The Weight of Promises
How much does a promise weigh? Is it something carried lightly, a small pebble in your pocket, worn smooth by time, cool and comforting to the touch? How long before it becomes a boulder that is too heavy to carry, so that you have to drag it along behind you, the weight slowing you down?
One of my promises became such a boulder when it should have remained a pebble. Quite unintentionally, but these things happen.
My grandmother told me stories of her life as a young woman, living through the 1930s and the Second World War, losing her brother and her husband in the space of three years, being widowed with two small children to care for. Family and friends got her through the hard times, and she, in turn, helped others do the same.
She feared the stories of such hardships would be lost forever if someone didn’t write them down. I was very young, but I knew how important it was to her. I promised to do it. Little did I know what a commitment that would turn out to be.
Gathering Information
I started when I was in my early teens, going to the library and looking at old newspapers for reports on the sinking of the trawler Leicestershire. I read the funeral reports, took photocopies, and filed them away. I had lots of information but no idea where to begin.
I married, I had children, I moved 300 miles south.
And all the while, my mother kept telling me stories – when we were reunited, on the telephone, sending me newspaper articles and books she thought would be of use.
In time, I joined a writing group. It gave me confidence to make a start. I wrote a factual account of the sinking of the Leicestershire that was published in the Grimsby Telegraph. A beginning. One step on a very long road.
I moved on to short stories and had success selling them, writing commercial fiction for weekly magazines. I found an audience, and I found my voice.
I often wonder what held me back when so many other writers didn’t seem to have the problem. Instead of spurring me on, their success only served to compound my self-doubt. Why couldn’t I just start? What was wrong with me?
It took me many years before I realised that I was the one getting in my way. A pressure I put on myself. No one else ever made me feel I had to do it. The fear of making a mess of it was paralysing. I wanted to get it right, I wanted it to be real, I wanted to honour that promise made to my grandmother in the best way I could. I had burdened myself with a heavy load of expectation. Needlessly so. My constant was my mother, telling me it would happen, in time—the right time for me, not anyone else.
So, what did I do? I wrote a book about…
Showbusiness
I know – not worlds apart are they!
Finding a gap in the market
My good friend and mentor, the author Margaret Graham, had given me some advice. If I wanted to get published, to write a book set in WW2 with three girls and, most importantly, find a gap in the market.
That’s how the Variety Girls came to be, based on my fascination with old variety performers and using my own experience of working backstage in a seaside theatre.
I threw myself into the research with glee, writing every day until the book was complete.
I had a two-book deal with Penguin and all was going well until the pandemic threw a spanner in the works. My publishing imprint, Ebury, stopped taking fiction. The editorial team were made redundant, and I no longer had a publisher. What next?
My then agent, Vivien Green, suggested I write a novel based around the tales my grandmother had told me and set in the fishing industry.
I had the research, years of it. I knew I could write a book and complete it – I had already done so, twice. The only way to conquer the fear was to write and keep going, even when the voices in my head were shouting, Who do you think you are, why waste your time, who cares?
Doing the Hard Thing
Beginning that book was incredibly hard. All the years of longing sat down with me at my desk. But once the nerves were set aside and I wrote deeper into the story, those voices became softer, and I learned to ignore them completely. I didn’t think about being published; I only thought of telling the small, smooth pebbles of stories. Of trying to make it as authentic as I could. Of keeping that promise.
I was exhausted when I finished and emotionally spent, but I felt that I had done it justice.
My agent sent it out to editors. It was turned down. I had a strong feeling that it might be. Dockyards don’t sound appealing, do they? They’re not so familiar to us as stories set in mills and mines, in factories and department stores. But they teem with life and characters, with drama and tension, with good fortune and heartbreak, strength and frailty.
The pages are lovingly filled with people I recognise; kind, hardworking people, who get things wrong but more often get things right and redeem themselves, people like you and me. With a reprobate or two thrown in for good measure. But no one’s all bad, not even the mother-in-law, as you’ll come to see if you read the books.
Take a chance on something different
Eventually, the book found a home with Boldwood, who took a chance on the title and wanted me to develop it into a series. I’m currently writing book four in the Dockyard Girls series (which was originally published as The Women of Fishers Wharf). It gladdens my heart that they did, for I hear as much from male readers as I do from females.
I hope readers who might look at the title or the cover and think, ‘That’s not for me’ will take a chance on Letty and Alec Hardy and the folks of Fishers Wharf.
I’d like to introduce them to a world and a way of life that’s almost disappeared. I hope they enjoy being there as much as I do.