Despite any number of other things competing for my attention in October, I decided to Inktober again. In case you don’t know, this is a challenge to draw something everyday in October using ink and following a prompt set up by Inktober on Instagram. There was also a suggestion of which might be coloured rather than monochrome if the artist fancied it.
There are some astonishing artists out there but I’m not one of them. I just like sketching as a relaxation tool as I’ve said before. It makes me take a few minutes out of my day and use a part of my brain that doesn’t get dusted off that often which helps reset the other bits of my brain that are on hamster wheels.
I’m not particularly competitive other than against myself, but I like a challenge if I think I can do it without exploding for no reason other than pride. I can beat myself up endlessly about my failures in a lot of areas, but art isn’t one of them.
Last year the prompts were pretty random. This year there was a theme – travel – with a couple of curve balls (‘rust’ and ‘violin’ being the ones most off topic) and several that were so similar as to be almost indistinguishable: ‘trek’, ‘hike’, roam’, ‘expedition’.
As the world currently seems to be often a scary and sad place, I decided that I wouldn’t try to have any hidden meanings in any of my sketches this year. I decided to attempt light humour. This also wasn’t always easy when following the prompt – a challenge in itself.
I’m pleased with some and less pleased with others. Some I will possibly draw again. Some days it was hard to find the time, energy or inspiration but overall it was fun. Two of the sketches are based on life: the pony trekking (6th) and camping in a gale with my father insisting on cooking breakfast (22nd). In other sketches, the little girls are also sort of me and my sister and the teddy is sort of her bear Freda (2nd, 7th, 24th). The dragons wouldn’t like to be left out of course and somehow a unicorn muscled its way in, ridden by a friend. It proves I can’t draw horses even when they’re magical but there you go.
Not being confident enough to simply start inking directly onto paper, I made a sketch first and then inked in the detail using fineliners and on a couple of occasions white board markers because I needed more ink. I didn’t use ink ink with a pen as I need to practise that and I didn’t think to use ink ink with a brush. But I might start to do some practising because it appeals – I was longing for my watercolours throughout.
Looking back, I realised I could have created a story using the prompts as the plot. It didn’t occur to me when I was looking at them and it would probably have added a layer of stress I didn’t want or need this year.
Next year though… maybe I will.
Let’s see what the 2025 prompts bring.
But without further ado, here are my thirty-one inktober efforts for 2024. Which (if any) is your favourite?
Words and picture Copyright (c) 2024 Paula Harmon. Not to be used without the author’s express permission.
My first introduction to the horror which was Public Information Films was when I was aged between five and six.
One day, the police brought an Alsatian police dog to school. I was (and still am to some extent) scared of dogs, but this one was beautiful. The policemen seemed huge. They told us to be good and not to be afraid of the police. Then they said they’d show us what happened to criminals.
We went to the school fields and someone dressed in a stripy top and balaclava appeared from nowhere, snatched a bag and ran off. The policemen blew their whistles and shouted ‘Stop thief!’ to no avail. The beautiful Alsatian tensed and was released. It sped towards the ‘criminal’ who dodged and dived but was eventually brought down to the ground, his (well-padded) arm clasped in the jaws of the tail-wagging dog.
It was pretty impressive, though we weren’t sure whether we were being told that the police would protect us, or that crime would be a bad career choice.
Afterwards in the classroom we were shown a film about strangers. It featured a little girl accepting a lift with a strange man in a brown car and ending up locked in the cupboard under the stairs with his shadow getting closer. It was absolutely terrifying.
I hope that no child in that classroom had any idea what threat that little girl faced other than death, but we all sensed it was very bad. Then, as if we weren’t traumatised enough, the teacher said that when she’d been six, a friend and the friend’s brother disappeared and were eventually found buried in a sandpit.
I can honestly say that I’ve never felt the same about sandpits nor brown cars since.
If the point of this exercise was to make us wary of strangers, it certainly worked for me. A year or so later I got lost and walked for miles before eventually deciding I had to ask for help. As a perfectly nice man drove me home to hand over to my frantic mother, I was engulfed not only in fear but also in guilt. I had disobeyed the ‘not talking to strangers’ rule.
But as for other Public Information Films? Mmm.
Children’s television was awash with warnings about what lurked in the world to kill or maim us.
Perhaps this was because we were one of the last generations of children in the UK to roam fairly freely – often chucked out on a summer morning to play and not expected home till tea-time (with maybe a brief lunch in the middle). Well before the age of twelve, we went without parents to Saturday morning cinema, sweet and comic shopping, or to play in whatever our environment offered us.
Tufty the Squirrel warned us about road safety. Charley the Cat warned us about other dangers. I was fond of Tufty, even if he had some very stupid friends. Charley sort of annoyed me, possibly because I was older by then and less inclined to want to be bossed about by a cartoon animal.
The animated ones were quite mild really except perhaps for one about playing in old fridges. I never saw a fridge that wasn’t in a kitchen doing its normal job, but after seeing that short film I was vaguely terrified that if I came across one which had been dumped I might suddenly be overwhelmed with temptation, climb inside and get suffocated.
Live action public information films were much scarier. In the same vein as the one about the little girl and the stranger with the brown car, The Spirit of the Water told you what awaited any unwary child who fell into a river or lake. Then there were the risks of playing frisbee near electricity pylons or mucking about on a railway which really were just plain common sense.
I’m not entirely sure any of those films would be made for children under twelve nowadays. They’re three minutes of horror.
Did they really make a difference to us? I’m not sure they did.
Despite playing in woodland, ‘caves’, a river and for a while an unsecured building site, and despite taking all sorts of very stupid risks (though not with the railway) my generation of children in my particular village survived. I’m sure that playing unsupervised helped us learn to assess risk in a way that can’t be learned any other way. Just because none of the children in my village were badly hurt (though one got close) doesn’t mean that others weren’t. Of course they were and we all knew it.
But deep down, that film I watched about the little girl has never gone away, and I think it has always been the fear of abduction which weighed heaviest with me as with many people.
For the record, that’s not because I think it’s more likely now than it was in the past. Any quick piece of research will reveal child abductions going back centuries.
So why does it remain a fear when the risk is much lower than injury from playing by a road or river?
Is that because injury from play or normal activities is a natural and acceptable risk, but abduction as an offence against nature: an abnormal, unpredictable evil event that should never happen?
I think it is.
Did I allow my children to play unsupervised like I did? Not really. Roads are busier and the local river runs faster. And I also know that some of the greatest risks they faced and still face are online. My daughter and a friend played in the brook of a nearby hamlet a few times but otherwise my children’s outside play without parents was via Cub and Scout Camps.
Do I regret that for them? I’m really torn between yes and no. What do you think?
This blog is dedicated to my great friend Val Portelli who, for reasons beyond her control, has sadly had to relinquish her faithful car. In sympathy, I’m looking back to some of the more memorable vehicles in my life and hoping to raise a smile on her face.
(Just for the record before I continue, in case you’re a phisher of any kind, the following is of no use whatsoever for getting at any of my passwords.)
The first vehicle in my life was a small fiat. My parents drove to Scotland in it when I was a baby to introduce me to my Scottish great-aunts (numerous and mostly scary). In those days before child restraints I travelled in my carry-cot on the back seat. My father always said that I’d eaten the carry-cot by the time we arrived. My mother, slightly more prosaically says that I chewed the straps a bit. I have no recollection of the car, her name, that particular journey or munching on plastic, so I can’t tell you what’s true. I like Dad’s version, but suspect Mum’s is true.
The first vehicle I recall was a motorcaravan. I called her ‘Daddy Car’. I have many happy memories of New Forest holidays in her. In my head, the sun always shone, but then I was a small child. It’s the opposite of being a teenager when memories of time spent with parents tend to be under a permanent cloud of gloom. My mother has since said that those glorious balmy holidays were spent in October, and photos show us playing ball wrapped up in winter coats, but to me they’ll always be golden.
After that, there was a Skoda. Whether she had a name or not, I can’t recall. In fact the only reason I remember her at all was that I was just about old enough to understand the news on the radio. Or at least, I understood that there was violent trouble in all sorts of places around the world. (My father did not comprehend the concept of shielding small children from that sort of thing.) One of the places in turmoil was Czechoslovakia and I was a little concerned that it was around the corner. Dad reassured me, saying it was a long way away but was where the car was from. I sort of imagined she’d escaped the trouble to live safely with us and was very glad for her.
Following the Skoda was a series of Rovers, my father going through a flush period at the time. This coincided with me being vaguely Viking obsessed and I loved the logo of the longship on the steering wheel. The Rovers (whose names I can’t recall either) pulled caravans to take us on holidays. This was a brief period of luxury, although it coincided with a period of wearing short skirts and short shorts. There’s nothing quite like a long car journey from Berkshire to Cornwall with your legs sticking to leather seats. And at the time, the road network wasn’t quite what it is now, the journey being via narrow country roads, singing songs and trying to make a monarch from pub signs: King’s Head, King’s Arms, King’s Seat. There were never any legs and not enough queens, but it kept us occupied.
Cars were mostly driven by dads where I lived. Only a few mums could drive at all, and those who could rarely had a car of their own. But during this brief period of flushness, Dad bought one for Mum. It was small, black, very old, seatbelt-less, musty and somewhat reminiscent of an Edwardian maiden aunt. An Austin perhaps?
Her indicators were little orange bakelite ‘ears’ that popped out of the side of the car if Mum wanted to tell anyone she was turning. The only time I recall her driving it was when she collected me from junior school after a fainting episode. Perhaps she was too embarrassed.
When the flush period came to an abrupt end, the next car was a Triumph. She was named Weena by my sister after a character in the film ‘The Time Machine’ (equally too scary for little girls, but that was Dad for you).
Weena had no concept of running for more than a few miles without breaking down. Her exhaust pipe would drop off at regular intervals (three times crossing the English/Scots border), her head gasket would blow, the back windows would partially drop whenever it was raining and/or cold and periodically her windscreen wipers would stop working. This was problematic as we did a lot of travelling but we always felt Weena wasn’t doing it on purpose, she was just absent-minded.
One particularly horrible journey going home from Reading to South Wales in an unexpected snowstorm Dad followed the barrier on the central reservation as the only thing he could see and Mum periodically wound down her window, leaning out and prodding the wipers into action. My sister and I huddled in the back, freezing from the draught coming from our windows and now and again, hers.
After Weena, Dad bought his one and only brand-new car. She and every subsequent vehicle was efficient and economical and hardly ever broke down. Somehow they were never named. And with one exception, I never named my own afterwards either.
In the intervening years I thought that maybe naming cars was an out-of-date thing, until I met a friend who still does it, and then my daughter had her first car and named it immediately. And all of those cars are/were perfectly efficient and economical.
So perhaps it boils down to personality. And maybe that’s a lesson in life: don’t worry about being perfect, concentrate on making memories and being your own unique self.
I don’t know what happened some of the old girls Dad or Mum drove when they were sold, but I like to think that Val’s car is now trundling towards a sunset she never needs to reach on a beautiful highway along with Mum’s ancient Austin, Weena the ditzy Triumph and Daddy Car the motor caravan, being unique, making adventures, having fun, being herself.
This month I’m taking part in Inktober again, and the prompts all relate to travelling. My brain is going off piste as usual, but even so, it’s brought back many forgotten memories, only one of which, so far, has got into a sketch.
Before they had children, my parents were keen hikers. They marched out of London carting whopping metal-framed rucksacks and wearing heavy boots into the wilds of North Wales, Scotland, Cumbria and Northern Ireland, camping in the middle of nowhere.
They told us tales of a friend’s beard frozen to the zip on their sleeping bag; Dad standing on a broken bottle as he bathed in a chilly river and having to limp several miles to get it stitched up; the joy of finding a town with public bathing facilities (as in bath-tubs and the facility being public not the bath-tubs) where they could finally wash luxuriously in hot water.
Once my sister and I were old enough to walk for any distance, we were bought walking boots and went hiking too. (Note the faded polaroid of me, Mum and sister looking glamorous in Scotland below.)
One summer, when there was very little money in the holiday fund, we spent a week hiking about the Gower coast ‘Jasper Hunting’. That is, looking for seams of jasper in the rocks. We found a lot of fossils, which was fascinating in itself and the fact that we never found any jasper didn’t matter at all.
As a child, Dad loved horse-riding. I’m not sure whose horse he rode, because he definitely didn’t have one of his own. As an adult, he was keen that my sister and I learned to ride. I was keen too, having the typical little girl fascination with horses (albeit that I wanted mine to be winged unicorns) but I only ever had a few lessons during which my lack of natural authority became apparent. I was very good at getting on and off in the approved manner. What happened in the interim was entirely up to the horse who knew exactly who was in control. It wasn’t me.
We went on a couple of pony treks as a family and once the pony I was riding lost interest in plodding after its companions quite quickly and let them disappear into the mountains while it munched grass and contemplated what it had done to deserve such a dull life.
No amount of rein-pulling, prodding and encouragement made the pony move until… a bunch of kids from the local pony club galloped past. My pony raised its head, clearly thought ‘That looks like fun!’ and galloped after them.
During the terrifying minutes before the pony realised it couldn’t keep up and decided to wheel about and join its trundling stablemates, I lost hold of the reins and lay forward gripping its mane for dear life with my hands and its flank with my knees. I have no idea how I didn’t fall off. My unrequited love for horses abated after that.
A few years later, Dad and Mum joined a group setting up a visitor centre on a Welsh mountain. We’d spend our Saturdays there, helping with displays but mostly going for long walks high above the South Welsh valleys. No one who met me later really believed this, as Dad remained plump despite all the exercise and latterly spent most of his spare time sitting down writing. But back then, that’s what he did and consequently what we did.
I was twelve by then and wouldn’t have dreamed of telling anyone at school that I spent my Saturdays in hiking boots and kagoule, clambering up mountainsides while they were going to town with friends to buy records and make-up.
When you’re that age of course, all parents are embarrassing but mine seemed worse than most. A sister who was nearly three and a half years younger wasn’t much better. So I did my best to pretend I wasn’t with them.
We’d walk up hummocky, heathery, gorsey slopes under cloudy skies and I’d fall behind, forming descriptions in my head of a lone girl pacing herself as she seeks shelter in an inhospitable landscape, uncertain how long it’ll take to find it, or indeed if she ever will, longing for the lush, fertile country she comes from, escaping across wild, desolate, bare slopes without any certainty as to whether she’ll survive.
Then of course, I’d be dragged back into reality by someone yelling at me to stop lagging behind, or shout that it was time for a picnic of cheese sandwiches and thermos flask tea.
I’d pause before catching up and look about, as the real world replaced my imagined one.
Greenish, greyish, purplish slopes climbed above me. Below was the pine forest we’d descend through later, crushing scented needles underfoot until we reached the visitor centre. Below that were rows of grey roofed terraced houses in a mining town. Further below was the motorway, the oil refinery… then dunes and the sea.
I recall those walks as always taken under overcast skies, rain imminent, but there must have been sunny days too. Perhaps the remembered weather is a reflection of that adolescent mood.
Now I live in chalk and cheese country: chalky ridges surrounding lush meadows. To my shame, I’m more likely to be indoors writing rather than outdoors hiking. My walking boots are who knows where, doubtless inhabited by spiders.
But that lonely figure whose journey I used to imagine in those Welsh hills is still trekking. She became a character in a novel that I started but never finished and is under the spare bed waiting for me to chivvy her up.
Perhaps it’s time to climb those slopes again and help her reach the end of her journey.
(Though I’m determined she’ll have something more appealing than cheese sandwiches and thermos flask tea awaiting when she arrives. I certainly will.)
Words and pictures (c) Paula Harmon 2024. Not to be used or reproduced without the author’s express permission.
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I was a little girl who felt as if she’d been born into the wrong era. This particularly applied to clothes. I longed for elegant colours, long, flouncy skirts, bodices, frilled petticoats and lacy gloves. I just knew that wearing them, I could swish down a sweeping staircase. (Important note – I wanted to live in a former age whilst also being rich.)
Alas, when I was a little girl fashion meant flares, bold day-glo polyester, tie-dye, A-line mini-dresses, jeans with patches on them, shiny boots, floppy hats if hats at all. Even if we’d had a sweeping staircase rather than the usual sort, one can’t swish down a staircase in any of that.
My first memories of dressing up was for school or Sunday school plays. Apart from a lovely Olde Englishe costume my mother made for me to wear in my role as an Olde Englishe Villager (I have no idea what the play was), most of what I had to wear ranged from unromantic to ridiculous, especially the rabbit costume. My sister meanwhile got to be a fairy or angel.
At home, we dressed up in Mum’s clothes from the late fifties– a full scratchy starched petticoat, silk covered dancing stilletos, a dirndl, a beautiful silk Chinese cheongsam which had originally been below Mum’s knees but then later tragically hacked off in the sixties to mini skirt level. We also annexed her wedding dress, the tiara that went with it, a hand-sewn Victorian cotton petticoat and a Victorian Paisley shawl. I’m not sure what we were trying to be, but we liked to think it was regal.
When I was about nine or ten, a much richer and slightly older cousin sent me some old party dresses. They were just up my street, made of pastel taffeta with sashes and flouncy skirts, but they definitely belonged to a different social set to the one which was inviting me to birthday parties and expecting me to wear something a good deal more fashionable and a lot less soppy.
Undismayed and ignoring my sister’s embarrassment I wore the dresses to church where I tried to look Victorian despite the modern hymns and bright surroundings. Then I asked my arty grandmother to paint me wearing one and make me look Victorian. She normally painted landscapes and hated painting people, so wasn’t too happy about it, and also unexpectedly commented ‘Goodness, I never knew your eyes were brown. I always thought they were green.’
Both of us hated the end result. She’d captured something of my day-dreaming self but hadn’t managed to make me look remotely Victorian. I looked like a 1970s girl playing dress-up with greeny-muddy eyes that were slightly cross (yes, she’d managed to capture my emerging resting b*tch face.) The portrait was surreptitiously put into the attic after a month and eventually disposed of by my mother. I hope it was painted over and isn’t haunting anyone (or isn’t haunting anyone despite being painted over).
My dad also liked dressing up. His go to costume was that of a tramp (hobo). I have no idea why. He was normally very smart and rarely without a tie, jacket or hat. (He never received the memo about the sixties and seventies.) Maybe it was the contrast.
When he discovered Science Fiction conventions, he embraced early Cosplay with joy. At the only one I was dragged to, I had to endure watching him and Mum parade dressed as the two main characters from a short-lived TV series called Kinvig in which Dad was the eponymous hero – owner of a run-down electrical repair shop and Mum as a beautiful alien. I had thankfully left home by the time he dressed up as Ming the Merciless and painted his whole (mostly but not entirely) bald head green.
At uni, slim and young but still deluded, I’d go to fancy dress things as Cleopatra (plenty of excuse for all that eyeliner and cheap costume made from a sheet) or a black cat (more eyeliner and a slinky black dress). It was a few years after that when the photo of me as Miss Muffet below was taken. It was nearly the last time I went to a fancy dress party, my outfit constructed from a bridesmaid dress and my then boyfriend’s spider legs from stuffed tights.
Shortly afterwards (but not as a result), the spider and I broke up. A year or so after that, I met my husband who doesn’t do dressing up at all, except for the time when we went to a murder mystery dinner.
Husband had to be a smart playboy, so he just had to wear his wedding suit and best tie and drink wine in a rich man manner. So he was happy. I so wanted to be the glamorous elegant rich character or at least the slinky femme fatale character, but no, luck of the draw meant I was the girl from the wrong side of the tracks wearing most of the contents of my make-up bag plastered on my face and a garish blouse probably visible from space.
And that was that. Would I ever get to play dress up again?
Well… I now give talks at fairly regular intervals. They’re about the inspiration behind my books in the main – the real women, real events, weird and wonderful facts that I uncover when I’m researching. One of them ‘Dressed for Detection’ is about how Victorian and Edwardian women did while wearing what they wore.
The first time I gave this talk (I will be giving it again on Saturday 5th October 2024), it was at a fashion museum where I was surrounded by authentic clothes from the era I was talking about. I had a bit of a think and …
Was this a chance to dress up in elegant Edwardian clothes? Was it also a chance to rekindle my neglected sewing skills which used to give me so much pleasure (and buy some gadgets inspired by the Great British Sewing Bee)?
What do you think?
Words and images copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2024. Not to be used without the author’s express permission.
Some sixteen years after I left the family home to create my own, my parents moved to a bungalow in another village. I never lived there, but when I visited, I’d say something like ‘I’m going home to Mum and Dad’ because somehow they themselves were synonymous with the concept of home. I mentioned this to a friend recently and she thought I was mad. But then she probably does anyway.
My husband’s parents still live in the house where he grew up. If we’re visiting them, we might refer to it as his ‘home home’ as opposed to ‘home’ which is where we live.
I have a complicated psychological relationship with the house I grew up in. I loathed it the whole time I lived there (eight to eighteen) because it represented being uprooted from a place I yearned for so much it eventually became a fiction of itself.
Nevertheless, that house was ‘home home’ until my parents moved out. Now it’s just somewhere I once lived.
There’s a concept of what ‘home’ should be, just as there is an idea of ‘family’ or ‘parent’ or ‘Christmas’ should be. For many people those concepts are hollow shells. They ought to be a happy things, yet aren’t. I’m lucky in that for me, they always mostly been happy and still are.
As an author, I think of my characters’ homes a good deal, because I feel it frames them. Some of the following I’ve explored in my books, some I plan to. What have I missed?
Can a character feel at home if they hate the house but love the person/people in it?
Can a character feel at home if they hate the person/people in it but love the house?
Can a character feel at home anywhere if they’re rootless and/or running from the past?
Can a character make a home in a new place if some of the people around them don’t want them there?
In Mr Rosenblum’s List by Natasha Solomons (alternative title: Mr Rosenblum Dreams in English), Jack and Sadie Rosenblum are refugees who flee Germany in 1937 for London where they are given a book of instructions on how to assimilate. Jack is determined to follow it so that he can blend in, leave the past behind and become an English gentleman in a new home. Sadie doesn’t want to forget her lost home, her lost family, or submerge who she is. When Jack moves them to post-war Dorset to build a golf course, she is even less happy, especially as the locals have mixed views on German Jews living in their village. Among other things, the book explores a concept of home. Will it forever be somewhere Sadie has lost and can’t replace? Can it be the place Jack has moved them to even if they have to fight to be accepted? Or can they create something else? Set not far from where I live, and inspired by the author’s grandparents, it’s an interesting (and often funny) read.
I have friends with hundreds of years of ancestors buried in their local graveyards. I sometimes feel sad that those friends have roots that I don’t.
I’m a mixture of Scottish, English and Irish with a few odds and ends chucked in. All of my ancestors over the last two hundred years had itchy feet. It would take years to work out where I ‘come’ from and visit everyone’s graves. While I might feel a little rootless, the greater feeling is a sense of freedom.
I’m not tied. I’m not obligated to tradition. I don’t have to follow my ancestors in their beliefs or lifestyle. I’ve been free to change and adapt and grow without feeling I’m betraying anything or anyone.
I wonder if my itchy feet ancestors felt the same?
One great-great-grandfather chose to leave not only a country but a community behind for a new life in England. I know he was valued by his new community and loved by his new family. Did he yearn for the previous place: its scenery, its language, its familiarity? Or was he happy creating a new home in London?
My Scottish grandmother moved shortly after marriage from Glasgow to Herefordshire and then Greater London. Surprisingly, for someone born and brought up in a city, she preferred Herefordshire and never quite reconciled herself to London. She spent two periods of time during WWII in rural Scotland, along with (among others) my mother then returned to London. Eventually she moved to Wiltshire. Where was home for her? I don’t know. How she felt about Herefordshire is the only personal information she ever shared with me.
Home is certainly not a geographical location to me. Largely it’s close family and close friends. But it’s also something else because ‘home’ needn’t mean people.
When I lived alone, my flat was no less ‘home’ because I was on my own there most of the time and was, to some extent, very lonely. I loved going ‘home’ to that flat. I loved living to my own rhythm with my few belongings and my sunny kitchen.
Home is being myself. I don’t have to put on a front, or attempt to be extroverted. Lucky enough to have family and friends who accept me as I am, I can express or discuss my thoughts or frustrations or doubts or faith without fear of judgment even if the other person doesn’t understand or agree.
If I’m alone, I can enjoy my own company, pottering about in silence without music or radio, listening to garden or weather noises, letting my thoughts wander, being creative.
For me ultimately ‘home’ is feeling safe.
In a world which seems to be currently insane, perhaps it’s worth remembering that for the vast, vast majority of people a safe home is fundamentally all they want. Surely that’s something everyone has a right to.
Trigger warnings in books, films and TV are contentious.
I’m often irritated when I’m watching TV after 9.30pm and a sombre announcement warns me about what might offend or upset me in the programme I’m about to watch. I’ve usually enough knowledge of what I’m about to see to anticipate it, and if I didn’t want to watch, I wouldn’t. (And often don’t even if the drama is going to be excellent.) Other times, if I wasn’t aware there might be a particular scene, I’m glad of the warning beforehand so I can make a choice about whether I watch.
I admit I don’t think I’ve ever seen a trigger warning a book. However, I have a question for you.
But here’s a quick trigger warning about this blog post if you want one before you read down and find out what I’m asking: it refers to human trafficking, slavery and obliquely to prostitution.
The image below may look fun, but it very much isn’t. It’s from a larger image that was printed in the Illustrated Police News on Saturday 17 June 1899 with the description: ‘Alleged Immoral Traffic in Chinese Girls – they are packed in crates and treated as freight on the railways’. The article (on page 3) says ‘An investigation has been ordered into the recent revelations regarding the sale and shipment of Chinese girls, a practice which, it is alleged, has been customary for months. The climax was reached a week ago, when two girls, aged fifteen and sixteen years respectively, were bought at Vancouver. It is asserted they were placed in a crate and shipped as freight over the railway, the train hands giving them food and water. The car containing them was placed on a side track one night, and the girls, being each clad only in a wrapper, caught cold. The man who purchased one of them demanded damages from the railway company for the injury thus done to his property. The girls, it is alleged, were sold for immoral purposes.’
This small picture is in the corner of a larger one depicting what looks like a rough (presumably Canadian) bar with two (possibly supposed to be Chinese) girls in low cut mid-calf dresses, sitting on the laps of two bearded men, watched by a crowd of other men.
If you saw the larger image without context, you might be reminded of an archetypal scene from a Western where everyone – including the girls – is having great fun in a saloon, in contrast perhaps to the stuffy citizens of a frontier town.
However, when you include the other image and what it’s describing (and a cockroach of a man who’d purchased two girls and had the face to publicly sue the railway company for their damage because he might not be able to profit from what damage he did to them afterwards) you might wonder how many if any of the girls in that bar/saloon (or any equivalent) chose to be there and were happy with what they had to do. Some did/do choose that job not simply out of desperation, but because they want to and they keep their own earnings. But many, many didn’t and still don’t.
There’s a prevailing view that refined Victorian and Edwardian women would faint if any reference to sex came into their hearing. Maybe it was true for some, but evidence suggests that there were plenty for whom it wasn’t.
In the UK at least, women fighting for suffrage in the 1800s did not simply want the vote. They also wanted better treatment for women and girls – not just in terms of educational opportunities but also their personal, moral and mental safety. And they weren’t afraid to tackle the subject head on.
Josephine Butler for example, had long campaigned for the raising of the age of consent to be raised from thirteen to sixteen. Why this was such a battle is mind boggling, but eventually, working with journalist W.T. Stead and Bramwell Booth of the Salvation Army, she was involved in the infamous Eliza Armstrong case. They proved to a horrified Victorian general public how easy it was to buy a child for immoral purposes, conspiring to purchase a thirteen-year-old girl for £5 (six months salary for a maid) from her mother who provided proof of her purity plus some chloroform to drug her, knowing that she would be destined for a brothel on mainland Europe. Instead, Eliza was rescued and subsequently had a safe and good life. W.T. Stead was, believe it or not, subsequently prosecuted for abducting a child from her parents, despite what they’d been happy to do to their own daughter. But ultimately, the case raised awareness of what was happening, and the age of consent in England and Wales being raised to sixteen in 1885.
By the 1910s when ‘The Suffragette’ was also campaigning about what they called ‘the traffic in humans’, the international White Slave Traffic Act (also called the Mann Act) had some into force, as had the International Agreement for the suppression of the White Slave Traffic (also known as the White Slave convention). Legislation was also introduced in the UK to allow for any procurer to be publically flogged if convicted, though whether any were I’m not sure. There were certainly plenty of procurers, some more sophisticated than others, from strangers posting apparently innocent advertisements for legitimate jobs, through mothers of young girls making money out of their innocence, to coercive husbands/boyfriends who just had one little job for them to do ‘if you really love me’.
‘The Suffragette’ and other papers however, were willing to point out that although the term ‘White Slave’ had been coined in the mid 1800s to refer to trafficked people of European descent where the perpetrators weren’t of European descent, by the early 20th Century there was a recognition that the race of the victim was irrelevant to perpetrators who were more likely than not to be white, and simply wanted to make money.
It was also recognised that victims weren’t only forced into ‘immorality’ but into illegally run factories, mines, farms etc etc; often abducted and/or imprisoned, sometimes a long way from home. The good old days huh?
So what about my question? The fifth Margaret Demeray book ‘A Justified Death‘ is coming out in the Autumn.
It’s November 1913 and while Margaret’s personal life involves being under pressure to work more days at the hospital and wrangling her unpredictable elderly father, the political world around her is still edging towards war. Britain and Germany are having a ‘my torpedo/canal/warship/zeppelin is bigger than yours’ contest under the guise of friendly demos. The ‘Irish Question’ is bigger news for once than suffragette militancy, with the leader of the Conservative Party, Andrew Bonar Law, hinting at major trouble from Unionists if the Home Rule Bill goes through.
But as I said in How What When – it’s not just politics which affect my characters. In ‘A Justified Death’, a young girl runs out into a foggy street and is knocked down more or less in front of Margaret. Before long, Margaret suspects that the girl was not only running from traffickers but is afraid her friend will get caught up in the same ruse. As Margaret and Fox try to find the girl’s friend and close down the operation, they start to wonder if everything is as depressingly simple as it looks or is something else going on too.
So here’s my question, assuming you’ve got this far. If you were considering buying this book, would you want a trigger warning?
Within the book there is reference to trafficking, but there is NO description of what physically happens to anyone trafficked, it is only hinted at and suggested. I don’t want the book to be gratuitous, or (heaven forbid in context) titillate, but I’m quite happy if it makes the reader angry on behalf of the characters.
The book is not just about trafficking of course, as I say, Margaret’s got a whole lot of other things going on as usual, and it’s not all dark and dreary either. The twins are getting more mischievous, her nephew may be suffering from first love, and Margaret’s father has found another bookshop to get lost in.
But I’m conscious that from a book description which refers to procures and trafficking, potential readers may be worried they’ll get more than they bargained for.
Some authors deal with this by including a statement to say: ‘Trigger Warning; please be aware that this book includes…’ Others have a link to a place on their website which readers can access if they’re at all concerned. Others put nothing and assume that the potential reader should guess what the book is likely to include by the description.
If you’re in favour of trigger warnings, what sort of things do you want warnings about? And how do you think I should approach it in this instance?
If you’re against, why?
I’d love to know.
(NB: Sadly human trafficking is still alive and well and often invisible – cheap clothes, cheap food, cheap goods, cheap services – they’re often cheap for one reason only. Please find some websites about modern slavery/human trafficking – how to recognise it, how to help, how to find help below.)
Words copyright 2024 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission.Image courtesy of the British Newspaper Archive and taken from page six ofIllustrated Police News – Saturday 17 June 1899.
2. How do Liz and I co-write without killing each other?
3. Re historical mysteries, does research come before plot or vice versa?
4. When do I find time to write?
The simple answers are:
1. The first draft of a 50,000 word book written with Liz is usually completed within a month. The first draft of a 90,000 book I write alone takes at least three months.
2. We co-write without killing each other partly because we live too far apart to pop round and have a scrap.
3. Historical accuracy is essential but ultimately it’s the character’s personal battles (and perhaps interaction with real events) which drives the plot.
4. Theoretically between 9am and 2pm on days when I’m not doing the day job.
In more detail:
Liz and I are developing an online session on co-writing for the near future, so please keep an eye on the Hints, Tips and Masterclasses tab on this website to see when this will be available. But what I can share here is that one of the reasons why it’s quicker for me and Liz to write quickly is that we plot the books in minute detail in advance – a process more natural to Liz than I – and diarise a specific window of time to write in.
My own books are typically longer and I don’t plot in as much detail. I am not a pantster (someone who just starts with an idea and no idea of where they’re going till they get there). I know the character’s challenges, the main plot points, the middle and the end. I usually plot tightly up to the mid-point after which it’s a lot more vague. I aim to write at least one chapter a day, five days a week if I can. This theoretically takes seven weeks, but sometimes longer. While detailed plotting for co-writing makes my teeth itch, not being 100% sure what’s happening between chapter twenty and thirty-seven of my own books keeps me awake at night – I’m not joking. I almost always end up with a first draft that’s 40,000 words longer than it should be, so I have to revise the whole shebang, often moving or ditching whole segments. Sometimes those ditched segments (often ones I most enjoyed writing) get reused. Occasionally they are gone for good. Eventually it’s ready for the editor after which I will have more revisions. End to end, the whole thing (with various breaks) can take the best part of nine months.
Do I think one technique is better than another? No. What works well for me and Liz together, doesn’t work for me alone. I’ve tried it but still go off at a tangent. Maybe one day. I actually enjoy the revision more than the first draft. It’s where I start to ‘find’ the story.
As regards historical research: the historical context may be a backdrop or a major factor depending on the book. So for example, The Case of the Black Tulips is set in a world in which Katherine has a job meaning she travels alone, and Connie is sent out without an escort, meaning they meet each other and start investigating against a general backdrop of late Victorian fog, hansom cabs, music halls etc etc. The Treacherous Dead and Dying to be Heard on the other hand, are set against real events that occurred in 1912 and 1913 (and also 1900). It’s Margaret’s reaction to them which drives the plot.
Caster & Fleet are in 1890s London when opportunities for young women were expanding and when improvements in communications, transport and education were changing the world rapidly. We made use of that, but we didn’t tie anything to any specific historical event therefore what they’re dealing with is more important than who’s Prime Minister etc.
Likewise the Murder Britannica series is set in the late second century Britannia. There are a lot of political shenanigans going on and the emperor is, frankly, insane, but Rome is a long way off. Lucretia and Tryssa feel broadly safe straddling Roman and Celtic life, going with the flow to keep on the right side of the invaders but otherwise more interested in what’s happening right in front of them as it’s more ‘real’ to them than a distant emperor who thinks he’s Hercules.
The Margaret books are slightly different, because the backdrop is an essential part of the plot. Six books will cover the period June 1910 to August 1914. Threading through are: the build up to World War One; anarchist and revolutionaries; people arrested for spying in Britain and Germany; the fight for Irish independence; conflict in the Balkans; industrial unrest; the drive of the labour movement calling for safer working practices; increasingly militant suffragette activity.
I research real newspapers of the day to see what Margaret might be faced with every morning in terms of current affairs. The likelihood is that she’d read about suffragette activity and ‘the Irish question’ on the front page, but have to turn into the depths of the paper for anything on spying and war-mongering manoeuvres in mainland Europe. Was this deliberate on the part of the media – keeping people worried about the things the status quo wanted them to worry about and oblivious to other things that might ultimately be more problematic? Mmm.
But like most of us, Margaret is no different to Katherine aand Connie or Lucretia and Tryssa, and current affairs are not at the top of her things to worry about. More often than not, she’s concerned about being a good wife/mother/sister/daughter/friend/pathologist (not necessarily in that order), wondering about bills and deciding what’s for dinner.
Which reminds me: should I wake my husband up from his Sunday afternoon sleep since it’s his turn to cook, or turn the oven on myself? Is the washing dry? Who’s visiting this week and what shall we eat?
Which leads me to the real answer to question four: how do I have time to write? Sometimes I have no idea!
In the last few months, life has been busy, hence getting out of the habit of blogging.
I’ve been working on A Justified Death (Margaret Demeray 5), and with Liz on Death in a Dinner Jacket (Booker and Fitch book 6). Both are now available for pre-order. That’s on top of a day job which is pretty trying (apply your knowledge of British understatement here); adult child wrangling; elderly parent/in-law wrangling; sad news from friends; talks; current global affairs.
Perhaps because I’m smouldering a bit at the edges, my eyes were recently drawn to a list of suggestions to counteract burnout. One took me right back to being six years old and Trixie and Trina:
Perhaps a year or so before I was six, my father read me an unabridged version of Alice Through The Looking-Glass and I loved it. To a girl who hated trousers and climbed trees in skirts; who got into trouble for backchat; who talked to animals, Alice was a kindred spirit, a role model and an inspiration.
Do we need trousers to have adventures? No! We can do it in frilly dresses.
Here’s a talking rabbit asking us to follow him. Let’s go!
Here’s a looking-glass we can step through. Let’s do it!
If I could have followed Alice through that mirror, I would have.
Perhaps that’s why I met/invented Trixie and Trina.
I’d recently moved school and my friend-making skills were terrible, so to begin with I was lonely and the target of older boys who’d threaten me, chase me and call me names. I reported it, but the teachers gave the standard response of the time: ‘Just keep away from them’.
I tried. I found a place to hide away: a corner by a glass door which was slightly shadowed, so I could see my reflection. In the absence of any other friend, I named my mirror self Trixie and my physical self Trina (or maybe the other way round). I decided we were twins who’d been forcibly separated and were stuck on either side of the reflection, desperate to rejoin each other.
We’d chat about bullies and loneliness and how we could be reunited. At least I think we did. I can’t really remember more than the names and sitting there talking to my reflection.
Eventually the bullies found me – clearly proving them right about how weird I was – and yanked me up by my anorak hood, nearly strangling me. I like to think a teacher spotted it and they were punished but can’t recall that either. I just knew it wasn’t safe to hide out of sight any more.
I started to make friends… and then after a couple of years moved schools again, which is another story. For a while, illogically, I felt guilty that I’d never gone back to visit Trixie/Trina before I left, that I never said goodbye. I half wondered if she remained trapped. Or if I had. After all, who’s to say which of us was stuck behind a reflection?
At nine years old, in a different place entirely, I forgot her and became fascinated by looking for ways into other worlds through the countryside near my new home. This was probably partly inspired Alan Garner’s books, but I like to think was partly instinctive as my ancestry comes chiefly from (in alphabetical not percentage order) Eire, England, Scotland and Wales.
It isn’t a good idea to cross into the realms of the Sidhe/Elves/Seelie/Tylwyth Teg nor to let them cross into ours. That’s why there are festivals and traditions around solstices and equinoxes, and an eerie edge to dawn and dusk when the wall between worlds is thin and the danger to humans is highest. But I didn’t realise that then.
Well before I heard of quantum physics, I sensed another world was just out of reach and all I had to do was find a way in. Was this because there really are other universes running alongside ours and I somehow knew it instinctively, or because I wanted to escape my reality? I don’t know, but I looked in the woods and the river for another couple of years without thinking of looking in mirrors instead.
By thirteen, the main ‘other’ world I yearned for was adulthood where I’d be in control, and mirrors were only for despairing over what I looked like in. While waiting for magical adulthood, I created alternative universes in my head and wrote about them: time-slips, fairy courts, aliens, ghosts. Of course, adult life didn’t turn out quite as controllable as I’d expected and I wish I still had the face and figure I used to about, but what teenager realises they’ll ever feel like that?
Then last week, when I was looking for something cheerful to counteract global politics, and read about avoiding burn-out by swapping places with one’s mirror self, I suddenly remembered Trixie/Trina and wondered what would happen if I sought her out to exchange realities.
When the bullies hauled her away from her side of the glass what happened next? I wondered. Is her world better or worse? Has she changed or stayed the same?
I remembered her as a small thin six year old with blonde hair, scabby knees and an anxious, serious, worried expression.
Now presumably, she’d be middle-aged, plump, greying with a pragmatic smile and sense of her own ridiculousness.
But what if she was no longer be my exact reflection but a different person after all these years of separation?
What if she were no longer there at all?
I looked at the news again, then the list of suggestions, then back at the news. We live in a world where everything – not just me – seems to be burning out.
IfI could climb onto a mantelpiece and enter a mirror and risk what was on the other side of the reflection, I thought, would I?
Would you?
(Actually, if you do it, can you pull me up? I’m not sure my knees could manage climbing onto a mantlepiece any more.)
Words copyright (c) 2024 Paula Harmon. All rights reserved. Not to be copied or used without express permission.
‘The girl stared at Jenny with cold blue eyes and…’ ‘Dear Karen, I don’t like…’ ‘a shape so dark and stealthy…’ ‘somethingmoves in the still …’ ‘tympanist hits his drums with two sticks so…’ ‘Leçon onze – un lapin = …’ ‘Heat of room 20°, heat of ice 0°’
These are on the back pages of a notebook I had when I was twelve. In the front is a novel I wrote around the same time. In the back, as you can see – all sorts of stuff.
The cover has long gone, but I suspect this was a school notebook hence the little bits about Music, French and Science. I doubt the school intended me to write stories in it. But there you go – it was paper, I had ideas, what’s an aspiring novelist to do?
Apart from the finished novel (a searing tale of a quest against dangerous odds, magic, romance), there are scraps of sentimental poetic drivel, and the start of another novel, including blurb and chapter headings. There are also various drawings of characters and animals.
But I was twelve. So I confess that one page is entirely dedicated to the fact that X loves Y next to a drawing of two stick figures under a love heart with the word ‘censorded’ across them, and a variation in X’s handwriting of ‘Paula loves Z’. X was my best friend and definitely wasn’t in love with Y, and though I was in love with Z, the closest he’d ever got to realising I existed was to pick up and hand over stuff that I’d knocked off my desk in clumsy agitation at his proximity as he passed.
Both the finished novel and the planned one sum up me aged twelve. I was naïve and immature. My stories were an amalgam of the sorts of supernatural/paranormal older children’s books I was still reading and themes of adolescent angst, bereavement, threat, and of course a bit of romance. (In my books the hero wouldn’t just hand over the stuff and go back to his desk, but gaze into the heroine’s eyes and fall in love.)
But whatever my lack of maturity and sophistication, and despite being generally shy and lacking in confidence, I clearly wasn’t shy about being seen writing stories at the back of notebooks when the lesson got boring and the teacher wasn’t looking. At that point in my life, if you’d asked me what I intended to be when I grew up, I’d have said ‘writer’ and no one would have questioned it.
I admit that even into adult life, while probably not so upfront about it, I’d still find moments of boredom in the office to scribble ideas and scenes on bits of paper now and again.
Properly writing in public though? When I started up in earnest again in 2015, I was still travelling a lot with work and consequently wrote large amounts of stuff on trains, oblivious to who was nearby. Once I thought I was alone in an empty carriage, writing a murderous scene and suddenly a voice from behind said ‘ooh!’ and made me jump out of my skin as I turned to find someone reading from between the headrests behind me.
Nowadays I find it a lot harder. I’m not sure whether that’s because the trains are busier, I’m more tired, or older, or what. But it’s rare that I write anywhere other than indoors in private. I struggle to write with certain noises in the background: songs (I start singing along in my head which interrupts my flow), chatter (I find myself listening in), teenagers playing video games (I mean…). My son (to stop me shouting at him for loudly playing the video games) put me onto https://mynoise.net/. Now, if there’s too much extraneous noise when I’m writing, I listen to Rain on a Tent, Irish Sea or – believe it or not – Train and Railroad Sound. It helps me disappear into my own world where I find it easier to focus on writing.
But the other week, for long complicated reasons largely involving an inadequate bus service, I went with my husband to a nearby town where he was meeting a friend, and went somewhere else with my laptop to work while they caught up.
I thought the library would be a good place to write. But the only free table was by an automatic door which opened every two minutes with a sound like Ivor the Engine’s ‘pssht-coom’. It was also full of surprisingly noisy pensioners and I didn’t feel like putting the headphones on when I was sitting by a door in case one of them came up behind me with evil intent when I couldn’t hear them.
I next went to a chain coffee shop and tried that. But pop music was blaring and it too was full of noisy pensioners. This time I did put the headphones on, but even with the volume ramped up I could still hear the two pensioners who sat down next to me and started a loud conversation.
Finally, I went to an old coaching inn. It’s very nice. A lovely setting to write historical fiction plus they served cream teas.
Two ladies had a laden cake stand and sat by the fire talking quietly. On another table, three ladies were drinking wine, one talking incessantly at the top of her voice. Music was playing, but it was fairly innocuous (and was turned off after the loud lady left.)
I gave my order then put my headphones on and drowned out Ms Noisy with train sounds. No one paid me any attention except to bring tea and scones with jam and clotted cream. I typed away happily for over an hour. Will I do the same again? Maybe. I might pick somewhere else though.
When it was time to go, the young waiter overcharged me. He’d seemed rather vague the whole time – admittedly it probably isn’t the most exciting job but even so. It took a lot of explanation to get him to understand how he’d done it (a simple enough mistake but a mistake none the less). Eventually he went for a manager who agreed that I was right. Throughout this, the young man kept calling me ‘my love’. I’m sure he was trying to be friendly, but I doubt he’d have done this to someone his own age and it made me feel like I was his granny. (All right, so I’m old enough to be his granny, but I don’t yet feel old enough to admit it.)
It was annoying to the point where I felt like picking up the carrot cake and squashing it in his face. In fact, the last time I was at that coaching inn, it was with my own gran, and she might have done that if he’d tried it on her.
But I’m a writer, so I have my own type of revenge.
I included him as a very minor character in a scene I was writing. A lot less messy, and somehow more satisfying. I doubt he’ll ever realise, but if he does he ought to be glad. I write murder mysteries. The character based on him might not have made it out of that scene alive.
So if you see any writers writing in the wild – be nice to them. You don’t know what they’ll do if they put you in their book.
Mwahahaha.
Copyright (c) 2024 Words and Picture Paula Harmon – not to be used without the author’s express permission.
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