Essay: The Inspiration for my Short Story GLASS  

(Published by New Writing North in the Collection BOUND alongside  the work of other writers who live and work in the Durham Region.)
 

Palimpsest: 
A parchment etc that has been written on twice or more, the original writing having been rubbed out.                                          (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary)

My Durham identity is hard-wired into my brain. I arrived here when I was nine, although my extended family were already here and had been here for three generations, through six branches of the tree.

Just off the bus from Coventry, we walked on a narrow path between the two great pit heaps that defined Spennymoor, past the seepage pool with its rainbow carbon tinge, past the dog track where I later worked for seven-and-six a night, selling programmes, and taking the names of dogs for the next week’s racing. That day my older brother looked up at the narrow pass between the slag heaps and asked my mother – distracted then by her recent bereavement and her anger at having to Come Back North – whether this was cowboy country.

In Spennymoor my head soon became snarled up with surviving a school, strangely masculine in its ethos, where they taunted me for speaking differently and called me Medusa because of my uncombed curly hair.  As well as this my job was to cope with new, extreme poverty in a tiny house with no bathroom and a mother (once bold and strong) who was depressed with her new life.  I thought then that Durham was a dark stony place. It was years before I noticed the nearby woodlands and the trickling becks; before I internalised the low rounded hills that characterise its skyline;  before I noticed the odd, strangely straight stretches of road and the simple houses scratched with Roman markings; before I came to relish  the underlying song of Durham speech, so different from the harsh city tones of Tyneside and Teessside.

It took more years for me to acknowledge the savage beauty of colliery wheels against sulphurous skies; to honour the stoicism of clever, resourceful, occasionally hedonistic men whose daily duty was to work long hours in the half dark; to value the creativity and labour of women whose vocation was to humanise a life which could, from the outside, look inhuman. It would be too easy to make heroes of them all, but there is no denying that their efforts were heroic; their labours were Herculean.

With time and study I came to understand that from the coal won by such men flowed the affluence and good life of families like the Lambtons and the Londonderrys  -  who sustained great houses in Durham and London and had a seat at the great councils of Britain. From the coal won by these men and the inventive creativity of men associated with that process, came the development of steel and railways, development of the shipping trade. From the politicisation of the underground men came a great and significant union.

I went on to learn that the men of coal, with their physical strength and their stoicism, made brave and resourceful soldiers in all the twentieth century wars:  a sacrifice made manifest in Durham villages by the names carved on war memorials scattered with poppies and memories every November.

All these and many other half-rubbed-out layers of meaning still lie there under the shopping centre car-parks and the greened and planted hills that were once colliery waste heaps: they are there in the pit-row houses gentrified by bathroom extensions and furniture from Ikea occupied by clerks and students with their first foot on the modern property ladder; they are there in the hedonism of Bishop Auckland Saturday nights and the instinctive masculine bonding of football and the older public houses: these layers are revitalised  in the moving paintings of Tom McGuinness and Norman Cornish.

What artist, what writer could fail to be moved, to be inspired by all these dimensions of meaning when they live in such a place?  This is so whether or not our work focuses on the concrete parameters and the specifics of this place. This palimpsest of place and experience establishes in us the core of authenticity that makes writing emotionally true and universally understood.

The Story

If my Durham identity is hard-wired within me by my experience, then my DNA must have a marker in it for storytelling. I grew up listening to my mother and her three sisters telling and retelling family stories going back three generations. I soon noted the editorial freedom with which the facts were moved round to suit the agenda of the storyteller; how identities could be changed to enhance the particular heroism, drama or pathos of a particular telling, tailored to a specific audience.

My grandmother wrote love letters for her sisters and sisters in law in the Great War and was a heroine to her daughters. By the time I was ten I could chant her very heroic, possibly fictionally enhanced, biography. This habit of fiction goes back and back, right through to stories in Welsh in Holywell in Wales, with their roots in the Mabinoigan. Like many died-in-the-wool Durham families we set out as economic migrants.

An imprinted ability to tell and interpret stories showed everywhere in my education. Very early on a teacher pencilled in the margin of my book Good syntax. I had to find a dictionary to discover just what I was good at. I did well at subjects like history and geography where syntactical ability added brownie points. I did well at languages because my translations into English were fluid and well conceived.

My first inspiration for a story for this collection was to write a story located in Sunderland where I worked for thirteen years and became engaged by its peculiarly edgy identity and its wounded-giant dignity.  I was working there when the hunt for the murderer known as Jack the Ripper was at its height, when tapes – later shown to be a hoax – were played on the radio of a man claiming to be the Ripper. He not only has a Sunderland accent but an accent common around  the streets where I worked. I decided that my story would be about the psychological emanation from the dreadful chill that voice caused in my soul.

Two thousand words and three drafts later I had to throw in the towel. All I had on those pages was an idea and a lot of inspired words but no story. I sensed there might be a novel there: larger, wider, more convoluted, more heavily  populated and messy than the required tightly wrought short story.

The next morning between sleeping and waking I had a vision of splintering glass and a boy crashing through the ceiling onto my kitchen table. I started to write and within a morning  – give or take half a dozen drafts – I knew I had my story. It seemed the story was already there in my head. Later, when I looked at the completed story I realised what had happened. While I was busying my brain with murders and hoaxes the real story was working away on its own. Sunderland. Glass. Those low rows of houses. The sea at the edge. Substances. Taking care of my mother. The girls from prison, grafting. The grand squares. Being shut in.  The great shipmaster houses.  Working class nous. Despair.  A wonderful boy. A mother’s despair. Mental hospitals. Cherry Knowle. All these atoms of inspiration were already there in my hardwiring, waiting to be pulled through and reformed into something entirely new.

I worked on in a great heat and in days was certain the story was finished. There was nothing more to say. Then, a week later, between sleeping and waking I heard  the clear voice of the boy. ‘Hey Missis. That’s not fair.’ I sat up in a cold sweat. There was more to say. The story was not finished. It was only half way there.

Well, it is all there now and will speak for itself. It is called GLASS.

© Wendy Robertson