Tag: history

In search of The Pagoda Tree: a four-part series

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by Claire Scobie Over the next four weeks I’m writing about the process I went through thinking, dreaming, researching and writing my novel, The Pagoda Tree (Penguin). Set in eighteenth-century India, this is largely told through the eyes of a temple dancer, or devadasi, named Maya whose life is transformed by the arrival of the British. After my first book, Last Seen in Lhasa, was published I suffered from second book syndrome. As with many first-time authors, my first book, a travel memoir, was a labour of love, a story I felt compelled to write because of my years going…

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Mum

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by Stephen Sewell My mother was the storyteller in our family. My mother and her sisters. They knew the truth and the secrets, as all women do, of births and deaths and the mystery in between. They knew the histories and could weave them into something that made sense, even when it didn’t. Not necessarily with a moral or a lesson, but conveying the peculiar contingency and strangeness of it all, the coincidences and odd juxtapositions that make us pause and wonder and grieve. I suppose that’s the overwhelming sense I have, what I got from them, the sadness and…

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Dad

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by Stephen Sewell My father was nearly killed in a motorbike accident a month after I was born.  When he finally came to, he couldn’t recognise me or my mother and didn’t know who he was. My Aunt Mary tried to tell him, but he didn’t know who she was, either. That was the first blow my parents received. My mother returned to factory work and with the help of her family and my father’s, principally Mary, but also my other aunts, they scraped through. He eventually came home, only to suffer what the doctors called a nervous breakdown that…

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Family

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by Stephen Sewell My father had six brothers and a sister. They had big families in those days, especially the Catholics. There were eight of them in all – Browny, Noel, Tom, Trowl, Barny, Harry, Mary and my father, the youngest, Jack.  Browny was the copper, a mounted policeman out at Condoblin, Tom was the thief who served time in gaol and died spitting and cursing in a sanitorium. He was a favourite of my father’s because of his tough-man talk and claims to knowing Darcy Dugan, a notorious gunman and escape merchant of the era. Sometimes Dad would look…

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Blood and Loss

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by Stephen Sewell I suppose I’ve been a writer all my life, and it’s always been getting me into trouble. I was nearly expelled from school when I was thirteen when the school paper I was editing began an investigation of the local parish priest, and my relationship with authority has been fraught ever since. It’s not that I’m a natural rebel, I don’t think, though most children are, but that I just can’t stand being pushed around. Fundamentally, that’s what it is. So maybe I just never grew up. Of course, I don’t like hypocrisy and can’t stand inconsistency,…

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Walter’s live blogging – final post: Garry Wotherspoon

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by Walter Mason This is my secret confession. When I was 17 I discovered a collection of biographical stories of ordinary gay men called “Being Different.” I bought it second hand and read it compulsively, over and over again, but always in secret. It was edited by Garry Wotherspoon, and it had a tremendous effect on my growing up and coming out. He has remained one of my heroes, and, I discovered when he came to see me today, my story has been repeated to him by other people. It was a groundbreaking book, and it certainly helped young Queer…

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The story of that day

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Belinda Castles Just over five years ago, I decided to write a novel about my grandparents. Their names were Fay and Heinz (in the novel they became Hannah and Emil), and like so many caught up in the wars of the last century, their lives in those times were characterised by displacement and agonising separation. Heinz, a German veteran of the First World War and anti-Nazi socialist, escaped from Germany in 1933, fleeing tragedy and great personal danger. Having crossed the border into Holland and then Belgium, he met Fay, a translator, at the Maison du Peuples in Brussels, where…

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