Alison May

How I wrote a novel in 4 weeks*

*not actually a novel, a first draft**

** not even a whole first draft really…

Anyway it was a big old hunk of writing and I’ve been documenting the process on my Instagram here, so you’re very welcome to go watch all that back, but now I’ve made it to the finish line I thought it deserved a longer debrief so I have a full YouTube video with the whole process, what I learned from doing it, and my tips for writing faster. Enjoy

While you’re here, making a living through writing is super tricky right now. Authors’ incomes are falling, and bills very much are not, so if you are able and you enjoy what I write it would be lovely if you could drop me a couple of quid by way of acknowledgement or thanks. I believe people generally say ‘buy me a coffee’ but I don’t like coffee and I’m lactose intolerant. So buy me a soya milk hot chocolate?

The things you just can’t say

You hear the phrase ‘you just can’t say anything any more’ a lot. Most often in comments from people parodying the kind of people they imagine say ‘you just can’t say anything any more,’ but second most often from people who have just said something horrid and been criticised for it. Obviously what they actually mean is ‘you can’t say anything without people responding and questioning it any more,’ which is a very different complaint.

But I do think there are some things that it appears certain people can not say. Here’s one: ‘In the UK we need to raise taxes.’

That really shouldn’t be a controversial statement. We spent a shedload* during Covid and in response to Brexit. We were already pretty broke after the 2008 financial crisis, and governments since then have pursued different versions of austerity to the point where our basic day-to-day lived experiences tell us that there is really nothing left to cut. Ambulances take ages to come. Police are acting as a mental health emergency service. Local councils are going bankrupt. If we want our public services to function better they have to be paid for.

And I can say that, but we seem to have created a politics where politicians can’t. We’ve tarred the Labour party, in particular, with the label of being financially irresponsible, which means that successive Labour leaders feel bound to go into each new election cycle with a promise not to raise taxes. Which is insane. Tax is pretty much the main lever the government has control of to do… well anything. Nothing else promised in a manifesto means anything if it’s accompanied by a promise that takes the main option for paying for it out of play before the party is even in government.

We also need tax reform. Too many forms of UK taxation (pretty much all of them apart from good old income tax) aren’t properly progressive and don’t proportionally hit those who can most afford to pay, but tax reform isn’t a sexy policy, and raising taxes is never going to be an instinctively popular one. Which means that we are running a whole political system where our politicians permanently have one hand tied behind the back because they can’t say the thing they must all know to be true. To fund functioning services they need to raise more money.

And functioning public services save the country – and individuals – money long term. A well run, prompt health service saves sick days and benefits payments. It keeps people in work and earning. A well-funded police service reduces crime. A properly functioning prison and probation service reduces reoffending, which saves the country money and and individuals pain.

But so long as we have a media, and a public, who refuse to hear unpleasant things – like ‘this is likely to require tax increases’ – then none of those improvements are going to happen. And we’ve created a media landscape where a lot of people only consume ‘news’ and opinion that tell them things they want to hear, so telling people things they don’t want to hear is seen as electoral insanity. And so here we are trapped, with a struggling public services and nothing but anger to fix them with.

And that’s today’s post. I did write one last week, but I didn’t post it. It felt too much like shouting into the void. But this week I’m back, whispering quietly into the void, sort of tapping the void on the shoulder and muttering ‘I’m sorry. Would you mind awfully taking a look at this?’ I hope the void enjoys it.

*technical ecomonics term there

Flags. Yeah. Flags.

If you spend any time at all on the interweb, and clearly you do because you’re here now, you’re probably already sick of people’s hot takes on the flying of England flags. So sorry. But also not sorry, because part of the reason I wanted to start blogging again was to move past hot takes on things and into really quite chilly takes. I wanted to talk about stuff with time to think about it, rather than ‘see it online, get cross, make cross comment immediately’.

For anyone not in England or who just doesn’t leave the house, flags have become a thing recently. People have been putting them up on lamposts, painting them on mini-roundabouts, and generally flagging the place up. Cue lots of think pieces about how national pride isn’t racist, and lots more about how actually in practice is quite often really really is.

And even as I’m typing this part of my brain is going ‘does the internet really need another person reckoning something on this topic?’ And alongside that I’m weary – weary of how politics is done at the moment – and that weariness leads to not really wanting to say anything much at all. But then, of course, quiet voices stepping back allows more space for loud voices to dominate everything. So here we go.

Seeing flags all over lamposts makes me feel really uneasy. I’m white. I’m about as English as one can be over lots of generations. There might be a sniff of Welsh or Scottish in there somewhere but it’s pretty well buried. I was born and raised in North Yorkshire, so there’s probably as much Viking as anything else. Anyway, very white and very English, but the flags still really really give me the ick.

Why is that? Well fairly obviously it’s because a flag is ultimately a symbol of something. And the St George Cross over recent decades has been a symbol of the far right. Maybe it shouldn’t be, but in reality it is, so when I see it I don’t think of stiff upper lips, or cricket on the village green, or multicultural inclusion. I think of racists.

And I think that a lot of the people behind the not-at-all spontaneous raising of these flags embrace that association and think that England should be white, and not inclusive of different ethnicities and not welcoming to refugees. And maybe some of the people actually raising the flag don’t think that. Maybe they think they’re reclaiming the flag for a more neutral statement of national pride, but they must also know what that flag represents to a lot of the people who see it, and at the very least, have decided not to care.

So unease number 1 is that national flags all over the shop send a message of exclusion and racism and that must be utterly awful for all the black and brown people jut trying to get on with their day and having to walk past that symbol every time they try to go to the shops or walk to work or get through the school run. And that’s unease enough to think it’s a bad bad thing. Any symbol that makes a whole tranche of your population feel unsafe can just get in the bin right now.

But there’s another unease that’s harder to define that ‘horrible racists are horrible, and people who are happy to go along with racists are fairly horrible too.’ It’s the idea of national pride itself. Supporting a national sports team I get. Sport is competitive and for it to be fun to watch you really do need to support someone to get the full emotional fix it can provide. It might as well be the ones who live nearest to you.

But national pride as a more general concept is baffling to me, and actually I think that ‘baffled’ is the correct English, and indeed British, response to national pride. I think we all absorb the idea that particular countries have particular characteristics. And I’m sure in some ways they do. Different cultural norms create slightly different ways of living and behaving. It can be mildly and largely harmlessly amusing to observe those norms, so long as we don’t kid ourselves that our norms are in any way more normal than anybody else’s.

For England there are two version of our national identity. There’s the one where we invade half the planet and try to export our way of life as the one and only correct way. And there’s the one where we mostly talk about the weather and find extremists a little bit in your face and ill-mannered. There’s the England of the crusades and the slave trade and the exploitation of the colonies. And there’s the England of live and let live, and taking the piss out of everything, and playing the Benny Hill music when the EDL try to rally in your city.

And of course we are both of those, and have been both of those, and have not been good at honestly discussing the first part at all. And recently the second part has been lost in a lot of heat and noise. The Tommy Robinsons and Nigel Farages – yes, they are totally part of the same continuum; how far along that continuum you feel comfortable is a question for you but I’d go with ‘a long long way away from it’ personally – should be laughable. They’re extremists in a country that, among its many confused and contradictory national identities, absolutely has one that giggles at extremists, recognising their lack of sense of humour as a big old red flag in its own right.

Flying flags isn’t part of that flavour of English national identity. It’s not part of the piss-taking, socially reserved, to each their own, flavour of national identity that is the one I’d choose to hold on to. It’s part of something louder, more earnest, less thoughtful, and, for me at least, much much less English. National pride in and of itself feels foreign to my very English sensibilities. At the very least it feels like something that one ought to do quietly to oneself at home. Displaying it all over the place is frankly not the done thing at all. Not in England.

So yeah, that’s some slightly half formed stuff I’ve reckoned this week. I might reckon something new next week, or before then, or not at all. There’s really really no system here.

(Re)starting a blog in 2025…

Back through the mists of time this website was basically just a blog where I pontificated about whatever random stuff had wandered across my consciousness. Blogging was very much The Modern Thing at the time, but now in August 2025 it’s three years since I posted anything at all, and seven since my last attempt to post regularly, so what on earth am I doing here now?

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure. It’s 2025. If I want to pontificate I should probably have a Substack or communicate my thoughts through the medium of viral dance trend on TikTok. But both of those sound like a) a lot of effort and b) like they’ll be every bit as out of fashion as old school blogging in another five years time, so here we are.

I think the reason I woke up this morning though and thought, ‘Let’s restart an entirely defunct blog’ was a growing frustration with social media and the way conversations online tend to descend into argument and ‘Well, actually’ and exchanges that are all about winning or being seen to be right, rather than engaging, listening or, indeed, actually being right. And sometimes that’s fair enough – when you’re dealing with a troll, polite discourse doesn’t necessarily cut it – but other times it just makes me weary, and I turn into a grumpy old woman who thinks the world is losing its manners and its nuance.

And I don’t like the grumpy version of me. I don’t want to be chuntering at the modern world. I want to be engaged with it. I used to think of myself as being quite political, but it feels like political conversations are so toxic now that I’ve backed away. And that backing away is part of the problem. Backing away leaves a big empty space for bigots and zealots to fill.

So restarting this blog is, I guess, me trying to step back into that space but in a way that hopefully feels less fighty and more thoughtful than just shouting in the comments on semi-strangers’ Facebook posts.

I make no promises to be here on any sort of schedule – ‘most weeks’ is the vague intention, but who knows? I am going to try at least to write stuff here about what’s on my mind, about the world we’re navigating through, about the bits of it that scare me, and the bits of it that bring me joy. Or if that’s too much some weeks I might just not, or I might share some pictures of cake instead. We will very much see how it goes.

In which I think about creativity and falling in (or out) of love with writing

Ahoy there! Welcome to the blog. Or perhaps welcome back to the blog. I see that I haven’t been to play here since 2019, so a little catch up is probably in order to get things started.

*checks diary for the last 2.5 years*

On the other hand, we could ignore 2020 and 2021, pretend that it’s still 2019, and that worst thing to happen to any of us recently was being slightly non-plussed with the ending of Game of Thrones, and just crack on from there.

Deal? Good.

The reason for blowing the dust off the bloggy blog blog was that I wanted to muse a while about creativity. There is – full disclosure – an element of shameless promotion here, because these musings are totally related to the brand new online course I currently have running with Romance Writers of Australia. That course is rather wordily entitled Reigniting Creativity and Finding Your Voice and is a self-paced online course, aimed at anyone who wants to find ways to be more creative or who has maybe fallen out of love with writing a bit. And that’s what I want to talk about today.

Most of us who write – whether it’s novels or poetry or screenplay or extended dragon based battle scenes that lose sight of multiple seasons of thoughtful character development – start writing because we love it. We love the creativity. We love exploring our imaginations. And it’s a huge privilege to be able to take that love and turn it in to even a small part of your career.

Which makes it a bit awkward when, for whatever reason, we’re really not enjoying writing. And I don’t mean that ‘some days go better than others’ sort of not enjoying it. Or the ‘well it takes me a while to get going but once I’m in the flow all is good’ sort of not enjoying it. I mean the ‘What is ‘in the flow’? I do not remember that and suspect you’ve just made up a thing’ form of not enjoying it. With shades of the ‘Maybe I could retire. That’s a thing people do. I could get another job and never have to write another word again’ sort of not enjoying it. I’m talking about the point where the thing that you loved, and worked so hard to be able to do for a considerable portion of your week, is about as enticing as burying yourself in quick drying cement.

And there are all sorts of reasons a writer might feel that way. The publishing industry is tough. Months, or years, of rejection and nearly-but-not-quites do get you down. Writing with a voice in your head asking if this is what the market really wants can be wearing. And writing for publication is a treadmill – one set up with a ridiculously high gradient and no option to step off. When you finish one novel, you gotta start the next. Over time the well you’re drawing from – your own imagination and creativity – can be emptied. Add to that all of the stresses that affect us all – health, family, the imminent death of the planet we call home – and finding a creative spark can get tough.

And that toughness can be difficult to talk about. We all know that publishing is tough and we all know – because as writers we tell each other it constantly – that all you can do is just keep on keeping on. So when keeping going with writing feels impossible or overwhelming or panic-inducing it can be hard to admit it, even to yourself.

So I came up with the idea for the Reigniting Creativity course thinking that if I felt that way, other writers might as well. And writing the course really helped me. Normally when I write a course on some element of writing or editing, I’m trying to work out the most effective ways of sharing some knowledge or tools with my students. In this case I was really thinking about what I needed and what might be useful for me to try, and what I’ve created is one of the most personal and the most practical courses I’ve ever put together. More than being a learning programme, I think of it as a form of couples’ therapy for you and your writing mojo – a chance to reconnect, rediscover why you fell in love to begin with, and work out how to keep the spark alive going forward.

Writing it helped me. Genuinely, there’s one particular tool from the very last section of the course that I’m using week in week out as part of my writing practice to help me stay creative and remember that writing can be joyful. And you don’t have to be in the midst of a full blown writing breakdown to sign up. You can also do that just because it might be fun. I just hope that following the course will help some of you get your creativity flowing.

In which I participate in A Convenient Marriage blog splash

Today is release day for my very good friend, and most excellent writerist, Jeevana Charika’s brand new book A Convenient Marriage. You should probably all go and buy it. Off you go – do that now.

Have you been yet? If you’re still hesitating here’s the cover and blurb to entice you further…

It was the perfect marriage… until they fell in love.

Chaya is a young woman torn between her duty to family and her life in the UK. While her traditional Sri Lankan parents want her to settle down into marriage, what they don’t know is that Chaya has turned away the one true love of her life, Noah, terrified of their disapproval.

Gimhana is hiding his sexuality from his family. It’s easy enough to pretend he’s straight when he lives half a world away in the UK. But it’s getting harder and harder to turn down the potential brides his parents keep finding for him.

When Chaya and Gimhana meet, a marriage of convenience seems like the perfect solution to their problems. Together they have everything – friendship, stability and their parents’ approval. But when both Chaya and Gimhana find themselves falling in love outside of their marriage, they’re left with an impossible decision – risk everything they’ve built together, or finally follow their heart?

So now you’ve all been and bought A Convenient Marriage. What? You at the back -you haven’t bought it yet? Well go now. Go on. Be quick.

Right. Now we’re all settled here’s my contribution to the blog splash…

One of the ways Gimhana shows he cares is by cooking for Chaya. Is there a food that evokes particular memories for you?

Well I’m very glad you asked me that, because as it happens I’ve been thinking about food recently and particularly about food I can no longer have. In a bid to identify what triggers my IBS more clearly I’m not currently eating cow’s milk or cream or softer cheeses (which tend to be higher in lactose). IBS has also seen off eating much red meat and other food allergies have taken oranges and brie, camembert and blue cheese out of my diet.

And, slightly depressingly, all of those are foods I love. So here is my very very favourite thing to eat that I can no longer have. I’m bequeathing it to you dear readers so that you might have joy in my stead…

Alison’s Perfect Boxing Day Sandwich

So the perfect Boxing Day meal should take the best bits of Christmas dinner and condense them down into a format that’s edible when you’re in a state of utter bloatedness and lethergy. The sandwich is ideal here. You can eat it with your hands with the plate balanced on your belly while watching the Sound of Music through a hungover haze.

For this sandwich you will need:

Bread – preferably white – this is not the moment to be introducing health into your diet

Leftover turkey

Brie

Bacon

Cranberry sauce

Cook the bacon. Bang all of the stuff that isn’t bread between two slices of bread. If you really must you can add a slice of lettuce so you can tell yourself you’ve had a vegetable. Toast the whole damn thing (or griddle it if you’re feeling fancy). Enjoy. If you want to get a second wave of ‘banned foods’ excitement serve with a glass of bucks fizz.

And now I shall go away and think about lovely melting brie over bacon and …. mmmmmm…. it’s too nice.

In which I think about writing and mentoring and money

It’s not easy to become a published author. It’s even less easy to become a bestseller. Statistically the odds are stacked against anyone starting out with the dream of writing a novel and then selling enough of that novel – or even of multiple novels – to make a living from being a career author.

That doesn’t mean that it can’t happen. It does happen, and the authors who work hard and write the best book they are able shorten the odds of it happening to them. Unfortunately, some of the other things that shorten the odds have very little to do with the talent or work ethic of an individual writer.

Sometimes it’s just bad luck – your book might be brilliant but the agent you’re querying might have signed an author with a similar voice or subject matter just before your manuscript hits their desk. Or an agent might love your book but have struggled to sell something similar recently and not feel confident that they could get a better result with your novel. Or your dark gothic epic might hit their desk in a week when editor after editor has told them they’re desperate for something fun and escapist. And there’s very little you can do about any of those things.

Some of the ‘odds shorteners’ are more than luck though – they’re privilege. Publishing is not immune from homophily – that’s the tendency that people have to make positive associations around people who are apparently similar to them. In recruitment it’s part of the reason that, for example, male dominated workplaces can fail to recruit more women even when there are qualified women applicants and a stated intention to even the gender balance. There is a tendency to feel more confident and comfortable with that which seems familiar, with that which seems ‘like us.’ In publishing that can mean that there is a (possibly unconscious) bias towards authors who look like what we think an author looks or sounds like based on our past experience. That can potentially disadvantage, for example, disabled, BAME, transgender and working class authors, who have historically been underrepresented.

And there are also privileges that come from income or relative wealth. If you can afford it you can go on writing courses, attend conferences, and pay for editorial and tutoring services before you get anywhere near submitting a book to an agent or publisher. Now I could write a whole other ranty post about the quality of some of those services for writers, but there are lots of reputable tutors, editorial advisers and writing mentors around. I consider myself to be one of them. But our advice is often a privilege available to people who are able to pay for it and I worry more and more that that creates an even more unlevel field when people come to make submissions. A writer who has been able to pay for one-to-one support or for numerous writing courses, or even for a professional edit on their manuscript, before they submit has a lot of advantage in trying to produce and present a professional, well-structured manuscript to potential agents and editors.

I don’t have a magic fix to that whole problem so instead I’m going to do one small thing… From January 2020 I will be offering 1 FREE mentoring place for a writer who isn’t be able to afford one-to-one support. My one-to-one mentoring service is completely tailored to the individual client so precisely how things work will depend on the successful applicant but, as an indication of what to expect, I do most of my one-to-one work by video chat (Facebook, Skype, WhatsApp) and normally talk to clients roughly once every couple of weeks, although it could be more or less than that depending where you’re up to in your project. The free place will be for six months from January 2020. Full details and how to apply here.

In which I Have Thoughts about disability, writer-world and publishing

This morning a friend drew my attention to a twitter thread started by Sam Missingham. Sam is a bit of a publishing industry legend and the founder of Lounge Books amongst a gazillion other things. She’s also a great advocate for under-represented voices in publishing.

Her thread today (which you can see here) was asking about experiences of disability in terms of wider accessibility and also in terms of writing events and publishing. And those are things I think about quite a lot when I’m wearing my Vice-Chair of a major writers’ organisation hat. But they’re also things I think about just as Alison. And just as Alison I started to type a reply, and then I stopped, because even in the modern world of multi-tweet threaded epics I couldn’t martial my thoughts down to a tweetable size. So instead, here I am, blowing cobwebs off the unloved corners of the blogosphere like it’s 2013 or something.

So let’s kick off by outing myself. I’m a disabled person. The most common response I get to that statement is generally in the area of ‘Oh but not like, y’know, really disabled…’ Here’s what the Equalities Act 2010 says a disability is… ‘a physical or mental impairment that has a substantial and long-term negative effect on your ability to do normal daily activities.’ So yeah – in those terms really disabled.

Amongst other things, I have IBS – a label I have lots of issues with – which basically means that I have chronic digestive pain and problems caused by nothing that GPs or consultant gastroenterologists can definitively identify. They can definitively rule out lots of things – bowel and stomach cancer, colitis, Chron’s disease, coeliac disease for starters – but can’t definitively rule anything specific in.

I’m not personally a huge fan of the term IBS. It stands for Irritable Bowel Syndrome and I find it sort of creates the image of one’s bowel as a kind of grumpy old man* – a Victor Meldrew figure – bitching and moaning at whatever food happens to get chucked his way. As well as causing pain, IBS can also cause constipation and diarrhea, or, for a lucky few of us, both (sometimes within the same 30 minute period). For me, at least, a more accurate term would be Over-reactive Bowel Syndrome. Everyone’s digestive system reacts to the food we eat – if they didn’t we wouldn’t all share an understanding that beans make you fart – mine just has significantly more dramatic mood swings than most, and sometimes reacts to entirely unexpected things, like ‘it being Tuesday’ for example.

As a result I have to modify my diet – red meat, for example, is pretty much a no no – and I have developed the ability to know where the nearest toilet is to the level of it basically being a superpower. I carry a radar key for disabled toilet access and am getting more brazen (although not fully shameless yet) in the face of the ‘you don’t look disabled’ whispers and glances when I have to use the damn thing. It also makes losing weight a real challenge. Pain levels vary from day to day but on flare-up days, doing exercise is a non-starter. If you can imagine your digestive system as a bottle of fizzy pop and then think about the shaking effect of a vigorous 45 minutes of HIIT or Zumba you’ll get a good idea of the issues there. And on flare-up days the only foods that don’t make things worse generally fall into the ‘beige carbs’ category. Again, not ideal, for maintaining a healthy weight. I get bloating to the point where I’m pretty much guaranteed a seat on the Tube on suspicion of being about seven months pregnant. If I get too hungry I get stomach pain. If I eat even slightly too much I get stomach pain. Sometimes I do everything ‘right’ and I get stomach pain.

The amount of pain varies a lot and, like most chronic illness sufferers, I do a lot of powering through. Because you can, up to a point, but it takes a toll. Powering on through pain is knackering. I have friends who have chronic illnesses where fatigue is a major symptom – I can only imagine that the exponential impact of the fatigue of powering through fatigue must be horrendous.

So that’s me. And now, I’ll try to drag myself back to the point I originally intended to talk about… What would I like to see change in writer world and publishing in relation to disability?

Obviously these are just my personal thoughts…

Events with multiple food options please… It’s great to be asked about dietary requirements before an event – I have multiple weird food allergies so it’s good to get them down in advance – but realistically a lot of days I don’t know what I’m likely to feel ok about eating until I’m there. Buffets are good. Menus with choices are good. If there’s only one option, staff who are understanding about me leaving half of it are good too.
Enough toilets… men’s, women’s, gender neutral, disabled – in a pinch I’ll use any of those. It’s just nice when there’s more than one cubicle for the massive room full of people.
Stop telling stories where disability is a metaphor for the character flaw the protagonist has to get over please… Disabled people can be delightful. Disabled people can be dicks. Most of us are somewhere in between. Like, you know, people. What disability and chronic illness definitely aren’t are flaws to be overcome. Powering through pain isn’t a great personal victory – it’s a choice. Staying in bed isn’t ‘giving in’ to weakness of mind or character. Both of those actions are entirely value and morally neutral.
Ask disabled people what they want and need… disability is a massive range of stuff. Sensory impairment, mobility limitation, chronic pain, chronic fatigue, mental health and a billion other things besides. I can’t speak for someone with, for example, a sensory impairment, but they can speak for themselves.

So those are my thoughts for the day. I probably have more, but this is quite a lot of ‘reckoning stuff on the interweb’ for one afternoon. Probably ought to do some real work now. Toodle-pip.

Oooh… actually one more thing before I go. If you’re about to type a comment that starts ‘Have you tried…’ then please don’t. I know it’s well-intentioned but seriously I was diagnosed in 2012. If you thought of it in the time it took to read this post, you can probably assume it’s been covered.

*No. No idea why I think my bowel is male. That’s probably a whole year of therapy right there.

In which I think about a whole lotta history

This Friday is release day for the brand new book from my alter ego, Juliet Bell. The Other Wife is out in ebook this week and paperback in January. And you can pre-order either (or indeed both) right here.

Outback Australia, 1981

After a terrible childhood, Jane comes to Thornfield as nanny to the adorable Adele, watched over by the handsome and enigmatic Edward. Plain and inexperienced, Jane would never dream of being more than his hired help. But swept up in the dramatic beauty of the Outback, she finds herself drawn to Edward. And, to her surprise, he seems to return her feelings.

But Jane is not the first woman Edward has pledged to make mistress of Thornfield.

As a child, Betty was taken from her English home and sent for adoption in Australia. At first, no-one wanted her, deeming her hair too curly, and her skin too dark. Until the scheming Mr Mason sees a chance to use Betty to cement a relationship with the rich and powerful Rochester dynasty…

When Jane discovers Betty’s fate, will she still want to be the next Mrs Rochester?

One of the most emotionally challenging parts of writing The Other Wife was researching how Betty ends up in Australia all alone after being born in England to parents who love her. Betty’s story echoes elements of the real stories of thousands of children who were sent to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and other countries, by the British authorities who were supposed to be taking care of them. The fictional version of Betty’s childhood isn’t a particularly happy one but it’s a lot happier than many of the children who were sent overseas. Betty is adopted. The majority of British children who were sent to Australia ended up in children’s homes or in work programmes that were unsafe for children of a young age. Many suffered physical or sexual abuse. Children were told that their parents had died, when this was often untrue. And this practice continued for centuries, well into the second half of the twentieth century.

I’m white. I’m British, specifically English. I’m sort of middle-classish. Historically people like me have not consistently been the good guys. I also have an MA in Modern History, so that means I’ve done five years of secondary school, two years of A-level and four years of university studying history, and from all that study a lot of the time you’d still think that the British have been universally enlightened and virtuous across time. When we learn about Britain’s relationship with the rest of the world what we learn about a lot is Britain as saviour, Britain as last bastion of freedom, Britain as driving force in ending evils like the slave trade. What we learn about less is what the British did to establish a global empire, about Britain as driving force in maintaining the Atlantic Slave Trade through the eighteenth century, and about Britain as a country that routinely deported children thousands of miles across the globe to an unknown fate.

And that matters because you can’t understand the world as it is now, and Britain’s place in that world, without understanding Britain’s history in that world. And that means understanding the good bits and the bad, because no person and no country is just one thing. I’m very definitely a British person. I can’t imagine living anywhere else – I’m really not sure my sense of humour would translate. I’m proud to have been born into the country that abolished slavery in 1833. I’m proud to be part of the country in which so many owe so much to so few. But if you embrace the idea of being culturally British, I think you have a responsibility to understand the darker parts of our shared history.

Because that history continues to colour our present. Why is there a common travel area encompassing Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland? Why is English an official language in sixty seven sovereign states across the planet (including Australia, New Zealand, India, Canada, the USA, Pakistan, Jamaica, Botswana, Kenya)? Why is the British monarch also head of state in fifteen other Commonwealth realms? All of those are questions that impact on how Britain interacts with the world right now – they colour things like why people choose to migrate to and from Britain, and why the British/Irish border remains such a massive issue if Britain wants to leave the EU – and all of them have long and complex answers that encompass some of the darkest parts of our history.

We live in a world that feels increasingly split down the middle politically. That’s dangerous. It reduces things to simple positions. Very few things about our history, our culture, and our nation are simple.

Child migration is just one example of the darker side of how the British have treated the vulnerable within our own country. We’ve also done great things – we invented the NHS and the national insurance scheme to protect the most vulnerable. We, as a country and a people, are not just one thing and we never have been. History, politics, culture – these are big complex amorphous things. If someone is selling you a simple version of any of them then they’re either lying or they’re an idiot. And you don’t want to be following a liar or an idiot.

So that blog post wandered a bit from the original topic. Sorry. Ah well, if you want to know more about child migration this is the place to look.

And if you want to follow Betty’s journey to Australia you can order The Other Wife right here.

In which I wish I’d been asked a particular question

With every book I’ve written, except for All That Was Lost, I’ve been asked at some point during the book promotion run which actors I would want to play the main characters if the book was ever made into a film or TV show. And every time I’ve been asked that I’ve ummed and aaahed and basically been unable to come up with a good answer. Which makes it all the more annoying that no-one has asked about All That Was Lost because for the first time ever I actually have ideas! As I was writing All That Was Lost it felt incredibly visual, so for the first time, I was picturing particular actors as I was writing.

So now I’m going to pretend that someone has asked me and answer the question anyway and because this is my personal corner of the internet over which I have total dominion nobody can stop me. So here we go…

Patrice Leigh

Patrice is a stage clairvoyant. She makes her living selling the idea that she can talk to your lost loved ones. Her biggest asset, which she makes great use of, is that she’s unassuming and unthreatening. She’s almost homely. People trust her. They feel safe with her. But she’s also highly intelligent and an astute observer of people around her, and she’s ambitious, single-minded and determined.

The performance I see in my head when I think of Patrice on screen is Julie Walters. She has the warmth but also the steel, I think, to bring Patrice to life on screen.

By Ibsan73/Flickr [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Patience Bickersleigh

Patience is very young, a bit naive, romantic, but also intelligent and thoughtful. Persephone Swales-Dawson springs to mind. She has a brilliant mixture of innocence and hardness. I also Ramona Marquez but, as I think I’ve written elsewhere before, she might be more of a Cathy from The Heights rather than a Patience. And I want someone who looks young, because Patience is so young – that informs and explains nearly all the choices she makes.

Louise Swift

Louise is incredibly vulnerable when we meet her in the story. She’s raw with emotion and everything is on the surface, but later in the story she learns to paint on a more controlled face, even with all the same emotion going on just underneath. Don’t tell anyone, but I think she might be my favourite character. But keep that between us. I’m not sure that having favourites is really the done thing.

By S Pakhrin from DC, USA (BAFTA 2007Uploaded by tm) [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

I was picturing Anne Marie Duff in my head while I was writing Louise, but, although she is brilliant in every imaginable way, she’s probably slightly too old to play Louise now. Hayley Squires would be a great alternative, or maybe even Billie Piper.

By Florida Supercon from Ft. Lauderdale, USA (MCCC_00790) [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Leo Cousins

Leo is where my claim to have mentally cast this whole imaginary movie breaks down. In my head while I was writing Leo was white, dark-haired, with stubble and a slightly worn down attitude about him. But I can’t think of an actor who fits that physical description. And the name that made me go, ‘Oh yes… that would work,’ as I was scrolling through my mental rolodex of British actors in their late forties or early fifties doesn’t fit that look at all, but does have exactly the right ability to play both Leo’s pain and his charm and his fundamental ordinariness. So for Leo my dream casting is Adrian Lester.

So that’s all sorted then. If someone would like to make a film or tv series of All That Was Lost now that would be marvelous. In the meantime, please do buy the book. It’s available from all these lovely places… Amazon, Google Play, Kobo, and Hive, and is available to order from all good – and some deeply suspect – bookshops.