LIVING IN THE COUNTRY, and CROSSING BORDERS

We’ve lived in our welsh farmhouse, in this valley for nearly 30 years now. If a house could scowl, and show you its backside, it did on the wet November day when we first saw it, with the rain lashing down and the many ducks in its yard muddy and with their feathers standing on end from a sharp wind, not a living soul in sight.
 No sooner was the ink dry on our contract when one cheery neighbour informed us , ‘This place is the graveyard of ambition,’ adding, ‘particularly for women.’

Good to know, and I sort of believed him, because I had an unspoken fear about moving to the country. What if here, it was well just too nice, and away from all the exciting anxieties of the city, I might not, do what I longed to do which was to write a novel, and find myself sliding day by day into the gentler pleasures, of lets say jam making or bell ringing.

It’s a version of the country, which assumes that a metropolis is where you find work, and the country is where you don’t. And that you either have to be one thing or another: a fully paid up member of the rat race, or dropped from some exciting group. 

But it took only a few months of living here to discover that behind hedges, up dirt tracks, in little cottages tucked in the woods, the Wye Valley is a hive of industry for the many women who work here. 

Two years ago, a photographer friend, Alex Pownall, and I decided to find out how they made it work, which led to our collaborating on, “Crossing Borders,” published by Graffeg .

At first we thought we’d cover the whole of the length of the Wye Valley, which runs from Rhyader in Wales, crosses the English Welsh border at Hay on Wye, and on down to the Severn Estuary.   In the end, less than an hour from our homes (Alex lives across the river in Gloucestershire)  we found an embarrassment of subjects : barristers, artists, economists, opera singers, teachers, a lady butcher, theatre designers, circus owners.

We didn’t set out to cover all occupations, or to write a self help book- simply to report on the lives of 21 women.

We called it ‘Crossing Borders,’ because so many of the women we interviewed seemed to have reached a point of change or crossed some personal rubicon, in order to find the job they loved. Some of these crossings were traumatic, some simply a question of having moved, or discovered they had started off in the wrong job. All of these women were refreshingly honest about the times when that old chestnut of work life balance was just not possible- their lives were as unpredictable and untidy as everyone elses.

After visiting them at their place of work: circus big tops, magic gardens, studios, lambing sheds, police headquarters, to name but a few, Alex and I had some interesting conversations on the way home.

We noted that many of our subjects were the daughters of farmers, policemen, airmen, factory workers.  Many had gone to comprehensive schools, and with few exceptions found work  (just as we had) through trial and error.

A surprising number had found their strengths after shocking reversals of fortune: Elizabeth Haycox, owner of Richard Booth’s Bookshop in Hay on Wye was widowed with awful suddenness, aged 43.  Race horse trainer, Venetia Williams, was all set to be a jockey until a near fatal fall changed the course of her life.

What linked them all was a sense of how integral to their daily routines the hills, valleys and rivers around them had become. Before picking up a paintbrush, the Ledbury artist, Andrea McLean, walks for two hours every morning in the hills above her house. Mezzo soprano, Catherine King runs for an hour most days in the valley her house overlooks, to keep her fit for singing. 

Venetia Williams is out on her gallops next to the River Wye every morning.

And age? Well that was fascinating too. Some of our women were years past retirement age and still firing on all cylinders. Jean Miller, who sadly died last year at 83, discovered she was an artist at 63 after she moved to the country. The best time of her life, she said, with ‘No Saturday, and no Sunday,’ she was too busy producing the work for her sellout exhibitions. Revel Guest, the 81 year old producer of Stephen Speilberg’s ‘War Horse’, will this year produce opera and documentaries, as well as being Chair of the Hay Festival. Her house is in a remote spot overlooking the River Wye and invisible from the road. 

We had a wonderful time writing and photographing these women. We hoped too that any school leavers reading this book, and possibly anxious about their prospects, would see it as a source of inspiration. That’s what it felt like to us.

REMA'S RECIPES

The Reviver,

Here's something people can make without a prolonged hunt for ingredients! The 'Reviver' ginger, cinnamon, lime drink for one is an infusion and a concentrate - to be mixed like a large drink, with chilled soda or water .

 Ingredients:

  3 glasses water

  3 glasses sugar 

  1 glass freshly squeezed lime juice 

  Thick 4 inch piece of fresh ginger and an equal quantity of cinnamon sticks. 

Scrape the skin off the ginger and crush it with the cinnamon sticks. Tie the crushed mix in a piece of fine cotton/muslin. 

Bring water to boil, drop in the spice bundle, simmer together for about 20 to 30 minutes  till you have a dark amber infusion (and the house is also redolent with the fragrance of the spices!). Add the sugar and stir to dissolve it into the infusion

Take it off the heat and cool. Now add the glass of lime juice. Bottle.

This has no preservative and must be kept in the refrigerator and used up in two weeks.

Vegetable stew

The secret to this is fresh coconut milk.This is made from combining gratings from half a coconut and I cup warm water, running it in a food processor for a minute. Strain and keep the thick milky extract.  Add one and a half cups more warm water to the  dregs and repeat the process to get the weaker second extract.

The coconut cream/powder you can buy there should be almost as good!

Beans chopped, carrots and potatoes cubed, cauliflowers..well...flowerlet-ed(!), peas etc all together about one and a half - 2 cups

One onion sliced thin

A small piece of fresh ginger julienned

2 Green chillies split (or more to your taste)

About 5 whole peppercorns crushed

4 cardamoms

6 cloves

1stick of cinnamon

A sprig of curry leaves if possible

A tablespoon of oil and salt to taste.

Heat the oil in a pan/wok,(add curry leaves first) add the cardamom, cloves, cinnamon and pepper. Then add the chillies, onions and ginger and cook till the onions start browning. Add the vegetables and sauté for a minute till everything is well blended. Sprinkle the salt and add the second extract of coconut milk. Simmer till the pieces are cooked. Now add the thicker first extraction of milk, stir and remove from the fire immediately. Goes well with bread etc

Life is Cruel

Hard to believe that this  time last week, I was in Kerala on a rice boat,  researching Book Four. This week, I'm gritting paths and putting out bird seed  in  Wales where four inches  of snow fell last night, and the woods and the fields near the Wye are covered.  The dogs think it a tremendous lark and have been playing in it for hours, their paw prints make  neat  lino cuts in the virgin snow.

But back to Kerala , it's warmth, it's bright colours seem, even after a week back,  like a  seductive dream.
 After one night in  Fort Kochi -where the Art Biennale is on, and where someone had transformed the branches of a huge Banyan tree into  a  snakes and dragons tree -  I based myself at  Olavipe, a Homestay ( the Indian name for a B and B), belonging to  the Tharakan family.
 Although the  Tharakans  are one of the oldest Syrian Catholic families in Kerala,  there is nothing grand or intimidating about the atmosphere here. The house, with its spacious verandahs, its cool whitewashed rooms, its  rosewood four posters and its  antique furniture, is as beautiful as it is welcoming.  Its grounds -  60 acres of farmland,  surrounded by lagoons, farmland and rice paddies,  are yours to wander through for as long as you stay.
The food was fabulous, often served on banana leaves or in simple bowls laid out on the long table for you to help yourself . Guests are invited to wander into the kitchen, or explore the house, make tea. What I  liked was the sense you have of having your own set of rooms within the house.  The rooms , every bit as big as you'd get in a luxury hotel , were scrupulously clean and quiet. You have the option of using a servant to make your bed, but I chose not to for the pleasure of imagining that this house  was my home, I settled in so thoroughly that I actually had to warn Anto and Rema that adoption papers would follow.
 The farm is plentifully supplied with  its own fresh fish, and organic chickens and vegetables and  I constantly marvelled at the skill and delicacy with which fresh vegetables, cabbage, beans, are turned with a pinch of cardoman and cinnamon and mustard seed into something genuinely exotic. I'll get Rema to send on some of the recipes so I can post them.
 Here you eat with the family and a floating population of guests ( during my stay: the English publisher of 'Curious Incident of Dog at Night Time',  his 22 year old son, a magazine editor; two delightful women from Oxford;  an American  Aids worker from  Africa, and  an English carpenter). The conversation was lively and  interesting, but one was left in peace when you wanted to be.
 Anto,  and Rema, are the most  relaxed and generous of  hosts, answered endless questions and, because I was interested in life in Cochin in the forties, took me to meet Rema's mother, Amma, (86) and godmother , Lily (94).

Lily and Amma  live in their own separate but close houses in a quiet close in a temple town called Trissur .  They share servants, meals, and when  their large extended  family comes,  the  pleasures and the work  of seeing  cousins aunts, siblings, sitting around Lily's long dining room table.
In their graceful saris, and with grey hair knotted at the nape of their necks, they looked so elegant, so serene, and yet neither had ever been to either a hairdresser or a beauty salon .  Food for thought  about the frantic efforts we're encouraged to make in the West to stave off old age. When  I got back - even my pared down travel  make up bag with its  age activated serum , its creams,   the mascara, the velcro rollers the lipstick, looked  bizarrely complicated.  Doesn't mean I'm going to step out now in a white sari and Rhett Butler  moustache, but  does make you think. The only beauty routine they followed  apart from baths and hair washing was a weekly scrub with vetiver, and the soft bark of a tree to exfoliate, followed by the application of coconut oil for hair and skin.
Both reminded me too that a well stocked mind is another useful attribute in old age.  Amma was reading a long and fascinating book on Indian history, 'Gem in the Lotus' written by Abraham Eraly, her nephew , and both agreed that one of the  best time of their lives had been when they'd both left home, aged 18 and  gone to live in a hostel in Madras in order to study for university degrees.
From Olavipe,  I went to on to Alleppey , and two days on my own on a rice boat

If you're ever in Kerala, trust me, take one . What I loved was  the perfect peace of it.  From a comfortably shaded wicker chair I gazed out at  a party of school children rowing themselves back from school across the river; a woman washing her curry pots in the stream;  an egret sitting on a grazing bullock's back; fishermen palm trees, sunsets.  Fresh fish and more delicious vegetables were served on that table on the left hand side of the photo, and at night, Mathu, the cook, lit a candle on the deck,and I sat and listened to the birds, and the chanting from a nearby Hindu temple.
Heaven, and now, back to reality. Where was that snow shovel ?


olavipe.com/homestay.html















olavipe.com/homestay.html

On the Sofa

There are days to savour in the full knowledge that on the day after you will be back at home emptying the rubbish, or taking hair out of a plug hole. Yesterday was one of them. After weeks of rain I took a train on a bright sunny day up to London,where,at Paddington station,my eye was gladdened by the sight of a stand of 'Jasmine Nights.' prominently displayed in W.H.Smith. Yes, I've been Richard and Judied again,and couldn't be more thrilled. Nervous at the thought of joining them on the sofa at 2.30 p.m. I had my hair done at a posh hairdressers near Orion,and this elegant young man with three crucially arranged tattoos on his neck did my makeup. When I asked him where he'd trained he said he was a dry cleaner,which worried me a bit until he said,'no darling, DRAG Queen.' Great, I thought,I'm going to come out looking like Danny La Rue, all jewelled eyelashes and lipgloss,but he was tres subtle and sitting on the sofa with R and J, turned out to be nothing like as terrifying as I thought it would be. We had an interesting warm up chat regarding writing horror stories which Richard won hands down by admitting he had recently deleted three whole chapters of his new novel, and had wanted to shoot himself. This reminded me of the time, my dear father, showed me a carefully honed short story he'd recently written, and then absentmindedly mistaking it for his cigarette thrown it into the fire. It was interesting to meet some of the other R and J authors- Rachel Joyce, Chris Cleave, John Green- when asked for our nuggets of wisdom about getting stories written they were remarkably similar and down to earth: read a lot; write a lot,don't give up.

New book deal

I'm looking for some lessons in South Indian cooking because I've just heard that I've landed a two book deal in the U.S. with Touchstone Books, which is part of Simon and Schuster. In recessionary times you don't take anything for granted, and I know plenty of wonderful writers whose overseas sales are right down, so this is very exciting news. All I'm allowed to say for now about my next book is that it takes place in 1924 and 1948 in Oxfordshire and a small village in Kerala, and it's about the pleasures and perils of a mixed race marriage. Some might say that all of my books have a section set in faraway places so that I have an excuse to travel there to research them. If that's true, then who can blame me? It may be sunny today in Wales, but it's a rare and beautiful exeperience.

Publication, JASMINE NIGHTS

It's been quite a month,with the publication in the U.K. and the U.S. of 'Jasmine Nights,'bringing the usual mix of nerves and excitement, plus a visit from darling daughter who lives in Sydney,followed by floods and rain in Wales, the arrival of a new collie, Jelly Bean (O.K. I didn't choose the name.) plus lots of lovely emails from readers. One reader pointed out that Saba, the heroine in 'Jasmine Nights,' is, like Catherine Carrag in 'The Water Horse': a bolter. I hadn't thought about this before, but when I did, I realised that I've always been fascinated by bolters- Nancy Mitford’s perfect description of women who make a dash for freedom. In East of the Sun too, my girls are runaways- towards new jobs, new countries, new lives, or unsuitable adventures in a stranger’s arms. The reasons why I’m drawn to such escapes would make no dent in an analyst’s couch. I was an Air Force brat. As a child, I changed schools, houses, often countries, every two and a half years. If this emotionally scarred me,I was either too thick or too distracted by new schools and new houses to notice it. But what it does mean is that restlessness is bred in the bone. Which is why I love writing historical fiction: it gives me a perfect grown up excuse to scratch that itch periodically- roughly every two years and a half years come to think of it. My first book came by chance on a long distance horse ride across Wales where I live, and where the mountains and valleys are criss-crossed by drover’s roads -wide green grassy tracks that were once the only way of delivering sheep and cattle to the meat markets of London. We stopped to give the horses a rest; I saw a small plaque outside a tiny country church. It commemorated a woman called Jane Evans who, in 1853, ran away with the drovers in order to join Florence Nightingale and her nurses in Scutari during the Crimean War. My skin prickled when I read this: for many of the fifteen years I’d been a journalist I’d secretly, passionately, longed to write a novel, and here it was, and it was a travelling book. My second book, ‘East of the Sun,’ was another good excuse for bolting, now officially called research. I think of this book with great emotion- I wrote it in my fifties and its success changed so much in my life. My young girls saw India through romantic eyes. You meet them at a huge moment of change: they are separating themselves from their parents, their culture, to some extent, their old values. To understand them, I had to strip away layers of cynicism and false thinking, common sense and hard experience and see myself at 18 or 19 and relatively innocent again. 'Jasmine Nights,' led to more travels: last year to Cairo and Turkey, where I interviewed Turkish nightclub singers and spies. One of the best bits of the Egyptian part of the trip was taking a 1930's Cox and Kings paddle steamer up the Nile. I was struck by the extraordinary unspoilt beauty of the river itself, with its lush green banks, the timeless villages, the glowing sunsets all framed by our cabin windows. The wonderful things we saw inside the Valley of the Kings reminded me of Flaubert's quote on his Egyptian tour: "I have taken in so much beauty through my eyes, I hope I can bring some of it back.' Back in Cairo, I explored some of the places my ENSA troupe might have hung out: Groppis for ice creams, The Mena House Hotel for parties, and the souks behind Tahir Square where Arleta bought her disastrous hair dye. I was lucky too to find a man called John Rodenbeck, an academic and writer, who had lived for over 20 years in Cairo, who edited Mafouz the wonderful Nobel prizewinning author. John's numerous emails on the language, the music, the poetry the richness of life in Egypt were a revelation and became, for me, like a parallel education adding hugely to the enjoyment of writing the book.. He was adamant that I should avoid what he called, 'The Hollywood Hokum' version of Egypt, a trap he says many Western writers fall into. ***