Setting and Family Stories by Emily Critchley
I’ve never lived in North Lincolnshire but I’ve visited often and it’s always been very present in my imagination. Having listened to the memories of my mother’s childhood, and the stories of my grandparents, it felt natural for me to use the place where my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother grew up as the setting for my novel. Although the characters and the plot are both a work of fiction, the setting is loosely based on the small English market town of Louth. In One Puzzling Afternoon, I call the town Ludthorpe. The present sections of the book are narrated by eighty-two year-old Edie as she tries to solve the mystery of her best friend’s disappearance, over sixty years ago, and the past sections, in 1951, are from the perspective of a teenage Edie.
Whether because of looking at old family photographs, or hearing my mother’s childhood stories, I clearly saw the town in the past. It felt natural for my characters to live and breathe there. And although One Puzzling Afternoon is set in the rural county my mother grew up in, not in London where my father remembers playing in the rubble left behind by Hiter’s bombs, the house Edie lives in has a similar layout to the house my father lived in in East London; a house with no inside toilet, and a bath hung on a hook behind the kitchen door ready for bath night.
I have always been interested in women’s lives during the first half of the twentieth century. It was a time of great change, and the two wars brought about many hardships. My great grandmother, one of ten children, was born in 1893 in a place called Saltfleetby, a small rural village out on the flat salt marshes of Lincolnshire. In One Puzzling Afternoon, I could easily see Edie and her friend Lucy cycling along the long flat road to the sea, passing the house where my grandmother and her siblings were born.
My first published story, written when I was at university, and published in an online journal for historical fiction, was set in 1916 and was based on my great-grandmother during WW1, on the day her parents received the telegram to inform them their eldest son, the brother my grandmother was closest to, had been killed in action in France. They received the telegram on Christmas Day. The doctor had to bring it to them as it was the postman’s day off. I can see the doctor now, solemnly walking alongside the bare winter fields, about to deliver this terrible news. My great-grandmother said it was the first time she had seen her father, and indeed any man, cry. She hadn’t known it was possible.
Family stories are meaningful to us. They belong to us. We are told them so often that we assimilate them and keep them alive.
I write fiction as I feel it gives me more creative freedom, but I also know the power a familiar setting or a family story can have, even written under the guise of fiction. And of course it’s the small details that add life to a novel which is why, when researching, I like to read diaries of ordinary lives and listen to personal anecdotes.
When we write a story that means something to us, we write with emotion and humility. These were people we once knew, or would have liked to have known, people tethered to us through our genes, and connected to us through the aeons of time. Perhaps writing their stories, using what would have been their surroundings, is a way of bringing them back to life. As Hilary Mantel said in her 2017 Reith Lecture, ‘… if we want to meet the dead looking alive, we turn to art.’ I feel the same about place. I want to fill a landscape or a town I know well with the people to whom it once belonged.