Writing a novel set in the fairly recent past in a country not my own but where I’ve lived for 18 years presents a few extra challenges. My work-in-progress (provisional title The Red Gene), spans the years between 1936 and 2012 and moves between various parts of Spain and England. Secrets of the Pomegranate was also set in Spain but, apart from the earlier diary excerpts, coincided with my time in Granada, which made it much easier: the setting was familiar territory.

Before embarking on the writing of The Red Gene, I had to read widely, interview quite a number of older people (in Spanish) and trawl the Internet. But the need for research doesn’t disappear when you start writing. Almost every day, questions arise – minor details that have to be checked. Were boys and girls taught separately in Cañar’s school in the 1920s? When did they stop bandaging babies’ tummies after birth? Where did people in Antequera go for excursions on feast days and what food did they take? What do they call the fish-shaped banner carried in the Easter processions? With recent history, one needs to take particular care, as there are still plenty of people living who would spot any mistakes or anachronisms. Getting these finer points right is essential. As a reader I’m not only annoyed if I spot errors; I’m also less likely to be convinced by the story.

 

This is not unique to a historical or a foreign setting, of course. Every novelist has to check facts, chase up minutiae. Google and Wikipedia make research a lot easier but they have their limitations and that is where personal contacts come in. They are a rich resource, the key to more first-hand and anecdotal information. The advantage of having lived in Granada for so many years, building up friends and acquaintances (as you do), is huge. A word here or there is enough. If I’m not personally acquainted with a native of Cañar or a midwife, for example, someone I know will be. Someone will remember what books or magazines the older females in their family (those who were literate) were reading in the 1960s.

Knowing whom to turn to for the answers to all those small but important questions is vital. I would never have known from the usual channels about the women in mourning black who prayed to the Cristo de los Favores in Granada’s Realejo district had not my artist friend Allan Dorian Clark, who lived there in the 60s, told me (see his painting below). Nor about the poor people who lined up every Saturday morning at the house of a well-to-do businessman (Esperanza’s father) for a coin that would enable them to eat.

I needed contacts for the English sections of the story too. For example, the father of Rose, my main protagonist, was a vicar. To glean more information about a vicar’s household in the 1930s and 40s, I consulted my friend John, whose father was a vicar in England at that time.

In Spain, my doctor friend Rosa could confirm that my account of dealing with a sudden heart attack in the late 1930s was realistic; members of my walking group knew in which areas the maquis (guerrilla fighters) were active in the years after the Civil War. The parents of my pilates teacher Javi are from Antequera, where Consuelo (another main character in my novel) grew up, and could give me an insight into life there during the dictatorship; Pepita, a midwife in the 1950s, could describe her travels to remote parts of the province to attend births. From Allan, who belongs to several of the religious cofradías (brotherhoods), I could glean an inside view of their activities.

I have friends or friends of friends who come from families on the left and (a few) on the right. A bus driver from the village of Cañar, where the family of Rose’s lover Miguel lived, told me of two histories of the village written by natives, one a relative of his. I talked to Spanish nurses, to a retired labourer and to the daughter of a Republican who had disappeared into hiding for most of the Franco decades.

So in this post, I want to offer a massive thank you to all the friends and acquaintances who by furnishing me with the authentic detail I needed, helped bring my story alive.

A question often asked of writers is which books or authors have inspired them, so here are a few of my favourites, those that have been my inspiration since childhood. Some have influenced my life as well as my writing; with others I feel a particular affinity. Only when I began to make a list did I notice the common threads. Adventure and passion seem to run through many of them – from authors as diverse as Arthur Ransome and Thomas Hardy. So maybe my choice of reading also attests to the passionate feelings of a Scorpio, the Sagittarian love of travel and thirst for adventure (you may scoff at astrology but, just for the record, Scorpio is my sun sign, Sagittarius my ascendant). Social justice (or rather injustice) is another theme common to my choice of reading from early on. It’s a topic I feel strongly about and inevitably this is reflected in most of the novels I’ve written.

 The first real craze I remember was for Arthur Ransome. The adventures of the Swallows and Amazons captured my imagination as nothing before. Between the ages of about eight and eleven, I read and re-read every one of his books; acted out scenes from them with my friend Rita; learnt all the vocabulary and technicalities of sailing without ever setting sail in a real boat. We were Captain Nancy and Mate Peggy of the Amazon and I still remember the thrill of meeting ‘Captain John of the Swallow’ at the local swimming pool; we became instant friends. My father indulged me by taking us on a family holiday to Lake Coniston and hiring a rowing boat to visit Wild Cat Island. What was the attraction of these books? Adventure and independence perhaps, along with a love of water (my Scorpio side again). I saw the film of Swallows and Amazons recently, expecting a family audience, but the mostly grey heads proved that its appeal was generational. The books now seem overly dated: I didn’t even try introducing them to my children.

Another author whose books I sought out in the library as a child was Malcom Saville. When, years later, I moved to Shropshire, Stiperstones, the Devil’s Chair and other local landmarks were as familiar as if I’d known them all my life. At around the same age, I became a fan of Geoffrey Trease’s historical novels. I remember scouring the library shelves each week for new ones, disappointed by his failure to keep up with my voracious reading demands.

In my teens, passion about causes and strong emotions drew me to the novels of James Baldwin. Giovanni’s Room, The Fire Next Time, Another Country chimed with (and very likely helped foster) my abhorrence of prejudice, whether racial or sexual, in the less liberal society of the 60s. On a more personal level, Thomas Hardy’s doomed romances pulled at my emotions, echoing my own teenage heartbreaks. I was the tragic heroine and Hardy helped me put the blame for my romantic failures on cruel fate. A couple of years later, I discovered D H Lawrence and fell for the earthiness and sensuality of his writing.

In the 70s, feminist writers like Doris Lessing, Marge Piercy and Marilyn French dominated my reading and undoubtedly shaped my thinking to some extent. Class was another important issue for my generation (street cred depended on proving your working class origins, at least in the circles I moved in). It offended my inverted snobbery that many contemporary novelists seemed to write only about middle class characters in bourgeois settings so I was delighted to find Pat Barker writing about working class people in the down-to-earth community of Teesside, where my husband grew up. In my own writing, especially in my earlier novels, I deliberately chose ordinary people (in terms of class, not character) from humble backgrounds as my protagonists.

John Fowles’ The Collector intrigued me and I went on to read The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Ebony Tower, The Magus and others, impressed by the fact that each was so different. I’ve always admired those authors who show versatility rather than repeating the same formula. Another example is Rose Tremain, perhaps my favourite contemporary writer and one of my greatest inspirations. The Cupboard, Letter to Sister Benedicta, Music and Silence, Sacred Country, The Colour, Restoration, The Road Home: what do they have in common? Very little except great writing, psychological insight and empathy, the skill of drawing the reader in to characters, setting and story. With Maggie Gee, it was our common themes and concerns that struck me first. I was well into writing my anti-nuclear novel when The Burning Book came out. Grace was a novel loosely based on the unsolved Hilda Murrell murder in Shrewsbury that with its disturbing political ambiguities preoccupied many of us locally at the time. The White Family dealt brilliantly with racial prejudice, through the lives of an ordinary English family.

My love of adventure and romance as well as his beautiful poetic prose made it inevitable I should fall in love with Laurie Lee. It may even have subconsciously influenced my decision to move to Spain many years after first reading his books. India was another country that fascinated me and I lapped up writers such as V S Naipaul, Arundhati Roy, Rohinton Mistry and Vikram Seth. In the meantime, I had become a travel writer myself.

Although Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy was aimed at young readers, it captivated me in middle age. The books can be read on many levels and chimed with my philosophical, non-religious outlook. The magic realism of Isabel Allende enchanted me too. Eva Luna in particular caught my imagination. Where do I stop? ‘Read, read, read’ is the advice given to aspiring writers. I agree, but reading as a writer is slow, time is precious and there are just too many good books out there.

I sit at my computer. Two hours pass by, three hours… and I’ve written nothing. My thoughts veer wildly, resisting any kind of discipline. The internet diverts me, even if my browsing started off as genuine research. E-mails ping their arrival; the urge to check their contents is strong. More often than not, they prove to be nothing more inspirational than sale offers, petitions or notice of bills, but I’m too weak to ignore them. My ability to focus has deserted me. How long should I sit there, ostensibly at work but in fact merely frittering away the precious moments? There’s a time to stay and a time to go but how to tell them apart? Two unproductive hours at my desk may be two hours wasted. Or they may lead to an hour’s furious typing and a thousand inspired words.

I’m waiting at the dentist’s. My mind is blank, zombie-like. Until, from out of nowhere the muse blows in with a superlative idea. I rummage in my bag for a pen, something to write on: the back of a till receipt, that restaurant or decorator’s flier handed to me in the street; any scrap of paper will do. I can’t believe there is no pen. How could I have been so negligent as to leave the house without one? It’s the number one rule for a writer: always have a pen and paper handy – in the bath, on the move, in bed, wherever. The idea refines itself. I am desperate to write it down before it vanishes, replaced by some distracting conversation about teeth or inconsequential domestic detail. My lousy memory can’t be trusted to wait for a more appropriate moment. I borrow a pen from reception and scribble a few notes before I’m called in.

Riding my bike, mind half on the traffic, half on my work-in-progress, I’ll suddenly pull in to the side of the road and jot down my brilliant sentence or plot twist. Ploughing my lengths at the swimming pool, I hold on to the thoughts until at last on dry land in the changing room with a towel at hand, I can write without soaking the paper and making of my brainwave a soggy illegible mess. (You can spot a writer anywhere.)

Now when I sit at my computer, I’m faced with a collection of untidy scraps of paper extracted from the bottom of bags, where they may have lurked for days. Crumpled and stained, they are nevertheless valuable and must be saved. Some go into a folder; others have their contents typed straight onto the screen to form part of my masterpiece.

For the ultimate in communing with the muse, nothing can top a retreat: time spent in complete isolation, far away from all the mundane tasks and social interactions that go with being at home. Total immersion is the ideal way to make progress. My novel is everything: it fills every space in my brain, allowing no intrusions. New ideas come racing towards me – character or plot developments, snatches of dialogue, revisions of structure… I welcome them in, gathering them up like precious blooms. I don’t have to be at a desk day and night. I can walk in the countryside, swim in the sea, sit over a coffee. I return to the computer fired up with enthusiasm, eager to transcribe the pages of notes I have produced during my sortie.

Sadly, it cannot last. Back home after a few days or weeks on retreat, writing immediately grinds to a standstill. There are jobs to catch up on, social life to resume. I mourn the loss of my parallel life of fulltime creativity. I must find a way to invite the muse back in. The secret, I know, lies in gaining freedom from all the usual preoccupations. Only when problems have been dealt with or dismissed and the mind is a blank sheet, will inspiration strike. A long walk, a day on the beach, may well be more productive than hours facing a screen, but only if I’m alone. Writing is a solitary occupation. The muse is shy, elusive, unreliable, the most perverse of companions. But every time it appears at my side, I give thanks for the miracle.

 

When I first arrived in Granada seventeen years ago, from a multicultural Britain where overt racism had long been socially unacceptable, I was shocked by the racism against Arabs that I found even amongst educated people. It struck me as ironic that while Granada and other towns in Andalucía were cashing in on their Moorish heritage (in particular the Alhambra) to attract thousands of tourists every year, they seemed unashamed of openly denigrating the moros who had settled in the city over the past twenty years or so, mainly from Morocco or Senegal. These people were labelled inmigrantes as opposed to guiris, the rather more affectionate term used for immigrants like me from northern Europe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I wondered if this prejudice could be a historical hangover, a kind of inherited memory passed down the generations from the centuries of struggle between Muslims and Christians. Or whether it was simply due to the fact that immigration (still on a very small scale) was such a recent phenomenon in Spain. For decades the Spanish had emigrated to other countries – Latin America or northern Europe – either for political or economic reasons. Its people were not used to immigrants. Could it even have something to do with Franco’s use of Moroccan mercenaries against the Republican population during the Civil War?

When I wrote Secrets of the Pomegranate, prejudice and especially Islamophobia was one of my themes. Deborah, the central character in the novel, had a relationship with a Moroccan journalist and faced insults from some of her neighbours as a result. She fought alongside local Muslims (some of them European converts to Islam) for the right to build a mosque in the Albaicín, virulently opposed by many in the neighbourhood. (I remember being shocked by some of the racist graffiti I saw daubed on the walls of my barrio.) After 9/11, an al-Jazeera journalist in Granada was arrested and accused of having connections with terrorists. Something similar happened after the Madrid train bombings in 2004, with which the novel opens. My fictional character Hassan was one of those accused.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In depicting this background to the story, I was not suggesting that racism was worse in Spain, just more open and admissible. Deborah’s sister Alice, who had always lived in England, was also prejudiced, as was their mother. Their suspicion of Hassan was based purely on prejudice.

Now, after the ugly Brexit campaign in the UK with its blatant appeal to xenophobia and its not so subtle message that immigrants are to blame for all the country’s ills, it has suddenly become permissible in the UK too to insult foreigners. The campaign hardly even bothered to distinguish between European ‘economic migrants’ whose status would be affected if Britain left the EU, and desperate refugees from the wars in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan, whose countries the West had been complicit in bombing.

Britain has in fact opened the door to precious few of these refugees, considering it is one of the richer countries of Europe. Instead, the flood gates (to use the type of expression employed in the Brexit campaign when talking about immigrants) have now been opened to hate and prejudice, which it seems was always lurking below the civilised surface. I thought Britain had embraced the richness and diversity of other cultures. Was it all just superficial? No more than a liking for Indian food, Jamaican reggae, hardworking Polish plumbers and the open-all-hours Pakistani corner shop? I’m horrified by how little it took to awaken the latent racism beneath. I feel deeply ashamed of my country. The sudden rise in racist incidents is shocking. Now, anyone ‘foreign’, whether born in Britain but the wrong colour, a recent refugee or a longstanding resident – maybe one of the many doctors, nurses and carers keeping the health and social services going – seems to be fair game for abuse.

 

I’m well aware that a vast number of my compatriots in Britain abhor what is happening as much as I do and are actively taking steps to show their support for those from other races and cultures, in particular helping refugees. Almost half the country voted to stay in Europe and of those who voted to leave, I would guess only a minority are racists. In Granada (and other parts of Spain) too, many are showing solidarity with refugees. The Spanish, after all, know only too well what it is to have to flee their country. Half a million did so as a result of the Civil War or its aftermath.

Prejudice and hatred are the result of division, of a ‘them and us’ mentality that denies humanity to ‘them’. Wars as well as individual acts of hostility result from creating enemies of those who are ‘other’, whether through religion, nationality, class, race, sexuality or whatever. My father, a (secular) Jew from Berlin, seeing the rise of fascism and what it might lead to, felt he had no choice but to leave his country and sacrifice a promising career in law. Fascism is now on the rise in several European countries. A far-right fanatic shouted Britain First as he shot and stabbed an MP known to support refugees. Could it really all happen again? Or can we take hope from the efforts of those moved to action by the negative fallout of the Brexit campaign and the plight of refugees?