Singing for Mrs Pettigrew: A Story Maker's Journey Read online

  Bruno peered at it closely for a moment, then started to roar with laughter. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Yannick may be a genius with crème brûlée, but this is by Picasso, the great man himself. I promise you. Isn’t it, Yannick?”

  So I told them the whole story. When I’d finished, Amandine came over and hugged me. She had tears in her eyes. I was in seventh heaven, and Uncle Bruno waggled his moustache and gave me six crystallized apricots. Unfortunately Aunt Mathilde hugged me too and pinched my cheek especially hard. I was the talk of the inn that night, and felt very proud of myself. But best of all Amandine came on my walk in the hills the next day and climbed trees with me and collected acorns, and held my hand all the way back down the village street, where everyone could see us, even the motor-scooter boys in their blue jeans.

  They still have the boat drawing by Picasso hanging in the inn. Amandine runs the place now. It’s as good as ever. She married someone else, as cousins usually do. So did I. I’m a writer still trying to follow in Jean Giono’s footsteps. As for Cézanne, was my mother right? Is he the greatest painter in the world? Or is it Picasso? Who knows? Who cares? They’re both wonderful and I’ve met both of them – if you see what I’m saying.

  an art and a craft and a marvellous magic

  A certain fear of the empty page has stayed with me since my schooldays. For me it still seems perfectly to mirror an empty mind bereft of ideas. It saps my confidence and my will and any hope I might be harbouring that I can cover the page with words at all, let alone with a coherent story. Yet almost every day of my life I choose to face down that fear. It is not because I am brave. Rather I am like a sailor who knows the terror of the sea and has discovered over the years and after countless voyages and adventures that the only way to banish this terror is by knowing and understanding the sea in all its moods so well that he is no longer frustrated when becalmed, nor terrified for his life in the midst of the storm. And just as a sailor goes out once again to face the perils of the open sea, so I go to my bed each day, pile up my pillows behind me, settle back, pick up a pen, draw up my knees, open the exercise book and confront once more the open sea of the empty page. The mariner sails the sea because he longs to, because it is a challenge he needs, because each time he is testing himself, exploring, discovering. I write for the same reason.

  But my need to write has another motivation too, one I share in part at least with sailors, I think. I like to feel connected, to myself, to my memory, to the world about me, to my readers. It is, I suppose, my way of feeling most intensely that I belong.

  I have often wondered in four decades of writing how it is that time and again my stories seem to gather themselves, write themselves almost (the best ones really seem to), cover the empty pages almost effortlessly – once I get going, that is. Each one is, I believe, the result of forces of a creative fusion, a fusion that simply can’t happen unless certain elements are in place, a fusion I don’t properly understand, but can only guess at. But it is an informed guess.

  At the core of it, without which there would simply never have been any fusion at all, is the life I have lived: as a child in London, as a son and a brother on the Essex coast, away at boarding school, then as a soldier, a student, a husband, a father, a teacher, farmer, traveller, lecturer, storyteller, grandfather. I didn’t live this life in order to write stories, of course – for at least half my life I had no idea I even wanted to write – but without its joys and its pain, its highs and its lows, I would have precious little to write about and probably no desire to write anyway.

  For me, memory is the source material that is needed for this fusion – the memory of falling off a bike into a ditch (“Singing for Mrs Pettigrew”); of being cast away on an island in Scilly (Why the Whales Came; Kensuke’s Kingdom); of collecting cowrie shells on a beach near Zennor (“The Giant’s Necklace”); of running away from boarding school (The Butterfly Lion; “My One and Only Great Escape”); of a family friend terribly scarred when he was shot down in the RAF in the war (“Half a Man”); of seeing my father for the first time in my life (“My Father Is a Polar Bear”); of loving the paintings of Cézanne (Meeting Cézanne) and the music of Mozart, the poetry of Ted Hughes (The Silver Swan) and the stories of Robert Louis Stevenson (I Believe in Unicorns); of a small boy sitting on his tricycle in a square in Venice at ten o’clock at night watching a violinist play in the street, entranced (“The Mozart Question”); of a village divided over the construction of an atomic power station; of a lady who lived in a railway carriage near the sea and gave me a glass of milk and a jam sandwich when I was little; and of a single lark rising into the blue (“Singing for Mrs Pettigrew”). So it is no accident that every one of these things has made its way later into a story of mine.

  But memories themselves are not enough to create the fusion that fires a story. To have read widely and deeply, to have soaked oneself in the words and ideas of other writers, to have seen what is possible and wonderful, to have listened to the music of their words and to have read the work of the masters must be a help for any writer discovering his own technique, her own voice.

  My own writing has taken all my years to develop – is still developing, I hope – and it has happened in parallel with my life and my reading. Once the spark is there – and with me the spark is always the result of some fusion between events I have lived or witnessed or discovered – then comes the time for research, and with research a growing confidence that I have the wherewithal to write it and then a conviction that I have a burning need to write it.

  But I must wait for the moment before I begin (procrastination has its uses!), until the story is ripe. This process can be five minutes (unlikely) or five years. All I know is that you can’t hurry it. The story will be written when the moment is right. I learnt some time ago not to force the pace, not to dictate the story but to allow the story time to find its own voice to weave itself, to dream itself out in my head so that, by the time I set pen to paper, I feel I am living inside that story. I must know the places; I must know the people. I may still not know exactly what will happen – and certainly not how it might end. That often emerges through the writing. But I do know by now the world of my story intimately, its tone and tune, its cadence and rhythm. I feel I am living inside it, that even as I am writing about it I am not the creator of it at all, but simply telling it as it happens, as I witness it. And when it’s written, I read it over, to hear the music of it in my head, to be sure the tune and the story are in harmony. No note must jar, or the dream of the story is interrupted.

  The last and most important element in the alchemy that produces this creative fusion is the sheer love of doing it, of seeing if you can make magic from an empty page and a pen. The truth is that it is not a trick. It is an art and a craft and a marvellous magic, and I long with every story to understand it better and to do it better too.

  the giant’s necklace

  The necklace stretched from one end of the kitchen table to the other, around the sugar bowl at the far end and back again, stopping only a few inches short of the toaster. The discovery on the beach of a length of abandoned fishing line draped with seaweed had first suggested the idea to Cherry; and every day of the holiday since then had been spent in one single-minded pursuit, the creation of a necklace of glistening pink cowrie shells. She had sworn to herself and to everyone else that the necklace would not be complete until it reached the toaster; and when Cherry vowed she would do something, she invariably did it.

  Cherry was the youngest in a family of older brothers, four of them, who had teased her relentlessly since the day she was born, eleven years before. She referred to them as “the four mistakes”, for it was a family joke that each son had been an attempt to produce a daughter. To their huge delight Cherry reacted passionately to any slight or insult whether intended or not. Their particular targets were her size, which was diminutive compared with theirs, her dark flashing eyes that could wither with one scornful look, but above all her ever increa
sing femininity. Although the teasing was interminable it was rarely hurtful, nor was it intended to be, for her brothers adored her; and she knew it.

  Cherry was poring over her necklace, still in her dressing gown. Breakfast had just been cleared away and she was alone with her mother. She fingered the shells lightly, turning them gently until the entire necklace lay flat with the rounded pink of the shells all uppermost. Then she bent down and breathed on each of them in turn, polishing them carefully with a napkin.

  “There’s still the sea in them,” she said to no one in particular. “You can still smell it, and I washed them and washed them, you know.”

  “You’ve only got today, Cherry,” said her mother, coming over to the table and putting an arm around her. “Just today, that’s all. We’re off back home tomorrow morning first thing. Why don’t you call it a day, dear? You’ve been at it every day – you must be tired of it by now. There’s no need to go on, you know. We all think it’s a fine necklace and quite long enough. It’s long enough surely?”

  Cherry shook her head slowly. “Nope,” she said. “Only that little bit left to do and then it’s finished.”

  “But they’ll take hours to collect, dear,” her mother said weakly, recognizing and at the same time respecting her daughter’s persistence.

  “Only a few hours,” said Cherry, bending over, her brows furrowing critically as she inspected a flaw in one of her shells, “that’s all it’ll take. D’you know, there are five thousand, three hundred and twenty-five shells in my necklace already? I counted them, so I know.”

  “Isn’t that enough, dear?” her mother said desperately.

  “Nope,” said Cherry. “I said I’d reach the toaster, and I’m going to reach the toaster.”

  Her mother turned away to continue the drying up.

  “Well, I can’t spend all day on the beach today, Cherry,” she said. “If you haven’t finished by the time we come away I’ll have to leave you there. We’ve got to pack up and tidy the house – there’ll be no time in the morning.”

  “I’ll be all right,” said Cherry, cocking her head on one side to view the necklace from a different angle. “There’s never been a necklace like this before, not in all the world. I’m sure there hasn’t.” And then: “You can leave me there, Mum, and I’ll walk back. It’s only a mile or so along the cliff path and half a mile back across the fields. I’ve done it before on my own. It’s not far.”

  There was a thundering on the stairs and a sudden rude invasion of the kitchen. Cherry was surrounded by her four brothers, who leant over the table in mock appreciation of her necklace.

  “Ooh, pretty.”

  “Do they come in other colours? I mean, pink’s not my colour.”

  “Bit big though, isn’t it?” said one of them – she didn’t know which and it didn’t matter. He went on: “I mean it’s a bit big for a necklace.”

  War had been declared again, and Cherry responded predictably.

  “That depends,” she said calmly, shrugging her shoulders because she knew that would irritate them.

  “On what does it depend?” said her eldest brother pompously.

  “On who’s going to wear it of course, ninny,” she said swiftly.

  “Well, who is going to wear it?” he replied.

  “It’s for a giant,” she said, her voice full of serious innocence. “It’s a giant’s necklace, and it’s still not big enough.”

  It was the perfect answer, an answer she knew would send her brothers into fits of hysterical hilarity. She loved to make them laugh at her and could do it at the drop of a hat. Of course she no more believed in giants than they did, but if it tickled them pink to believe she did, then why not pretend?

  She turned on them, fists flailing, and chased them back up the stairs, her eyes burning with simulated fury. “Just cos you don’t believe in anything ’cept motorbikes and football and all that rubbish, just cos you’re great big, fat, ignorant pigs…” She hurled insults up the stairs after them and the worse they became the more they loved it.

  Boat Cove just below Zennor Head was the beach they had found and occupied. Every year for as long as Cherry could remember they had rented the same granite cottage, set back in the fields below the Eagle’s Nest, and every year they came to the same beach because no one else did. In two weeks not another soul had ventured down the winding track through the bracken from the coastal path. It was a long climb down and a very much longer one up. The beach itself was almost hidden from the path that ran along the cliff top a hundred feet above. It was private and perfect and theirs. The boys swam in amongst the rocks, diving and snorkelling for hours on end. Her mother and father would sit side by side on stripy deckchairs. She would read endlessly and he would close his eyes against the sun and dream for hours on end.

  Cherry moved away from them and clambered over the rocks to a narrow strip of sand in the cove beyond the rocks, and here it was that she mined for the cowrie shells. In the gritty sand under the cliff face she had found a particularly rich deposit so that they were not hard to find; but she was looking for pink cowrie shells of a uniform length, colour and shape – and that was what took the time. Occasionally the boys would swim around the rocks and in to her little beach, emerging from the sea all goggled and flippered to mock her. But as she paid them little attention they soon tired and went away again. She knew time was running short. This was her very last chance to find enough shells to complete the giant’s necklace, and it had to be done.

  The sea was calmer that day than she had ever seen it. The heat beat down from a windless, cloudless sky; even the gulls and kittiwakes seemed to be silenced by the sun. Cherry searched on, stopping only for a picnic lunch of pasties and tomatoes with the family before returning at once to her shells.

  In the end the heat proved too much for her mother and father, who left the beach earlier than usual in mid-afternoon to begin to tidy up the cottage. The boys soon followed because they had tired of finding miniature crabs and seaweed instead of the sunken wrecks and treasure they had been seeking, so that by teatime Cherry was left on her own on the beach with strict instructions to keep her hat on, not to bathe alone and to be back well before dark. She had calculated she needed one hundred and fifty more cowrie shells and so far she had found only eighty. She would be back, she insisted, when she had finished collecting enough shells and not before.

  Had she not been so immersed in her search, sifting the shells through her fingers, she would have noticed the dark grey bank of cloud rolling in from the Atlantic. She would have noticed the white horses gathering out at sea and the tide moving remorselessly in to cover the rocks between her and Boat Cove. When the clouds cut off the warmth from the sun as evening came on and the sea turned grey, she shivered with cold and slipped on her jersey and jeans. She did look up then and saw that the sea was angry, but she saw no threat in that and did not look back over her shoulder towards Boat Cove. She was aware that time was running short so she went down on her knees again and dug feverishly in the sand. There were still thirty shells to collect and she was not going home without them.

  It was the baleful sound of a foghorn somewhere out at sea beyond Gunnards Head that at last forced Cherry to consider her own predicament. Only then did she take some account of the incoming tide. She looked for the rocks she would have to clamber over to reach Boat Cove again and the winding track that would take her up to the cliff path and safety, but they were gone. Where they should have been, the sea was already driving in against the cliff face. She was cut off. For many moments Cherry stared in disbelief and wondered if her memory was deceiving her, until the sea, sucked back into the Atlantic for a brief moment, revealed the rocks that marked her route back to Boat Cove. Then she realized at last that the sea had undergone a grim metamorphosis. In a confusion of wonder and fear she looked out to sea at the heaving ocean that moved in towards her, seeing it now as a writhing grey monster breathing its fury on the rocks with every pounding wave.

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p; Still Cherry did not forget her shells, but wrapping them inside her towel she tucked them into her jersey and waded out through the surf towards the rocks. If she timed it right, she reasoned, she could scramble back over them and into the cove as the surf retreated. And she reached the first of the rocks without too much difficulty; the sea here seemed to be protected from the force of the ocean by the rocks further out. Holding fast to the first rock she came to, and with the sea up around her waist, she waited for the next incoming wave to break and retreat. The wave was unexpectedly impotent and fell limply on the rocks around her. She knew her moment had come and took it. She was not to know that piling up far out at sea was the first of the giant storm waves that had gathered several hundred miles out in the Atlantic, bringing with it all the momentum and violence of the deep ocean.

  The rocks were slippery underfoot and more than once Cherry slipped down into seething white rock pools where she had played so often when the tide was out. But she struggled on until finally she had climbed high enough to be able to see the thin strip of sand that was all that was left of Boat Cove. It was only a few yards away, so close. Until now she had been crying involuntarily; but now, as she recognized the little path up through the bracken, her heart was lifted with hope and anticipation. She knew that the worst was over, that if the sea would only hold back she would reach the sanctuary of the cove. She turned and looked behind her to see how far away the next wave was, just to reassure herself that she had enough time. But the great surge of green water was on her before she could register either disappointment or fear. She was hurled back against the rock below her and covered at once by the sea. She was conscious as she went down that she was drowning, but she still clutched her shells against her chest and was glad she had enough of them at last to finish the giant’s necklace. Those were her last thinking thoughts before the sea took her away.