The Return of Pedro

          On September 2nd, Picadilly Press publish 'We're Having A

'We're Having A Party!' - 30 years of children's books

Party' to celebrate their 30 years of publishing for children.
          In one volume, they've brought together seven short stories - enough for one every day, or bedtime, or bath-time, for a week.
          The book is illustrated by Emma Chichester Clark, and its stories are 'about everything from imaginary friends to following Mum’s orders, an amazing dog to unexpected neighbours...'
           They have been written by a roll-call of excellent, acclaimed writers for children: Anne Fine, Jan Mark, Jacqueline Wilson, Helen Cresswell, Robert Swindells and Hilary McKay.
          It costs £7-99, and would make a very good Christmas present. Or birthday present. Or unbirthday present, come to that.
          What is my interest in this book? Well, that amazing dog... His name is Pedro, and I wrote him.
          I've got even more attachment to him than that, because 'Pedro' is an almost entirely true story - apart from a little narrative tweaking here and there. Pedro belonged to my great-grandmother.
          I was raised on stories of my parents' childhoods - 'Tell us about Christmas when you were little, Mom.' And then we heard about the orange in the stocking's toe, the white enamel bucket filled with nuts, the pink and white sugar mice. Or we heard about how her brothers fought - or how they dressed one brother up as a guy, and towed him round the streets in a buggy, begging for, 'A penny for the guy.'
          My father countered with stories of damming brooks, or seeing spitfires flying overhead, or filling his mother's washing-boiler with tadpoles. (And hilarity ensued? Not with my grandmother, it didn't.)

Dare you to fill this woman's boiler with tadpoles!

          They also told us stories from the previous generation - stories that their parents had told to them, about their childhoods. So we heard about our mother's mother going out to work at ten, or walking 12 miles every day to work in the glassworks.
          My father told us how his father started work, in 1912, aged 12, and how he'd been an ostler with enormous great cart-horses. Another tale told of Great-Grandad's nightly attempts to put the cat out.
          Great Grandad was always a little befuddled by bedtime, and every night my Grandad (who slept on the floor under the kitchen table) would watch as his father caught the cat, unlocked the many locks and bolts on the door, caught the cat again, put the cat outside - after a struggle involving the cat bracing its legs against the door-frame - closed and re-bolted and relocked the door,  and finally started up the stairs to bed. Half-way up, he always met the cat coming down on its way back to the warm kitchen again.
          Swearing, Great-Grandad would start the whole cat-wrangling performance again. What he didn't know - but which my young grandad sniggering with his brother under the table did know - was that the cat simply climbed the crumbling cottage wall and got into the upstairs room through a broken pane which had been blocked with cardboard. It pushed the cardboard aside with its head, jumped inside and scooted down the stairs, back to the fire. To have pointed this out, though, would have spoiled the nightly show.
          I loved these stories. Another great favourite was the tale of my paternal Great-Grandmother (wife of the befuddled cat-dupe) and her corgi, Pedro. This was the woman and the dog who convinced several Polish emigrees that all the stories they'd heard were true, and the English were quite mad.

Original 1996 cover

          So when, in 1996, Picadilly asked me for a funny story, I wrote down the family story of Pedro. I can't decide whether it was my Great-Grandmother or the dog who was more eccentric, but I thought their story deserved to be passed on.
          I never worried about dates when I sat listening to these stories, but I suppose the years when my Great-Gran doted on Pedro were either just before or just after the Second World War.
          It would spoil the story to give away much of it here - but I will warn you that the ending is unavoidably sad. Dogs don't live for ever. I don't apologise for this, though. I think adults often try too hard to protect children from the harshness of the world. I've said in another blog that as soon as I was able to read a favourite book of animal stories for myself, I gravitated to the more tragic stories - whereas my father had only read me the lighter, more comic ones.
         When I read stories aloud to my younger brother, I noticed that those he asked for most often were the ones that made him sob. I would say, "You don't want to hear that one again, do you? It made you cry." He would insist that he wanted, more than any other, to hear the sad story again. There was obviously something in the story that he needed and wanted to hear.
          So I decided not to hide Pedro's sad end. After all, he had a very good and happy life. It might have been short - but his memory lives on!

We're Having A Party!

Post-Haste

          I've got to be brief this week, as I'm the middle of various work deadlines, and also, am not feeling too well. Like a lot of other people, I've a bit of a cold, a bit of sore throat, bit of headache... And it's Davy's birthday meal-out this weekend, too, so I'm saving myself for that.
          First, I'd like to share this short film with you. I've copied it from YouTube, where it was posted by the BBC Wildlife Trust, but it was filmed and sent to the BBC by a friend of mine. I'm not saying where it was filmed, for fear that government sharp-shooters get to hear of it, but it was somewhere in the deep, dark depths of the West Midlands concrete wilderness.

So there's hope that even if the government stupidly persist in killing one of our oldest native species, despite very little evidence that doing so will stop the spread of TB in cattle, badgers will simply join foxes in our backgardens. This one already co-exists with a family of foxes and several cats.

          And then there's this lad:- 

 Not the best photo, I admit. He now has a frost nibbled maple leaf in his crown - an English maple, Joan, sorry - and oak leaves sprouting from the corners of his mouth in best Green Man style. A bird of a species unknown to science has built a nest against his right cheek. There will be eggs in it, but at the moment the glue's still drying and I don't want to add extra weight.

          I spend as much time looking at him and thinking as I do adding anything. I'm thinking: apple-blossom above the nest, and an apple against his left cheek, opposite the nest. Too obvious? Maybe. But then, the seasons are pretty obvious. Not much point trying to be original about them.

          As soon as I get my hands on some paint - couldn't find any in my local poundstore, Madwippet - I'll add some colour, just to make it easier to tell what I'm doing.

 

 

English Words

A tunky pig?

          As a child, I often heard the expression, ‘fat as a tunky pig.’  My aunt’s over-fed dog, for instance, was often said to be, ‘fat as a tunky pig.’

          I asked my father (who I regarded as a walking encyclopedia) how a tunky pig differed from other pigs, and was astonished when he didn’t know.  (But, to his credit, he admitted it.)  “I suppose,” he said, “it was a breed of pig.”

          I left it at that until, years later, I was researching my book, Christopher Uptake (available here, as an e-book.)  This involved finding out about the Catholicism and saints of the 16^th century, and I happened to read about StAnthony the Great.  His emblem was a pig; and he came to be regarded as a saint who looked kindly upon all pigs.

Christopher Uptake by Susan Price

          It’s recorded by John Stowe that, in Elizabethan I’s reign, and probably earlier, market officials would not allow ‘unwholesome’ or underweight pigs to be sold.  Instead, they were marked by having their ears slit, and turned loose, to feed on the rubbish in the city streets.  Since all pigs were considered to be in St Anthony’s care, they were known as ‘St Anthony’s pigs,’ and left unharmed. They thrived, and soon learned to follow people who had food, making a bit of a nuisance of themselves.

          So, Stowe says, if someone pestered you for a favour, they were said to be following you ‘like a tantony pig.’  And someone who obviously fed themselves well was, ‘as fat as a tantony pig.’

          I had forgotten all about my childhood puzzlement, but when I read this, light broke in upon me.  “As fat as a tunky pig!”  ‘Tantony’, corrupted and contracted from ‘St. Anthony’ had suffered further in being passed down through generations of Protestants and – being my family – athiests.  Protestant athiests, if you will.

          Since Stowe explained its meaning in the 1500s, presumably it was an expression which was beginning to puzzle people even then.  I’m amazed by how far it staggered on down the centuries – 400 years, at least -  in frequent use by people who didn’t know what a ‘tunky pig’ was.  They probably just liked the sound of it.

          But words and phrases do survive, much better than people.  Perhaps they’re what Dawkins would call ‘memes.’

          Take the expression, ‘down in the dumps,’ meaning ‘depressed.’   How old would you say that was?  I’d assumed that it was 19^th Century, perhaps a bit later – the kind of phrase found in one of those beautifully drawn Punch cartoons with a novella for a caption.   I was astonished to find it in Christopher’s Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, written in 1589 or 1590:

BARABAS. Go tell 'em the Jew of Malta sent thee, man. ..... Why, how now, Don Mathias, in a dump?

          And that racy 1970s expression ‘Come back to my pad’?  - 16^th Century beggars’ cant.  They carried with them a rolled up sleeping-pad, which they often left outside towns, in lonely barns, while they made forays.  At night, they ‘went back to their pad.’  Why this re-surfaced in the ‘70s is anybody’s guess.

          That word, ‘cant’, which my Oxford Dictionary defines as ‘language peculiar to a specified group: thieves’ cant… Origin, 16^th century, in sense "singing", later "whining speech", as of a beggar.'

         My mother often used the word.  She’d come in crossly, saying of someone she’d met, “Her kept me canting above half-hour and I’ve so much to do!”  Or, “Standing here canting woe mek the babby a new frock!”  For her, it meant 'gossip' or 'idle talk.'

          Coming from the Black Country, where the dialect is all that remains of Middle English, I learned a lot of very old words, which were used casually, in everyday speech.  ‘Wench’ for instance.  There was nothing ‘humorous’, as the OED puts it, or self-consciously quaint about our use of the word.  Nor did it have any sense of ‘prostitute’ as my OED insists the word originally meant.  It simply meant ‘girl’ or ‘young woman’ – just as the northern ‘lass’ does (Old Norse: ‘Laskura’, unmarried.)

          ‘Our Wench’ meant ‘my sister’, as ‘Our Kid’ meant ‘my brother’.

         An editor once refused to allow me to use ‘Our Kid’ in this sense in my book, Twopence A Tub, set in the 19^th Century Black Country.  ‘Kid’ was ‘an Americanism’, she said.  I didn’t believe it then, and I see that my latest OUD (2009) gives its derivation as ‘Middle English, from Old Norse kith.’  As in ‘kith and kin’, I guess.  Ha!  Writer, 1: Editor 0.

          When, as an ‘A’ level student, I read of the king’s ‘reechy kisses’ in Hamlet, I didn’t need to look at the notes, because my mother was always wiping us down while exclaiming, “Yo’m reesty, reechy, riffy, dairty, like some kid nobody doe own!”

          When I came across ‘gledy’ (fiery) in Chaucer, I was already familiar with it because of the often heard description of people with a raucous laugh or voice: ‘like a gleed under a door.’  This, it had been explained to me, was when a small piece of burnt coal, a gleed, became trapped under a planking door and was scraped across uncarpeted, bare tiles or stone flags when the door was opened or closed.  The noise was painful.  So I knew that ‘gledy’ was associated with fire and burning.

          One more Black Country word from my childhood: malkin.  I used to think it was spelled ‘mawkin’ because that’s how it was pronounced.  It was often used affectionately, but means, ‘idiot, fool, silly person.’  I thought of it as ‘slang’ and never bothered to look it up – but I was flipping through my parents’ dictionary one day, and happened to see it, as the last entry at the bottom of a page: malkin.  It isn’t in my OED Concise, but I remember that the old dictionary gave its definition as ‘simpleton’ and said it was derived from Old English.       

...Choose me,

You English words? 

 

...But though older far

Than oldest yew, -

As our hills are, old, -

Worn new

Again and again:

Young as our streams

After rain:

And as dear

As the earth which you prove

That we love. 

 

Edward Thomas.

 

          I'm always delighted to learn new dialect words, if you know any!

 

A Day Out In History

The Black Country Museum from the Chapel steps

          I visited the Black Country Museum the other day.

          It’s an open air museum, dedicated to the industrial history of the Black Country, with many reconstructed buildings, illustrating what life was like in the area from the late 1700s to the 1930s.

          We chanced on a day  when many steam engines were chuntering around the site, and as we stepped from the entrance building, we breathed in coal-smoke, and ash I hadn’t smelled in many a long year.  It was the smell of my childhood. (Davy, a Scot and country boy, started coughing immediately, and said that he wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes in Ye Olde Blacke Countrie.  My family lasted, but it’s true that we have generations of bronchitis, severe coughs, sinus trouble and catarrh behind us.)

          We saw the ‘nodding donkey’ Newcomen engine steaming away.  It’s one of the oldest surviving engines, dating from 1712, and originally built to pump water from Lord Dudley’s mines, only a couple of miles from where it stands now.

          From there we visited the mine.  It’s a ‘fake’ mine, but within the constraints of not actually injuring or killing visitors, an effective one.  As you go round, tableau are illuminated, and a recorded voice – supposedly that of an old miner – tells you about the work done by the miners in the 19^th century. 

          The low, narrow, dimly lit tunnels give a very real sense of the claustrophobic, awful conditions: and the mock ‘blasts’ and roof-falls are scary.  We emerged into the daylight profoundly grateful, yet again, for having been born in the 20^th Century, and not having spent a childhood crouching in total darkness, to open air-doors.

          The mine also provides a vivid impression of the dangers of the Black Country’s famous ‘thirty-foot seam’ (9 metre seam) – the only place in the world where you climbed a tall ladder to cut coal.  Bringing the roof down was no game.

'The Ghost Wife' ebook by Susan Price - Art by Andrew Price

          Walking around above ground, I pointed out the dark ‘Staffordshire Blue’ bricks that topped most of the walls, and made the pavements and roadways.  I realised that the red and blue brick, the grey smoke and the greenery in the gardens made up the colour palette of my childhood – as my brother has so well captured in his cover for my ‘Ghost Wife’, set in the Black Country.  I hadn’t realised that until I visited the museum.

          We joined a lesson in the school, chanted our times tables, and practiced our handwriting on the slates, and we toured the 1920’s fairground with its helter-skelter and swingboats.  We went into the cinema – we got two of the better seats, avoiding the hard benches – and watched a showing of Chaplin’s ‘Getting Acquainted’, which I have to say I found completely incomprehensible, though Davy was chuckling.

The Dudley canal tunnel

          But what Davy really wanted to do was go through the canal tunnels under Dudley’s hill.  So we joined the narrow boat and were taken into the dark, dripping tunnels that have been there since 1792.  It’s not very comforting, when you have a whole hill hanging above you, to think that the boat battered brickwork around you, seeped through with calcite from the limestone, is 220 years old.

          It’s a memorable – if wet – experience, as your boat passes the sinister openings of old limestone mines, or floats from darkness into a brilliantly lit, green basin, open to the sky and birdsong.  In many places the walls of the tunnel are hung with beautiful calcite ‘curtains’ of crystals in glittering lacy folds.

          After the boat-trip, we visited the ‘Bottle and Glass’ Inn, where they will serve you a pint of old ale – but the place was grimly comfortless compared to a modern pub, even in the saloon bar (and no respectable woman would have crossed the threshold).  Opposite the pub, of course, was the Methodist Chapel, which is used for carol services at Christmas.

          There are several shops, of different dates.  Davy liked the one displaying old motorbikes, and I always enjoy Emile Doo’s Chemist’s.  The grocery shop was being swept out by a woman in Victorian dress.  A visitor called out to her, mockingly, “I’ll have ten pounds wuth of grey pays!”

          The shop-keeper replied, tartly, “I doubt yo’ve got ten pounds to yer nairm, madam – look at the sight on yer – wearing a mon’s trousers, and on a Sabbath!  Yo should be ashairmed!  Out on it – goo on!”  The visitor was laughing too much to think of asking why the shop was, disgracefully, open on the Sabbath.

A Black Country pike

          I was sorry to miss the magnificent shire horses which are sometimes to be found on site (at other times they’re at the Sandwell ValleyFarm) but there were a couple of very happy Gloucester Old Spot pigs grubbing around in a cottage garden; and the stretch of canal down by the old lime kilns has become something of a nature reserve.  Davy, a fisherman, was much impressed by the clarity of the water and the big fish (including a small pike) – and I liked the moorhen and chicks.

Happy pigs

          All in all, a good day out and one which, if great lumps of imagination are used, can give you a glimpse of the old Black Country.  But the real thing, it needs to be pointed out, was much grimmer, dirtier and far more cruel.  The men who worked those lime-kilns, for instance, were blinded: and there was no ‘nanny-state’ either to change the conditions that caused the blinding or to look after them once they were blind.

 

CHRISTMAS PRESENCE



'Overheard In A Graveyard' by Susan Price.

         
           Christmas will soon be here, and Christmas is the season for ghost stories.  I think it was Jerome K Jerome who observed that at Christmas, that time of fellowship and good cheer, we love to tell stories of the grave, of hearts torn asunder by death, of ghastly presences hovering in the dark just outside the lamplight... How right he was.
          Here's a little Christmas present for my readers, a link to one of the stories in my book OVERHEARD IN A GRAVEYARD - in fact, the title story itself.
          I'll be posting links to another ghost story on Christmas Day itself, over on Do Authors Dream of Electric Books.



'Nightcomers' by Susan Price.

          The story going up on Christmas Day is a much sweeter tale than Overheard - it's based on family Christmases from my childhood, and was inspired by my mother talking about her childhood Christmases and how much her mother always looked forward to Christmas.  It's called 'The Christmas Trees' and comes from my collection of ghost stories, NIGHTCOMERS.
          It's a bit of a family affair, as all the covers to my e-books are done by my brother, Andrew Price.

'Hauntings' by Susan Price

          I have yet another collection of ghost stories on kindle, HAUNTINGS.  I like  ghost stories - I like reading them and writing them.  They aren't an easy form.
          For me, they aren't about gross-out horror.  That's for horror-stories.  Ghost stories, I feel, should unsettle or disturb in some way - but they are as much for talking about sadness and loss as fear.  They are about our shadow-side and the numinous, as well as the dead.
         But for now I'll wish you all a Merry Christmas, because this blog will be taking a break over Christmas (and eating itself sick.)
          But, before I go, Blot has a Christmas Message he wishes to impart - 

WHY ARE YOU A WRITER?

Me (seated) shortly before deciding on writing career

          A student recently asked me, “Why are you a writer?”  And since writing’s not secure or lucrative, why am I still?

          There isn’t one simple answer.

          It was an early decision.  My aunt tells me that she remembers me marching up to her and my grandmother and firmly announcing that I intended to be a writer – at four years old.  This surprises me because I thought I’d decided much, much later in life - at seven.  But, whichever, I was unwavering thereafter

          But why did an infant want to be a writer?  I used to think it was due simply to my family’s immense respect for books and writers.  My mother almost revered books, and minded us scribbling on the wallpaper far less than drawing in a book. So, in our house, saying you wanted to be a writer was sure to win approval.

          These days, I think Nature and Nurture are almost equal in influence, and my family were great story-tellers.  Throughout my childhood I heard stories of my mother’s childhood: of how one hot-tempered auntie punched her fist through a glass pane, of an uncle was taken to hospital in a wheelbarrow, of the cat which could open the door when my mother couldn’t.

My Grandmother Price

          My father countered with tales of my grandfather’s battle with a mouse called Mickey Duff, of how my great-grandfather served time for GBH – and how my Grandmother won a national newspaper’s story-writing competition.  Nearly fifty years later, I won £50 the same way.

          Telling stories was what you did.  Anything that happened, you polished into a story, with dramatic pauses, twists, punch-lines.  Writing stories down was a natural progression.

          And then, writing is acting for ugly people and action for coach-potatoes, which suits me perfectly.  I can take on whatever appearance I fancy, in whatever century, change sex, change species, even become an extra-terrestrial.  I can sail Viking ships, ride with reivers, dig a canal, emigrate to Mars – all without leaving my sofa and laptop.  As the student said, “How cool is that?”

          Lastly, writing never becomes boring.  Difficult, frustrating, head-nipping – yes.  Boring, no.  I once knew a novice writer who wrote a play for a University production.  It was well-received and the novice decided to write another for the following year.  After several months, with head severely nipped, she cried out, “It doesn’t get easier, does it?”

          She’d thought it would, you see.  Everything else she’d tried had been easier the second time, and easier still the third.  Obviously, writing would be the same.  After all, she knew how to do it now, right?

The Sterkarm Handshake

          No art – be it writing, painting, music, dancing, or even Fuzzy Mathematics – ever gets easier.  You don’t have to be Shakespeare or Beethoven for that to be true either.

          Every new piece of writing brings new problems, and exposes new areas of ignorance to be researched.  You never know where a story’s going to lead you.  You’re always learning.

          I had no idea, fifteen years ago, when I headed off for a walking holiday based in Durham, that, as a result, I was going to learn so much about the reivers and their way of life – to say nothing of modern weaponry.  Nor, that fifteen years later, I’d still be learning more.

          I’m doing what I declared I would, fifty-odd years ago, aged four.  I can’t say I regret it.

          And here's Blot -  

LET'S MAKE THE FILM RIGHT HERE! In Our Kitchen...

£1.71  Ghost Dance by Susan Price  $2.99

          I met up with my brothers last week, and mentioned that I was days away from publishing my third book on kindle, GHOST DANCE, the third book in the Ghost World sequence.

          Adam looked at Andrew and said, “We ought to make a trailer for them!”  Andrew enthusiastically agreed, and the rest of the afternoon was spent in planning how it could be done for no money at all.

          I never asked them to do it!  It was, I swear, entirely their own idea.  For all the attempts I’ve been making to let the world know that my books are on the kindle, making a trailer had never occurred to me.

          But, both my brothers love films, and they’re both artists.  (Andrew, the older, has worked as an artist for a computer games firm, and does the book covers for my kindle books; and Adam has published cartoons, and draws the Blot cartoons.) They said it would be a fun way of teaching themselves some new programmes and techniques.

          There followed a long discussion of whether to use stills, or some kind of puppets, or animated paper cut-outs.  What dissolves would be best.  “Can we get Alan (our cousin) to play some music for us?”

           They are going to meet up this Thursday, to draw up a story-board.

          I don’t know if it will come to anything, but I’m agog.  I’m even prepared to disturb the moths in my purse and buy them a camcorder (though the last I heard they were planning to borrow my aunt’s.  Keep it in the family is our motto.  This is why my Twitter name is @priceclan.)
          Film trailers are nothing new of course.  My friend and fellow Scattered Author, Katherine Langrish, has made a trailer for her book DARK ANGELS I love it (and the book) and played the trailer to my brothers for educational and inspirational purposes.

          I think Kath’s short film captures the atmosphere of her book brilliantly, and I’m impressed by its quality.  If Kath had told me she’d paid large splodges of moolah to have it made professionally, I wouldn’t have doubted it, but in fact she made it herself, with help from her family.

          I’ll be thrilled if my family can come up with something as good.  You can bet I’ll keep you posted on the progress of PriceClan Studios.

        

And here's Blott -

There are more Blot cartoons at www.susanpriceauthor.com