Shadows of Time
by Jackie Meekums-Hales
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GENRE: Women's Fiction
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INTERVIEW:
1. What or who inspired you to start writing?
This is really difficult to answer, because I started writing when I was very young, and I don’t remember being inspired. I was one of a group of friends who played together in the woods behind our houses, and I started writing plays as part of our games. It seemed a natural part of using our imaginations. I didn’t write much as I got older, other than for school, until I was studying literature and history as a student. I then began writing poetry and prose fragments as an outlet for my thoughts and feelings about the world around me. Having one of my poems published in a student pamphlet inspired me to submit others for public consumption.
3. What elements are necessary components for this genre?
I can’t claim to be an expert on this genre, because this is my first novel, but I think there has to be some growth in self-knowledge, when faced with an obstacle or difficult situation. For example, Cathy has built the life she thought she wanted, but her mother’s death brings with it challenges to her assumptions about herself, her way of life and her views of other people. She has to reconcile all of this.
I also think there has to be some reflection of issues that affect, or have affected, women’s lives, so that there is something the reader can identify with and some can be given a voice through the characters. This is where I think the flashbacks to Maggie’s story and Cathy’s experience before she emigrated are so important.
2. How did you come up with your idea for your novel?
What inspired me to write my novel was my fascination with family history, having spent two years researching my own and watching television programmes like “Who do you think you are?“, “Heir Hunters” and “Long Lost Family”. There are often surprise revelations, and there are so many examples of women having lost children because they were unmarried, because of death, or because they emigrated. My great-grandmother, for example, lost all three sons to the First World War, to which Maggie’s mother alludes early in the novel (Ch 9):
“ …she knew what heartache these war-time romances could bring. It didn't seem that long since her sister had lost the man she loved to the trenches of the Great War. They had been so young, so full of hope that at least it had been the war to end all wars, a noble sacrifice. But that had been part of the great lie that had taken so many boyfriends, husbands, fathers, and beautiful young sons to their death.”
Infant death seemed to be common, and I was surprised at how many women were pregnant when they got married. They wouldn’t have dared to have a baby out of wedlock. As a teenager in the 1960s, I’d known at least two people, a bit older than me, who’d had to give up babies for adoption because they weren’t married, with all the grief that caused. I have relatives in Canada, New Zealand and Australia, because of ancestors’ emigration, not to mention the devastating personal experience of losing my own daughter and her family to Australia in 2014, which is embodied in Maggie’s reaction (Ch 17):
“…her mother collapsed against the kitchen units, sobbing like someone whose dearest loved one had just died, incapable of anything but cries of "No! Oh God, NO!" Maggie had known that if her daughter made up her mind, that would be it. She would go. Engulfed by imminent loss and ultimate fear of what the future held, Maggie clung to her husband, who—helpless in the face of such grief—could say nothing to make it any better.”
4. What expertise did you bring to your writing?
The only expertise I can claim is having been an English teacher for over thirty years. I didn’t have problems with spelling and punctuation, but even then I could be wrong in terms of common usage, when compared to modern publishing practice, because I learnt grammar in the 1960s. I’d spent years analysing literature, in order to teach it, so I understood poetic devices and rhetoric, and I have an expansive vocabulary. I still had an awful lot to learn about making my own writing fit for publication.
5. What would you want your readers to know about you that might not be in your bio?
My context. I am one of four siblings, so I grew up as the third child and yet the older sister, because the war created an age gap between two pairs of children. Coming from a working-class background, none of us took up careers in the arts, but we did all go into professions. As we got older, we all turned to creativity of some kind. Sadly, my brother died in 2017, but he’d spent his life as a naval officer – there are shades of him in Robert in “Shadows of Time”, with his smart appearance and naval background. When he retired, he took up silver-smithing and creating equipment for disabled people. My older sister has written some poetry and is a talented artist. She has invented a character about whom she writes amusing cameo pieces. My younger sister was a lecturer, but we went to the same grammar school, had the same teachers, could both write. When she retired, she began writing fiction instead of academic papers. What we didn’t anticipate was that we would both have our debut novels accepted by the same publisher, so we both have Between the Lines to thank for getting our novels into print. They had no idea we were sisters when they accepted mine, because I submitted under my married name, Hales, and my sister used our maiden name, Meekums. I added my maiden name for publication, because I discovered there was another writer with the name Jackie Hales. I wonder how many publishers have two sisters on their books?
6. As far as your writing goes, what are your future plans?
I just want to enjoy writing into old age. I have two more completed novels, and when I’ve found time to finish revising and editing them myself, I need to decide what to do with them – try submitting them for publication or learn to self-publish. If they’re rejected by publishers, I may do the latter. I’d like to try writing an epistolary novel, between two sisters, inspired by the structure Alice Walker used in one of my favourite books of all time – “The Color Purple” – as well as going back to the origins of the novel. I’ll always write poetry, as sometimes I think in images, but if that’s published, it will probably be in one-offs online, rather than in an anthology of my own. I’d love to be able to do something with my collection of short stories one day, and I have a children’s novel still to be completed. I’ve become jaded, when it comes to entering competitions, because of the cost and the improbability of winning, but I may still enter some, just to see…
7. If you could be one of the characters from this book, who would it be and why?
I am none of the characters in their entirety, but I think maybe I’d be June, rooted in the place she loves, surrounded by her children and with a warm heart. I have tended to be the “sensible one”, the coper, the older of two sisters, and a teacher. My mum had no such secret, but if she had sprung a surprise like Robert on us when she died, I’d like to think I’d have welcomed him.
8. Can you give us a sneak peek into this book?
‘ “Have you got a photo of Great-grandma?” Georgie asked innocently. “We’re doing family trees at school. I need to make a list of all the surnames and all the places my ancestors came from.”
Bob tried to hide the feeling that the blood was draining from his face. His heart sped up as he just managed enough control to answer. “Well, I’ll have to have a think about that, young man.”
He knew that fobbing off a bright seven-year-old probably wasn’t going to work, but right now he didn’t feel up to a full explanation.
Luckily, at that very moment, his daughter called to her son, “Georgie. You haven’t cleaned your teeth yet. Hurry up! Bedtime, NOW!” When Vicky had that teacher's tone in her voice, you did as you were told, even if you were her father, so, unsurprisingly, Georgie pecked his granddad on the cheek and, with a brief “Night,” disappeared from the room.’
This extract is where Georgie’s school work sets of a whole chain of events, because it makes Bob curious about his own birth. It was based on my own grandchildren asking me for a list of names and places, because they’d been studying the Tudors and Stuarts at school and learning how to make a family tree. The wry smile I had at Vicky’s teacher’s voice is based on the way I knew could turn on the teacher’s clip in my own voice. When I was at a mother and toddler group with my son, a new member was told: “When Jackie tells Ian off, we all sit up!”, which made us all laugh, because I didn’t realise the effect it had!
9. Do you belong to a critique group? If so, how does this help or hinder your writing?
I did belong to a University of the Third Age writing group, before Covid struck. It encouraged me to take the seed of an idea from a prompt and work a story around it, so it helped me to draft without worrying about it being perfect first time, but only on short pieces of writing, Via Zoom, during the pandemic I was able to join another group of writers, many of whom had already published books. Feedback was very useful, for example when someone queried “head-hopping”, because they found it difficult to follow. It made me put myself in the place of the listener and made me more aware of technique.
10. When did you first decide to submit your work? Please tell us what or who encouraged you to take this big step?
I submitted poetry years ago, motivated by helping children to submit their work and colleagues’ encouragement, but when it came to submitting prose, in recent years, I have to give credit to sharing my love of writing with my sister, who turned to writing fiction when she retired. She already had experience of publishing academic work and had her first novel accepted, so she encouraged me to finish mine. We both began submitting pieces for online publication, and we collaborated on a joint memoir, which then gave me the confidence to pitch my novel to several publishers.
11. What is the best and worst advice you ever received? (regarding writing or publishing)
I think the answer to this is “Don’t give up”. It’s both the best and worst, because it can be very hard to deal with rejection, and I let that put me off at first, but unless you keep going, you’ll never be accepted, and sometimes what one rejects another will publish.
12. Do you outline your books or just start writing?
I tend to blend these two ways of writing, so I’ll start with an idea, and I’ll make some kind of rough plan to get me going, but then, as I get to know my characters, I let them take me into what they would say and do, and that can change what I thought I was going to write. With short stories, I definitely just see where they take me, and usually have to cut them to a word limit, but with a novel, I do impose an overall structure, so that I have a story arc with some kind of resolution.
13. How do you maintain your creativity?
I walk in the countryside. I have my best ideas when I’m out across fields or down by the river, away from the humdrum of life in the house. I don’t try to force it, because I write when I want to, but a story can nag away in my head until it’s formed on the page. I might just meet a new character in my imagination, while I’m walking down a lane, lost in my own thoughts, or I might spot someone or something that sparks an idea. I might feel strongly about something going on in the world, and snippets of poetry start to form in my head. There is no pressure on me to write, so I just let myself enjoy it.
15. Anything else you might want to add?
Thank you for taking an interest in my novel. I hope those who read it enjoy it and can sense something of what I wanted to shine a spotlight on. I was in my twenties in the 1970s, when women were fighting for the right to equal pay, among other things, so my consciousness of social inequality and injustice towards my generation and those before me makes me very aware that it’s still out there, as “Me too” has illustrated. The end of the novel was inspired by sitting on a seat at Point Walter, in Perth, Australia, during a visit to my daughter. The seat was beautifully carved and dedicated to the “lost generation” of children taken from Aboriginal mothers. It struck me that, over the years, women had lost children in so many ways, and that we can all empathise with each other, so it pulled together the final strands of my story.
BLURB:
Maggie’s daughter, Cathy, is a successful business woman in Australia. After the failure of a relationship and her mother’s death, she returns to England for the funeral, hoping to rekindle her childhood sense of carefree life in the Yorkshire countryside. She is confronted by revelations about Maggie’s tragic past, which has a legacy of loss overshadowing her family’s present and future. As Cathy and her sister June unravel the truth, her mother’s story unfolds in a flashback to 1945. Life for the young Maggie before they were born reflects the world of mid-century attitudes towards women who dared to have a baby out of wedlock. The illusion of the Maggie her daughters knew is dispelled.
Meanwhile, two young women explore family history, and fate takes a hand. Three families are linked through coincidences and circumstances they did not know they shared. Cathy must decide how far, and for what reasons, she allows herself to live in the shadows of the past.
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EXCERPT:
The wind was roaring down the side of the house and through the chimney, and the daffodils were bending their heads in submission. It might be nearly spring, but that news did not seem to have reached the village yet. The smell of burning wood always brought back memories of bonfires at the bottom of the garden. Cathy's thoughts lingered on bonfire nights at the farm next door, when the children had ridden down to the middle field on bales of hay on a trailer pulled by an old tractor. How simple everything seemed then.
Cathy sensed that June’s tense shoulders meant she was steeling herself for something unpleasant. Cathy was busy trying to work out how to ask her what was wrong, when suddenly, staring into the flames, June announced, “We may have to sell the house, you know.”
Cathy heard the words but didn’t believe she had. “What?”
“We may have to sell the house. The solicitor phoned today about the reading of Mum's will. The house may not be ours, Cathy. We may have to move.”
“WHAT?”
“Stop saying what! It seems that someone has appeared out of nowhere since Mum died. Something about someone else being entitled to something. I don't know the details. I’ve been dreading telling you, and I didn’t want to say anything in front of the twins.”
“How on earth could that be? I don’t believe it! There can’t be anyone else, can there? There must be a mistake!” She felt the cosy, comfy world she had come back to claim crumbling to ashes and dust.
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AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Jackie is a member of the Society of Authors, whose debut novel Shadows of Time was the fulfilment of an ambition nurtured during her working life as a teacher, inspired by her research into her own and others’ family histories. She has been writing as a hobby since childhood, contributing to poetry anthologies since her undergraduate days and being a Poetry Guild national semi-finalist in the 1990s. She has also written short stories for friends, family and students. Since retiring, she has contributed to Poetry Archive Now (2020), with 20-20 Vision, uploaded to YouTube, and has had poetry and flash fiction published online by Flash Fiction North. One of her flash fictions is to appear in an anthology, having been selected from entries during the Morecambe Festival 2021. She had a creative memoir, Shelf Life, published by Dear Damsels in 2019, a precursor to collaborating with her sister on a creative non-fiction memoir Remnants of War, published in 2021. She writes a blog about her walks and thoughts in the Yorkshire and Somerset countryside.
Twitter account: Jackie Meekums Hales, writer (@jackieihales) / Twitter\ https://mobile.twitter.com/jackieihales
Blog: Jotting Jax
https://jottingjax.wordpress.com/
Goodreads: Jacqueline Hales - Goodreads
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/128512053-jacqueline-hales
Facebook author page: Jackie Meekums Hales | Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/Jackie-Meekums-Hales-103410038936426/news_feed
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GIVEAWAY INFORMATION and RAFFLECOPTER CODE
Jackie Meekums-Hales will be awarding a $25 Amazon/BN GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.
RAFFLECOPTER:
http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/28e4345f4153
