Caroline McGhie is an award-winning journalist who has written for The Sunday Times, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Sunday Telegraph, and was part of the launch team for The Independent on Sunday. She has written columns for The Financial Times, The Standard and Country Living. Caroline’s debut novel, The Sitter, has just launched.
Welcome to A Writer of History, Caroline.
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Was it a biography I read about Isambard Kingdom Brunel that got me hooked on railway mania? Or was it my growing interest in Eugenius Birch who decorated the coast with seaside piers, exhorting the Victorian middle classes to walk on water? Or was it the sheer riotous optimism of the first year of the twentieth century? However it began, I found myself writing a story about steam trains, the seaside bathing boom and, just to add extra spice, a look at the changing art scene.
What really moved me was driving through Melton Constable, a down-at-heel village near my home in North Norfolk. I was struck by how unlike other villages in East Anglia it was. The Norfolk villages I knew consisted of picturesque flint cottages round village greens, front doors turned away from the winds blowing off the North Sea. This place was made of tiny industrial brick terraces that appeared to have strayed in from Swindon or Grantham. Ruins of vast railway buildings lurked down back lanes, entirely derelict. It had been built in the middle of nowhere, solely to serve an enormous railway hub called The Works. This was a forgotten railway village. I was utterly fascinated.
All writers need a stroke of luck and mine was to meet an old lady called Phyllis Youngman who welcomed me into her house on the outer edge of Melton Constable. She was chair-bound and spent her days with a board over her knees to support her notebooks and pens, and a telephone by her left elbow. She was the self-appointed chief keeper of village memories. When the railway closed in 1959 (The Works had already shut in the 1930s) she gathered in all the memorabilia she could lay her hands on. She hoarded photographs, diaries, documents, and kept lovingly preserved old railway carriages and an entire ticket office in her garden. Over tea and biscuits once a week, she shared her collection with me and talked about the past. One evening she invited descendants of the railway families to come and tell me their stories.
Novels should take you out of yourself, carry you into another world. I found that world in Melton Constable so reimagined it, named it Swanton Stoke and set my novel The Sitter there. I invented a superintendent, a manager, upholsterers, trimmers, clerks, coal shovellers, engine drivers, a gang of boys, and got the trains running again. An artist’s model called Rosie arrived in the village and was suitably amazed. “Night after night she was woken by the noise from The Works and the comings and goings of the trains. The village lived by the trains. There was no need for clocks or timepieces. As the darkness of winter deepened, the gas lamps glowed longer and she became accustomed to the sound of men scraping and clanging, the blow of whistles, the hissing of steam, the roar of the engines.”
Best of all, a young adolescent boy called Jack Stamp sauntered into my first draft, catching rats and taking on dares. The son of the baker, his days were bookended by early mornings lighting the bread oven and bible readings or prayers with his father. He was born out of conversations with my friend Marian Skipper, a friend who was born and bred in Norfolk. Her father Jack Gaskin had been the baker’s boy in Melton Constable and a strict Methodist. No alcohol, no ornament, lots of bible reading and dignity for all.
Then I found that I couldn’t ignore the storybook landscape I lived in. The huge skies, the marsh, the dunes, the windmills, the clifftop town of Cromer with its fishing boats and spectacular pier were all waiting to be used as backdrops. Luckily Jack Stamp had cousins living in Cromer and ran wild with them through streets past the crab dressers and bathing huts. When a storm blew and “the devil opened its throat” he watched fishermen (all unable to swim) heave the lifeboat into the foaming sea and haul themselves in, pulling on the ropes that tied them to the boat.
Such a time-forgot region of England and such an intense closed community needed an outsider, a disruptor, to make the story work. So Rosie, the artist’s model, stepped off the train in Swanton Stoke. She was a woman of her time, therefore she had no money, no rights and no status, but she had a talent for drawing and the looks to attract many suitors. She had been bruised by a relationship with married cartoonist Edward Stafford Clark in London. I based his character loosely on Punch cartoonist Linley Sambourne. The Linley Sambourne House Museum at 18 Stafford Terrace in Kensington, crammed with artefacts, gave me lots of ideas for Edward.
He had given her praise and work but been disingenuous about his own passion for photographic erotica. She was unaware of the power of her beauty, while he was unaware of his power to really help her become an artist. The modern reader might decide she was in an abusive relationship. Playing with a shifting moral landscape is part of the fun of writing historical fiction.
Many thanks for sharing the inspiration for this novel, Caroline. And best wishes for success.
The Sitter by Caroline McGhie
Adolescent baker’s boy Jack catches sight of a beautiful woman alighting from a train at dusk. His remote Norfolk village is built around a railway maintenance hub known as The Works which is ruled by ritual, hierarchy and God.
Newcomer Rosie is escaping a secret past involving a well-known London cartoonist who is a proponent of early photographic pornography.
A beguiling tale of love and learning unfolds against the backdrop of the hardships faced by the railwaymen and fishermen of the time.
Poignant and moving, this literary novel weaves the key themes of women’s rights, childhood memories, sexual freedom, religion, art and pornography around it’s compelling cast of characters. Based on extensive research in and around Melton Constable and Cromer, The Sitter exudes the charms of Victorian Norfolk and a nostalgia for the steam railways.
Caroline McGhie is a multi-award-winning journalist who has written for The Sunday Times, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Sunday Telegraph, and was part of the launch team for The Independent on Sunday. She has written columns for The Financial Times, The Standard and Country Living.
The Sitter by Caroline McGhie (Waterland Books, £12.99) is available from all good book retailers.
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M.K. Tod writes historical fiction. Her latest novel THAT WAS THEN is a contemporary thriller. Mary’s other novels, THE ADMIRAL’S WIFE, PARIS IN RUINS, TIME AND REGRET, LIES TOLD IN SILENCE and UNRAVELLED are available from Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Google Play and iTunes. She can be contacted on Facebook or on her website www.mktod.com.
