Autumn Chickens
The Online Magazine for Forward Thinking People in Mid-Life and Beyond
Because we never stop reading
If you haven't come across Jude Hayland's novels before, then we're sure the following article will inspire you to investigate further. Click on the book covers in the article for a link to each publication.
Writing Out of the Recent Past
Jude Hayland
The past, like the poor, is always with us.
Our own pasts haunt us for better or worse. Good memories can be used to gild the indifferent days whilst bad memories - well, sometimes they can put present problems into perspective!
Personal pasts are a landscape, sometimes a minefield, that are hitched to us irrevocably, however much we might try to shrug them off. And even if the conscious mind refuses to engage with such incidents, dream states lack such discipline. Have you ever woken up and wondered quite why you have just dreamt about a past boyfriend, lover, estranged friend? A buried occurrence that you have not thought about for decades? Dreamland knows no barriers, clearly!
My four novels are set in what I term the ‘recent past.’ In other words, times I can recall through lived experience. Eras where I can touch the mood, the climate, the recipe of the times because I was there, living and breathing it all. I am not sure if it’s a habit of nostalgia that has led me down this path or simply expediency. Practicality.
Let’s take technology for a start.
Mobile phones, the internet, perpetual and constant access to information and communication are wonderful inventions of the very late 20th and early 21st centuries. But they can be inhibitors for plot development.
My novels are character-driven stories concerning the complexities of relationships, families and friendships. Secrets, suppressed knowledge and hidden truths lie at the heart of each one of them and propel the plot to its resolution.
Take my first novel, Counting the Ways.
Set in the mid-1980s, the abrupt disappearance of one of the characters and his ability to remain free and unfettered by discovery would simply not be possible in our current era. People have become so traceable, so accountable.
The Legacy of Mr Jarvis, my second novel, plunges even further back with a dual time line of the late 1960s and early 21st century and concerns duplicity of a level unimaginable in these fully informed times.
After all, now it’s possible to sit in your armchair with phone or laptop and within moments find out extraordinary levels of information about an individual.
The same level of deception is required if the plot of my most recent novel The Odyssey of Lily Page is to work.
For me, there’s an enormous attraction of setting a story in times that were, in hindsight, simpler. Less hampered by the distractions, complications and perplexities of technology.
Then there’s the attraction that the past, however, recent, is just that. Past. Finished, boxed up and labelled with no chance of springing surprise events upon us. That’s satisfying for the novelist. It’s a known quantity that can be viewed with hindsight but with no fear of sudden startling occurrences.
Like, for example, a world wide epidemic rearing its unexpected and unpredicted head nastily above the parapet …
When the pandemic struck, I was writing my third novel, Miller Street SW22, set over the year 2005-2006 and I was thankful to be able to escape during lockdowns into a year that already had its script written, so to speak.
And it’s undeniable that for me another delight of setting novels in the recent past is pure indulgence, allowing for reflective recall. It permits me to revisit scenes, images, moments from a lived life. A little like flicking through a photograph album or watching old cine film material.
My novels are not autobiographical, I hasten to add.
Yet inevitably snatches of personal experience find their way into the narrative as they provide authentic material for people’s norms and habits of a particular decade.
Thus, in writing Counting the Ways, I was revisiting mid 1980s London with my protagonist, Grace, remembering where and how I lived at that time in the city as a single young woman alongside my fictional character, Grace, as she negotiates her way.
For the past, as we all know, is a different country.
Attitudes and values can shift extraordinarily over a decade or two and I am drawn to revisit the norms that previously propelled our behaviour. It’s not just legislation that changes outlook and perspective but simply the accepted way of thinking and feeling. The latter half of the 20th century saw so many changes in material values, in moral sensibilities and these impact the way characters behave and react. There is no need to be writing historical fiction to find people living very differently from their contemporary counterparts!
And no more is this so than for women.
Women like Lily Page in my most recent, eponymously titled novel, The Odyssey of Lily Page. Lily is 50 in 1983 when the novel is set and has lived a biddable and obliging half century, seeing little possibility or need to divert from the path defined for her by her professor father and indomitable aunt. Born pre- WW2, she is of a generation with prescriptive choices over career and destiny. Even women born a couple of decades later still had considerable limitations in the work market. And although it’s hard to believe now, it was not until the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 that banks, employers and other institutions were legally required to treat women and men equally when it came to applying for a mortgage or opening a bank account in their own name. Imagine that – a single woman in the latter half of the 20th century, earning a good salary yet incapable of gaining a mortgage, a bank account or a credit card without the permission and signature of her father!
The 1980s has always seemed to me to be a pivotal decade – when change was radical and fast in every aspect of people’s lives. That’s why I have chosen to set two novels in this era, to reflect and re-evaluate through plot and character those changes.
Lily Page in The Odyssey of Lily Page is an innocent caught up in the maelstrom, a victim, if you like, striving to find her place in a changing world which at last allows her a voice, a freedom to be herself.
So my natural inclination and curiosity has always been to look back, to steep my characters in the norms and attitudes of earlier eras as an act of reconstruction.
For me, writing has always been about trying to understand.
Trying to make sense of it all – of the good, the bad and the indifferent.
Writing out of the recent past is, therefore, my own way of trying to make sense of all those times, those fleeting and inevitably transitory moments, that have gone before.
