I’ve
recently been reading The Cazelet
Chronicle by Elizabeth Jane Howard.
It’s a slow, beautifully written story set just before and during the
Second World War. Quite apart from it
being a good read, (but without a great deal of pace – first published in 1991,
would it have been accepted as it is now, or edited down, or rejected outright?)
it is the dreamy, compelling sense of time and place that draws me back again
and again. I wasn’t alive during that
era (far too young of course) but have heard so much about it from my parents
and grandparents, have seen so many photographs and films, that when I read
this book I feel as though I am there. A
great triumph for a writer, to achieve that.
Which brings
me to another experience where I was transported back in time and place. I was preparing to do the evening washing up
and was skipping TV channels to find something vaguely interesting, when I came across a
programme on Josiah Wedgewood. Just one
glimpse of those little blue and white ceramics and I was back in my Nana’s
home, in the Sixties, when such ornaments were her pride and joy.
I could see
them there, set out on her sideboard, a collection to be added to on birthdays
or at Christmas. To her, and therefore
to me, they were the height of desirability, impossibly glamorous. They were dusted and displayed, but never used. A glimpse of those precious ornaments on the
television screen brought back all sorts of other memories. Having tea when ‘tea’ was a meal in late
afternoon accompanied always by an enormous pot of very strong tea and endless
plates of sliced bread, already buttered.
Overheated sitting rooms where both grandparents smoked and thought
nothing of it. Writing about it, I can
smell the smoke in the air, see the nicotine stains on the flowery
wallpaper.
These small
things help us as writers to be transported to a certain time and place. If we can create that for the reader, then we
have given them a gift, added something to the story so that it stays with them
long after the details of plot have faded away.
It’s something I try to do in my own writing, but of course don’t always
achieve. That was why I was particularly
pleased to receive the comment on a recent manuscript aimed at the Young Adult
market, saying that I have created something warm and ‘a very pleasant world to
be in’. As a reader that’s what I’m
looking for, the creation of a whole world, and as a writer it’s what I aim to
achieve.
I’d be
interested to know what helps other people create that certain sense of time
and place? And I also can’t help wondering,
looking at those pictures, what happened to my Nana’s lovely ornaments.
