‘Looking back, I felt adrift... I was a scaffold without the house inside it’

NICCI Gerrard says she is blessed with wonderful female friends – and they’ve all needed each other more than ever these last few years since the children began to leave the nest.

Add to these pangs of loss the changes brought by the menopause that often coincide with children leaving and it’s a tricky emotional time for a woman.

As novelist and journalist Gerrard puts it, the flood of grief she felt when her children, the centre of her life for so long, left her behind truly knocked her over.

She missed them, she missed the person she had been when they were young, and she knew she could never go back to the days when she could protect them from the world. She admits she was also frightened of who she might be without them.

As teenagers across the country face the hurdle of A-levels and the process of separation begins, parents have to face the moment many dread: a rite of passage that must happen that is good and positive, however painful.

Mulling over 24 years of children growing up, Gerrard talks about how much her life was shaped by the moods, wants and needs of one boy and three girls. Even though she had always worked, the loss of children left her feeling shockingly bereaved and redundant, devoid of purpose and worth.

“Looking back, I think I got properly depressed, and I felt ashamed of that. I felt adrift, and didn’t understand what I was meant to do now. I was a scaffold without the house inside it.”

While still struggling to turn feelings of melancholy into positives such as a renewed sense of adventure, appreciation of space and lack of mess in the home and the opportunity to pursue new passions (she learned pottery and became a humanist celebrant), those personal reactions to the empty nest helped to form the nucleus of a novel.

Missing Persons takes the idea of waving off a much-loved son when he goes off to university into new terrain.

While Isabel and Felix are still getting used to the new dynamic in the household – with older daughter already gone and the youngest still at school – suddenly their lovely, centred but rather self-contained son Johnny stops answering calls and texts.

Isabel fights her instinctive fear that something dreadful has happened; Felix tells her she needs to let go of Johnny more. But he quietly calls the university to find that Johnny left some time ago, telling tutors that his mother was ill. No-one has heard from the 18-year-old – he had not shared his plans even with his oldest friends.

The book is not so much Johnny’s story, but that of his parents, sisters and friends – the terrible fears and nightmares, the fissures that open up in relationships, and how each one bears their individual burden of disbelief, hurt and grief.

Other seeds of this particular book, Gerrard’s fifth solo novel (she and her husband Sean French have also written 14 crime novels together as Nicci French) go back decades.

“I did an MA in Sheffield,” says the Worcestershire-born writer, “and after that worked in a children’s home in the city, where the young people’s lives had been blighted. The place had a feeling of lostness about it.One little boy, Matthew, has haunted me ever since.

“Many years later I covered the Rose West trial for the Observer, and apart from the gothic awfulness of the murders, I felt great sorrow and sadness that no-one had seemed to miss these young women. It was as if their lives mattered less.”

Another influence were stories she’d heard about young people who had left home to go to university, whose inability to cope with the change had led to depression or suicide.

“Eighteen or 19 is very young, a period of messiness and fragility in a person’s life. A parent has to let go and let their child have a separate life and secrets, but everyone’s treading a tightrope.”

Like Isabel in the book, parents who are determined not to smother their child and stifle their need to initiate contact.

After Johnny’s disappearance the parents in Missing Persons each retreat into their own corner, separately buckling under the terrible emotional pressure. Loss blows them wide apart.

“I don’t want to be too gender-specific,” says Gerrard, “but these things do drive people apart, and among the people I know who have lost kids, the men tend to control their world of grief and retreat into facts and figures.

“I met Jim Swire, who lost his daughter in the Lockerbie bombing, and it was almost as though he thought he could bring her back by campaigning.

“His wife was just busy being a lovely mum and looking after him and the family. Of course there’s no right way of doing these things.”

Gerrard and her husband give birth to their latest jointly written crime novel this summer.

The collaboration between the two already-succcessful writers came about “as a sort of secret scientific experiment”, she says. At the time their collaboration was unusual; since them many have followed. Their only rules are that they never sit in the same room to write and no outsider is allowed to know who wrote which parts of the book.

No-one wields a red pen; each quietly adds to or rewrites the other’s work as necessary.

“We plan together in great detail what the plot (which changes later) will be and who the characters are, and answer our own questions about why the book is being written. When we feel we’ve both got the same novel in our heads, Sean goes out to the shed to write and I go the study at the top of the house. We then send chapters back and forth, making changes and adding the next chapter.”

Secret Smile, the couple’s eighth novel was adapted into a two-part ITV drama starring David Tennant and their latest co-written book, Tuesday’s Gone, the second in a series about psychotherapist Dr Frieda Klein is out next month.

In between, Gerrard, who still works for the Observer where she has covered the high profile trials not only of Fred and Rose West, but also Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr, has written six solo novels.

She says they have no difficulty slipping back into Nicci French’s voice, after working on their own projects, although she does admit the ability they have to write in the same authentic voice as “the strangest part of the process.... although I feel I have different chambers inside me with a different voice in each. I don’t like to think of only ever using one or two of them.”

Research for Missing Persons took her to missing persons’ charities and onto the streets to sit with and talk to people who live there. The experience was bound to change her.

“Around 250,000 people go missing a year, and I spoke to some of them. Once you really see them you can’t ever ‘un-see’ them and turn your eyes away again.

“They may be matted, weathered and bleak, but we all share the planet equally and they all have their stories. They have just suffered more bad luck than the rest of us.”

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Missing Persons by Nicci Gerrard is published by Penguin, £7.99. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 0153232 or online at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing costs £2.95.

Nicci Gerrard: A writer’s life

Nicci Gerrard was born in June 1958 in Worcestershire. After graduating with a first class honours degree in English Literature from Oxford University, she took an MA at Sheffield University. She married Sheffield Star journalist Colin Hughes.

After teaching English, she moved into publishing in 1985 with the launch of Women’s Review.

Nicci had a son, Edgar, followed by a daughter, Anna, but a year later, her marriage to Colin Hughes broke down.

In 1989, she became acting literary editor at the New Statesman, where she met Sean French. They married and had two daughters, Hadley and Molly. In 1997, they published their first jointly-written novel The Memory Game.