interested in the idea of small communities, apparently idyllic, colluding in denial and concealment. Writing about famous historical figures means that the story is already known and to some extent the writer is fleshing out a plot that history has already written; obscure or completely fictional characters allow for more scope. There's also a part of me that wants to protest against our culture's obsession with celebrity and royalty. I admire novelists who reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary.
How do you approach the historical research for your books? And do you enjoy it?
It seems incredible now but when I wrote As Meat Loves Salt I didn't have an internet connection for much of the time. I used the standard histories of the period and also pamphlets put out by small presses. The pamphlets tended to be the work of dedicated re-enactors and rich in obscure facts. (Anybody want to know the price of a pair of pockets for a Model Army jacket? Or which branch of Curry's was once Cromwell's headquarters?) I also visited the site of Basing House and was shown over the grounds by the curator. On one occasion I went to Wells market, saw a re-enactment being staged in the cathedral grounds and met someone there who told me about fading vegetable dyes in New Model Army jackets. That detail found its way into the novel. I went on researching as I was writing, which is partly why the novel took so long to complete.??The process of researching The Wilding has been different. While horror lies just beneath the surface, in this novel everything at first appears serene, even pastoral; all the battles are in the past and the hero is familiar with his surroundings (whereas Jacob in As Meat Loves Salt was constantly being uprooted and moving from one place to another). This means there isn't the same need for obsessive detail, plotting the action against the dates of battles, and so on. My research was mainly into witchcraft and into the history of cider.
Do I like doing the research? During the time I was writing As Meat Loves Salt someone said to me, 'I always enjoy coming to see you, and spending a weekend in the seventeenth century.' I think that probably gives you some idea ... While writing that novel I became more interested in the lives of soldiers than I would have thought possible, but what really intrigues me is social history: finding out how people cooked food in cauldrons, that sort of thing. At the moment I'm trying to learn about women gamblers in the 1700s, the tricks practised by professional card cheats and the song collections made by Cecil Sharp. Everything is interesting, once you apply yourself to studying it. The difficulty is to keep research under control so that it doesn't swamp the novel.
What sparked the idea for 'The Wilding' - or its setting or characters?
Initially it was finding out about something that took place during the Civil War: the incident in the Guild Hall, which I can't reveal here because some people reading this won't be familiar with the plot. The historical event took place not far from my home in Somerset and I first became aware of it when researching for As Meat Loves Salt. I couldn't write it into that novel as it would have been out of place but (despite the sketchiness of the accounts) the story is so shocking that it stayed with me for years.
The Wilding began as a way of answering the question, 'How could this possibly have been allowed to happen?' I have fictionalised the incident considerably and was surprised to discover, when I checked a source I didn't have at the time of writing As Meat Loves Salt, that the name I've given the person most involved is almost exactly the same as the name of the historical personage. I wasn't even aware that I knew that name. I must have seen it somewhere and stowed it in my unconscious until I was ready to write.
You write in such detail in 'The Wilding' about how old cider presses work - you must have had experience in this, or seen one in action. But were there many 'travelling' presses in action around the small villages in this time, and how did you come across stories of these? Was it a good trade to be in? And where did your interest in it come from?
As I said previously, I'm always interested in how things were done in the past (cookery, printing, weapons drill). Sometimes the interest goes further and I develop fads and crazes. When you live in Somerset, however, you become aware that for some people here, cider is more than a craze, it's a religion. (Take a look at James Crowden's Cider: the Forgotten Miracle if you need any proof of that; if you haven't time to do more, just look at the cover.) There are still splendid orchards, lots of presses tucked away in sheds, and quite a few wassails still going strong. Cider is surrounded by tradition and mystique. Jon's travelling press, however, is poetic licence. I got the idea when taking a group of students to see Max Gate, the house that Thomas Hardy designed for himself. We were shown the plans of the building and they included a space marked 'room for itinerant men' or words to that effect. When I asked about these men I was told that they were seasonal workers, only required for a short time each year, who kept up a 'round' in the area.
It is known that there were travelling cider makers during the nineteenth century, though their main work was probably milling the apples; Hardy's poem 'Shortening Days at the Homestead' features a rather sinister cider maker who appears to be going the rounds from house to house. If Hardy made use of a travelling cider maker (and planned for his arrival as a regular occurrence) it seems likely enough that Jon could find work in the seventeenth century, and though there is no record of a portable press I see no reason why one couldn't be built. Perhaps such presses were built.
During part of the 1970s I was living in a tiny village called Framwellgate Moor, in Co. Durham, and the hairdressing salon there had an extremely efficient hair-washing machine. Who would ever imagine, nowadays, that such a thing existed?
Which writers have most influenced your writing? If I confine myself to historical novels, the first ones I remember reading were by Anya Seton and Jean Plaidy; we used to pass them round at school. Since those writers were best-sellers, the historical novel has been transformed by writers like Peter Ackroyd, Alan Garner, Rose Tremain and Peter Carey into something infinitely more ambitious.
Hawksmoor taught me, long before I ever thought of writing a book, that the days of ripped bodices and thigh-slapping were gone and that historical fiction could create a dark, alien, suffocating world, and in time liberated me to write As Meat Loves Salt. Golding's Rites of Passage is another supremely accomplished novel, particularly in its use of an unreliable narrator and of diaries. I read it while writing As Meat Loves Salt and was so impressed that I considered redrafting my own novel to make use of diaries, but it would have been inappropriate.
What are you working on next? A novel about an eighteenth-century 'Corinthian' (swindler and debauchee) seen through the eyes of various victims. It's also about the way in which such careers are romanticised and mythologised until they come to seem glamorous. It's at a very early stage, however, and could change dramatically before I'm finished with it.