Beginnings. Beginnings. THEFT - The Fifty-Year Novel
The wonders of the Internet delivered a miracle to me from perfect strangers. The first was about about my first ever published book – how the letter writer loved it as a child and still reads it.
Welcome to my new Substack Newsletter.
In the last year or so the wonders of the Internet delivered a miracle to me in terms of two email letters from perfect strangers. The first was about about my first ever published book – how the writer loved it as a child and still reads it. I was moved to tears by this letter where he talked about my very first publication - in 1972 Carousel, a branch of Transworld Publishing, published my very first novel THEFT. This is the story of that book.
At that time, I was a young teacher with two children, managing a family and a house and a working husband. And as always at that time I was writing, obeying the compulsion that had consumed me since I was eight years old. In those young days - as well as changing my library book five times a week - I used to write my own invented stories on A4 paper, then fold each story in half and stitch the spine with my mother’s big tacking needle. In some of these ‘books’ I even pasted in library tickets marked up with dates of imaginary borrowings. (Then and always libraries were my heaven-sent place in a rather difficult young life.)
The fact is that THEFT, written when I in my twenties, was longer than these home-made beauties and had taken rather longer to write. There came the night when I was sitting in my new house on an estate built on the site of a demolished orphanage. Around me was a group of women discussing an organisation called Books for Your Children – a group led by the charismatic Anne Wood, another teacher emerging from South Durham. She happened to mention that some people were - even now - writing for children! So I happened to say that I’d written one, for a start. She asked to read it and I willingly handed it over.
The next day she rang me and said, ‘We’ll have it.’
Puzzled, I said, “We? Who? Who will have it?”
That was when she told me that she was newly appointed editor for Carousel, the new imprint launched by Transworld.
My daughter Debora, now a very successful writer and very grown-up indeed, recently told me that she remembers the day when a box full of copies of THEFT arrived on our doorstep and how excited we all were to see these books with their wonderful cover spilling out of the box.
After that, as well as teaching and family et cetera, I produced several children’s and then adult novels before I took the bull by the horns and gave myself permission to be a full time writer and went on to write many more novels.
THEFT is a story told using the context of my own South Durham working class life and extended family. So, since it’s publication in 1972, alongside teaching in schools and later working in higher education, I have written a good number of novels which celebrate my own cultural and social context - I hope without stereotyping, romanticising or denigrating that life and its values.
This feeling about writing has, I trust, ensured that at the core of all the novels are grains of fundamental truth which are the sign of good fiction and will be recognised by readers from widely different backgrounds – just as I recognised the contexts of the novels of Jane Austen and George Eliot.
This turned out to be the case with Robert. His story will be in my next newsletter.
Quite an important point here is that, as well as my own South Durham setting, some of my novels are sometimes located in such far-flung places as France, Spain, Russia, Singapore, and America and of course - as with many migrant Durham families - locations such as Ireland Scotland and Wales. (From my little two up and two down street house, I grew up very keen on both travelling and researching – in the first case usually in my head through the doorways in my library books.)
In the subsequent novels, my characters are featured sometimes leaving and sometimes arriving - always touching base in the north-east of England, my own heart’s home. Like THEFT, these novels spring out of my identity as a South Durham person in the context of social and political life in the twentieth century.
Sadly THEFT is now out of print, and while I do have a few copies, there are also some available on eBay.
And so now I have come to full circle. I have just completed the collection Siblings – short stories of seven brothers and sisters living in just such a the location as the setting for THEFT. To my delight these stories were broadcast over Christmas on Bishop FM. And are now also in book format.
In the next newsletter…
Will be the story of the boy who was given a copy of THEFT as a child and treasured all his life. He is my special reason for telling you my own long story here: he is a perfect stranger, Robert. He lives in London and is now retired from his job as a graphic designer. He has his own story to tell about THEFT and its role in his quite long life. I think you will like it.