The Forgotten Seamstress (35 page)

By the time we had finished I had, in my mind’s eye, a very clear view of what the quilt would look like. We very much hope that someone, someday, will be inspired by the pattern Lynne has very generously devised (available for free at
www.liztrenow.org
) and create ‘Maria’s quilt’. If you do, please let us know!

Q3: Setting the story in a mental asylum creates quite a contrast to the royal theme. What inspired you to do that?

I love novels with a great sense of place, and having set my first book in the house where I grew up, I was determined to find somewhere just as evocative and atmospheric for this one.

When the Severalls Mental Asylum, on the edge of my home town of Colchester, first opened its doors to patients in 1913, it was considered to be a state of the art institution which would become a centre of expertise in the very latest treatments for mental illness. It was built on a vast scale like the estate of a country mansion, with gardens and sports facilities and a range of other houses for staff, with the ideal that patients could be safely contained and soothed in these beautiful surroundings.

Of course, with hindsight, we now understand that the treatments used were sometimes inhumane, even brutal, and patients often became institutionalised by the strict routines. Occasionally its use was also sometimes abused, and tales of people being locked up for little more than social breaches (such as umarried pregnancy) once used to abound.

In the 1970s, when patients began to be discharged into ‘care in the community’ (now itself discredited) some of the buildings and wards were used by other hospital departments, for example clinical treatments and minor surgery. This is how, as a teenager, I became an in-patient at the hospital, having a benign cyst removed from my arm. It was only two days, but that experience of the place has never left me: the scale of it, both impressive and oppressive, the locked doors and bars, doctors riding bicycles down the miles-long corridors and the people – mental patients – sometimes behaving or reacting quite oddly, as they walked or worked in the gardens.

A collection of old photographs is available on the website
www.severallshospital.co.uk
and, although most of the buildings are now closed (pending redevelopment), it is still possible to walk in the grounds among the pine trees. The atmosphere of the place remains as strong as ever.

Q4: Where did you get the idea of using old recorded cassette tapes of Maria, to tell her story?

Because there is a century between the two characters they could not have met, so there had to be a way for Caroline to learn about Maria’s life story. While researching the history of Severalls Hospital, I came across a wonderful book by the sociologist and author Diana Gittins called
Madness in its Place
(Routledge 1998), in which she quoted from her recordings with staff and patients. These first-hand accounts really brought the place and the people to life, and in one of those light-bulb moments, I realised that this was exactly what I needed to do with Maria.

So I created a character – Professor Patsy Morton – who had undertaken a research project not unlike that of Diana Gittins’, although a couple of decades earlier. This was the perfect way of allowing Caroline – and the reader – to hear Maria’s story first hand. Although we never actually meet her in the book, the tapes help us to feel that we know her.

Q5: Your main character, Maria, is a very ‘unreliable narrator’. Did you find her difficult to write?

Maria was not difficult to write at all – she just flowed onto the page! The tricky bit was managing the reactions of the other characters, especially Caroline, to the fantastical things that they learned about her. Because I knew the outcome of Maria’s story, I had to imagine what it would be like to know nothing about her except for the small clues that we gathered along the way, so that I could establish how much (or how little), Caroline should believe (or not believe) about Maria’s story.

Q6: People always say that the second book, or music album, can be trickier than the first. Did you experience this with
The Forgotten Seamstress
?

And how!

My first novel,
The Last Telegram
, was based on real-life characters, events and places from my family history and childhood, and by the time I’d finished writing it I felt that a lifetime of memories and experience had been ‘used up’. What would I turn to next? My husband wisely counselled me to write ‘something completely different’ and not to try to recreate the atmosphere of the first one, which is what I set out to do.

As I wrote,
The Last Telegram
was published and received almost unqualified five star reviews. Each time someone told me how much they loved it I would start to panic again, wondering whether
The Forgotten Seamstress
would ever match up.

About half way through, I watched a television documentary in which the crime writer Ian Rankin talked about the process of writing
Standing in Another Man’s Grave
(now out in paperback). He talked about how, with each novel, he experiences what he describes as ‘the fear’, a point at which he thinks he’s writing complete rubbish that will never get published, and even if it did, that reviewers would slate and readers hate. He talked about having to work your way through it and hold faith that it will come right in time.

It was so reassuring to hear that even Britain’s number one bestselling crime novelist should suffer such crises of confidence that I came back to my manuscript with renewed determination. After a major restructuring and quite a lot of rewriting I found my rhythm again, and now believe it is just as good as the first (although very different).

I hope you think so too.

1
The aphasia appears to be selective, thus ruling out fears of any long-term damage, and is considered to be a condition imposed by the patient herself.

Many might think it a foolhardy enterprise for a non-quilter to write a novel with a patchwork quilt as one of its main ‘characters’, but I was incredibly fortunate to be introduced to a true expert, teacher and fellow-author Lynne Edwards, MBE, who embraced the project with such enthusiasm I knew at once that our collaboration would produce something remarkable.

With her years of experience and expertise, Lynne knew precisely what fabrics, techniques and other influences Maria would have had during the various stages of her life, and we had great fun creating her ‘virtual quilt’. The pattern is available on my website at
www.liztrenow.com
and we would both be thrilled should anyone be tempted to try it. Any technical inaccuracies about fabrics, quilting and patchwork in the novel are, of course, entirely mine.

As a teenager I was an in-patient on a clinical ward at Severalls Hospital, on the outskirts of my home town of Colchester, and that brief experience of the place has never left me. For my research into its history for this novel I am indebted to those who created the website and collection of historic photographs at
www.severallshospital.co.uk
, and in particular to the writer and sociologist Diana Gittins, author of a remarkable exploration of the hospital’s work entitled
Madness in its Place
(pub. Routledge, 1998).

My thanks, too, to Kate Wigley and others at the Warner Archive in Braintree, which is where I first became entranced by a scrap of extraordinary silk, in cream damask with pure silver threads, which became the central focus of the quilt and the narrative. This was one of the May Silks, hand-woven for the wedding dress of Princess May (later Queen Mary) by Warner and Sons in 1893. Also to May Bercouwer who introduced me to the mysteries of fabric conservation.

My daughters Becky and Polly both read early drafts and gave me useful feedback as well as helping me get into the mind of my contemporary character, a thirty-something professional metropolitan girl.

Finally, I am indebted to the support and guidance of three wonderful women: Caroline Hardman, of Hardman & Swainson Literary Agency, and my two editors at HarperCollins/Avon, Caroline Hogg and her successor Lydia Newhouse, without whom this book would never have happened.

Liz Trenow is a former journalist who spent fifteen years on regional and national newspapers, and on BBC radio and television news, before turning her hand to fiction.
The Forgotten Seamstress
is her second novel. She lives in East Anglia with her artist husband, and they have
two grown-up daughters. Find out more at
www.liztrenow.com
and join her on Twitter
@LizTrenow

The Last Telegram

Monday 11 November 1918

RED LETTER DAY!

Even now I have to pinch myself!

I have sorely neglected this diary since starting at the factory – having felt so exhausted and dispirited each evening, and my entries so dull. But now! There is so much to write about I barely know where to begin.

It started out as another gloomy winter Monday with us all bent over our benches carefully mixing ‘devil’s porridge’ and then, at 11 o’clock this morning, the siren wailed. We jumped out of our skins of course. We always do. Explosion warning? An air raid? Everyone stood stock still, looking at each other over our respirators like yellow-faced frogs. And then we twigged. We’d heard rumours, of course, there had been plenty of reports in the newspapers, but no one really believed them. There’ve been so many false promises. Could it really happen this time?

Then the boss came over the tannoy and told us it was official: fighting had been suspended on the Western Front. Just as he was talking all the church bells of East London started clanging with a deafening din – such a surprising sound that we hadn’t heard for four years – and we were cheering so loud and laughing that we couldn’t hear the rest of what he said. But the word got round soon enough: not that we’d have carried on working, in any case, but they were closing the factory for the day.

We threw off our overalls, grabbed our coats and tumbled out into the street like a pack of puppies, where there was already such a great crush of excited people singing and cheering, running and dancing, hugging and kissing, that we could barely make our way through the streets. Being so short and slight Freda was virtually carried along, and I had to hold her tight so’s we wouldn’t get separated. A group of young lads adopted us: ‘Come on canaries,’ they yelled, ‘we’ll look after you, show you a good time.’

On a normal day we wouldn’t have given them a second glance, but the world had suddenly been painted in bright colours and even those spotty boys looked handsome. The weather was grey and a bit drizzly but it felt like the sun had come out, beaming down on us lot, all lit up with happiness.

We had a notion to get ourselves to the West End and somewhere near Buckingham Palace ‘cos word was that the King and Queen were going to come out and talk to us but there wasn’t a cat’s chance of that. The buses were crammed to the nines with people piled high on the top decks and hanging off the rear doorways, but they weren’t going anywhere due to the crowds. It was almost impossible to push your way through even on foot, so we just let ourselves be carried wherever the crowd took us.

We passed by Smithfield, and a surge of greasy, blood-stained lads had poured out of the meat market, and on to the edges of the City where a great black wave of clerks and business types had flooded the street. They were throwing their bowlers in the air, hanging out of windows and balconies and climbing lampposts, without a thought for their smart city clothes. No one cared a jot.

The pubs were opening by now, and tankards being handed out around the crowd, and bunting being hung from upstairs windows so the city looked like a fairground. At one junction someone had set a gramophone going in an open window, and we started dancing to it. After a while, as we moved slowly forwards, the bands came out – Salvation Army, musicians from the dance halls and proper classical players – just about anyone who had an instrument seemed to gather on every street corner and they played together, all the old favourites:
Pack up Your Troubles
and
It’s a Long Way to Tipperary
. If they stopped, someone would hand them each a pint and we’d shout for more till they tuned up again.

Freda and me both got horribly drunk and kissed a dozen unsuitable types, which as a married woman I really shouldn’t have, but we were so happy we just didn’t care.

Then there was a great roar from the crowd and people shouted ‘God Save The King’ again and again, and the musicians struck up with the national anthem. We were still in Cheapside and nowhere near The Mall, but word had spread through the crowd that King George and Queen Mary had come out onto the balcony of Buckingham Palace and waved to all those lucky beggars who managed to get within sight of them.

After
He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,
the crowd started on other songs and I was joining in cheerfully until they struck up with the hymn
All People That on Earth Do Dwell
, and a sudden surge of sadness engulfed me. I don’t suppose the beer we’d drunk on empty stomachs helped, but my legs went wobbly and I felt I might fall over if I didn’t find somewhere to sit. I pushed my way through the crowd to the side of the road and found an empty doorstep.

Then the tears came, coursing down my face in a deluge, as I remembered all those poor boys. Those thousands and thousands of boys, even millions, who were never coming back, who would never be able to celebrate the victory they lost their lives for. Not just Ray and Johnnie, but my uncles Fred and Ken and the three Garner brothers, Billy and Stan, Tony and Ernest, Joe, William and Tom Parsons. And those were just the boys in our neighbourhood we knew well.