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How dark side of the Sixties gave author inspiration
The highlight of the week was probably going to the youth club or maybe to the cinema to see South Pacific.
Hours might have been spent browsing the counters of Woolworths before buying a lipstick with a name like Gone Lilac.
You could hear the latest music on a jukebox at the coffee bar or play records in your bedroom at home on a Dansette record player.
Anybody who grew up in the '50s and early '60s will feel immediately at home when they start to read Leah Fleming's novel, Mothers and Daughters.
It follows the lives of three young girls who are about to make their way in this new post-war world. All three will face some heartbreaking times in the years ahead.
Leah Fleming is the pen name of Helene Wiggin, a child of that period herself who has a sharp recall of those days. Growing up in Bolton she remembers that the Bible and hymn books were always around at home, but no bought books.
"Post-war austerity took its toll on my childhood. The library was our second home and reading was for knowledge and diversion."
Later, at university in Leeds when the swinging Sixties were underway, she found herself rather out of her depth and lonely.
She says it wasn't until she did a teaching post-graduate course at Leicester university that she really learned to think. Working with primary school children she discovered the sheer pleasure of reading and of making things up. But becoming a writer herself was not on the agenda at that stage.
Helene married, had four children and moved to the Yorkshire Dales.
"We wanted to bring the kids up in the country and we just took a risk," says Helene. "We were living in Litchfield in the Midlands and I had a Damascene moment one day and thought –I need hills. It was one of those gut feelings that changes your life."
Her husband David was between jobs at the time and they decided to take a huge gamble, setting off for Yorkshire with a caravan in tow and settling in the village of Langcliffe near Settle where they bought an old farmhouse. They have lived there for 30 years.
"Giving everything up to live the 'good life' wasn't something people did then and we had to find work where we could," said Helene.
She taught aerobics and ran a market stall in Settle selling bread and cakes. Then they bought a caf in Settle which turned out to be a big mistake. It was a meat and two veg establishment which Helene attempted to transform into a wholefood, vegetarian restaurant.
"It was in the early '80s and a bit ahead of its time, in my arrogance I thought I could change it."
They sold the cafe, Helene's husband returned to work as a financial director and she retired hurt to dig the garden.
She says experiencing failure proved to be the making of her. It was around the time that a campaign to save the Settle-Carlisle railway was being launched and this gave her the idea for a book about the navvies who worked on it and the building of the railway line.
She spent a long time writing and re-writing what became her first novel, Trouble on the Wind.
A lifeline during this period of her life was provided by the National Housewives' Register (now the National Women's Register) which had been founded by Mary Stott, the editor of The Guardian woman's page. It was a way of meeting other young mothers and they organised the kind of book circles and study groups that are commonplace today but then provided much
needed stimulation outside the home.
The women's movement was very influential and they read authors such as Marilyn French and Simone de Beauvoir. Everything that happened proved to be grist to the writing mill and both the caf and the National Housewives' Register appeared in Helene's subsequent books.
Until writing took over her life full-time, Helene worked as a counsellor, firstly for Relate and then based at GP practices in the area.
"You get to work with really deep emotions and I think training to do that helps deepen what you write and of course you have to examine your own life and that's informed a lot of my writing as well.
"It allows the dark side of yourself to have its day and one or two bad experiences in my life I have been able to re-form and get my own back. I've really enjoyed that," says Helene.
After writing six or seven books quite quickly she had a break before moving to a new publisher and writing under her maiden name of Fleming. Mothers and Daughters revolves around a baby that was given up for adoption due to family pressure, something that happened regularly in those days if the young mother was unmarried.
It wasn't until she had written the first version of the book that she discovered that this had happened to someone in her own family. Nobody had known about this until the relative phoned Helene and told her she had found the daughter she had been made to part with all those years ago. Helene says she hopes the book will convey how punishing those swinging Sixties could be if you stepped out of line.
A pivotal part of the book also involves one of the characters discovering she has breast cancer, which becomes a turning point in her life.
Before embarking on this book Helene had been treated for breast cancer, from which she is now in remission.
Last year she and her husband drove to Crete, an island they had fallen in love with, and that is where she wrote this book, by far her most personal novel so far.
They had thought about building a house there but decided they could never be ex-pats because they love Yorkshire too much, the rain and the mud and the ups and downs of village life included.
They'll still be heading back to those olive groves from time to time, however, which sounds like the perfect combination.
Mothers and Daughters by Leah Fleming, is published by Avon, priced 6.99. To order a copy from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 015 3232 or go to www.yorkshirepostbook
shop.co.uk. Postage and packing is 2.75.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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