LIZZA THE CROSSOVER GIRL

A return to Substack, and the story of Lizza, my first YA novel.

Substack Catch Up

Here I am sitting by a window in the South West of France, the guest of Debora and Séan in their fine house which was once owned by a trader in fine wines.

After writing for a living for fifty years, I have written very little in the last few years, owing to family pressures and an influx of illness. But now, finally, I am sitting on Debora’s terrace embarking again on my newsletter, Life Twice Tasted.

To explain: In these essays, I intend to tell the stories if how I came to write a succession of novels which have reflected and dominated my life. You will see here that the first three essays discuss the writing of my first published children’s novel, Theft.

And now today, we have the story of the writing of Lizza, my first novel that crossed over the border between Children’s and Adult fiction.

Writing with a view

There is an ancient Celtic custom of telling the history of the tribe in the form of a delicate cobweb of story with the filaments leading back a thousand years.

My own family cobweb included the great heroine Boudicca. My mother had auburn hair and would frequently say to my sister Susan - who also had auburn hair, and me, with the red streaks in my mousey hair - how the great women of European history all had red hair, beginning with Boudicca that great British heroine who fought face-to-face and was killed by the invading Romans.

When I was nine years old, after my father died, my mother Barbara was forced to abandon her semi-detached Coventry house, newly built after the war. Aged thirty-six. with two sons and two daughters to raise, she was obliged to return to the northern mining town where she had grown up.

Her family, sympathising with her dilemma, had promised her some support. In the event, she was too proud to ask for or to accept this.

Her sisters had found her a cheap, stone house in a narrow street. It had one-and-a-half rooms downstairs, one-and-a-half bedrooms upstairs. Across the back yard, just by the tin bath that hung on the wall was an earth closet cleared by soilage men, once a week. The front room had a black iron fireplace for a coal fire. Barbara soon replaced this with a gas fire as the promises of free loads of coal from her miner brother-in-law did not really materialise.

Even at eight years old I could observe the contrast between our Coventry house with its three bedrooms and bathroom and long garden where my dad kept chickens.

In the following days, I began to recognise my mother Barbara’s three sisters and two brothers – whom I featured in my recent short story collection, Siblings - as my family. They became part of my story web.

One thing I remember from those early years in the North was sitting under the table while two of the sisters drank tea with my mother, keeping quiet, which was Barbara’s rule. Sometimes I would be scribbling or drawing, but I was always listening, always listening as they repeated the stories of their lives and their parents’ lives and their grandparents’ lives in the true Celtic tradition. These stories fell into a rhythm - the deaths, the births, the journey from Wales, the heroes, the villains, the betrayals, the tragedies, the entrances and exits into the life of this family.

In the following decades living and working as a writer, the many stories which flowed from my pen were influenced by the subtlety and depth of these intergenerational family tales, full of human wisdom and complex relationships. Significantly, they were not drenched with sentimentality. These were tough women. So when I came to the short stories of Chekov and de Maupassant as a schoolgirl , I could identify with them more closely than I could with the prim stories of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte.

My novels are not stuck in the North East. They range across the country and occasionally across the world, reflecting my own experience of reading, researching and experiencing my own family life in the Twentieth Century.

As I said before, the most direct reference to those family tales emerged in my recent publication, Siblings, These are seven stories emerging from a single family of seven brothers and sisters in 1922. It was a real treat to listen to these same stories on radio – Bishop FM (Soundcloud audio files) – narrated by the very gifted Anne Dover.

After what seemed like a lifetime teaching in schools and colleges, I finally entered the real, rather alien world of publishing. One of my earliest publications was Lizza, which I wrote after several children’s books, including Theft, were published by a Carrousel Books (part of Hodder & Stoughton).

Fact into Fiction

The story, Lizza, emerged from fragments of my mother’s life as she told tales of leaving her small pit house when she was fifteen years old to travel to the busy, industrial city of Bradford to work in a woollen mill. Half a century later, I could still see her brown-eyed gaze under her crown of auburn hair, by then showing streaks of grey. “I could have gone wrong, pet, believe me I could have gone wrong!”

“Going wrong” in her young days, was the code for getting pregnant or being raped.

Later, when I was working on this story, Lizza, I was tempted to call my heroine Barbara, but now I realised the sinewy power of fiction rather than inflexible biography. I ended up calling my character Lizza, a similarly strong name.  Lizza’s story is fiction. But indeed it reflects significant elements of Barbara’s experience.

Lizza sets out for Bradford when she is dismissed from her first job as a servant in a doctor’s house, for using long words in response to a question from the doctor’s wife. (Barbara once told me that the word she had used was zephyr, for wind.) It was then decided – probably by Barbara’s formidable mother, known and Ma – that she should go to Bradford to live with her oldest sister. There was work for girls in the woollen mills.

The Nature of Research

In working on my novels, I have always loved the research demanded by any story. When asked by aspiring writers in workshops, I would say, “Each novel involves about a hundred sources."

In those early days. before the Internet crunched into our lives, I obtained books and sources from the British Library through the excellent Bishop Auckland County Library, where I came to enjoy the friendship and support of the librarian, the brilliant Gillian Wales.

When I was researching the history of the industrial metropolis of Bradford, my materials also included maps, which I’ve always enjoyed. The walls of my little writing room upstairs are still covered with maps and visuals from various novels. In the 1970s, I also I also walked in Lizza’s steps, visiting the industrial town of Bradford, driving my blue Ford Prefect, bought from an apprentice priest from one of the Durham Colleges. I relished weaving around the streets and back streets of the city, where mills soared like rock faces above the well paved streets.

So my novel, Lizza, emerged from my mother’s much-told tale of leaving the small house in the small mining town in the North East, to go to the industrial town of Bradford.

I soon realised this would not be a children’s book like my earlier publications, but as my heroine was only fifteen, I thought young people would surely enjoy it too. So I decided I would call it a Crossover Novel.    

 I thought I had invented this term, but one day in London a rather pompous, very London-y agent informed me that these days, this was a common name for this kind of novel. I was duly corrected,

The publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, took Lizza on and made a very good job of this novel, I think you will agree if you take a look at the paperback or the hardback.

Paperback on the left, and Hardback on the right.

I took the final proofs of Lizza to Barbara's house and set it on the top of her pile of library books on the table by her chair. The next day, I called on her on my way home from the primary school where I taught. I was somewhat tense, worried about her reaction to my excavating her life in the service of my novel.

I settled my children at the table with paper and crayons, made Mam and me our usual cup of tea. Then I sat down in the chair opposite her. "Well,” I said, my heart in my throat. She sipped her tea and nodded. “Couldn’t put it down, pet. I was up till two o’clock so I could finish it.” She placed her teacup beside the pile of books. "There was just one thing...”

I held my breath.

She nodded. “The foreman at the mill in Bradford. His name wasn’t Thomson. It was Fred Entwhistle.”

I grinned with delight, We had never discussed details about the mill, I had made them all up with the help of my research.

Therein lies the truth of fiction.

‘‘ You can call me Studs’’

A boy's story - coming soon!