One of the most enjoyable things about being a fiction writer is the research you have to do. I haven’t chosen to work in crime, so don’t have to hang around police stations (probably just as well) or chat to murderers. My genre is contemporary humorous fiction, and that means lots of reading around my subject.
When I started writing my first novel, the diary of Isabella M Smugge, I set up a Pinterest account, investigated fashion and delved into where rich posh people went on holiday. All on the internet.
Maybe if I become a runaway success, my publishers will let me go on a long cruise around the Med. “It’s research, honestly,” I will reassure them. “I don’t want to do it, believe me – but I have to, for veracity.”
My research for novel number two, the Trials of Isabella M Smugge, involves me buying the Guardian and the Times on a Saturday then spending most of the next day reading them, circling items of interest and adding them into my working notes. Without all this, I would never have been able to drop words like liminal* into my work, have my heroine burble on about conceptual layering pieces or weave Japanese cherry cheesecake into the narrative. It’s amazing what you find in the glossy supplements and it’s all grist to my mill.
I read nearly everything in the paper and the supplements and over the past few weeks, two stories have leapt out and smacked me between the eyes. They were fascinating, surprising and gave me a window into someone else’s world. Here they are. I hope you enjoy them.
A good story needs the basic elements. Strong characters, a plot, twists and turns, a quest, a struggle.
One day, a group of WI ladies out on a walk-in Norfolk noticed some gravestones under a tangled mass of brambles and nettles. One of them, Gloria Davey, crawled inside the old building and found that it was an old church, abandoned in the 1930s. A group of local Satanists had moved in and made it their own. When Gloria went home and told her husband, a retired Water Board superintendent called Bob Davey, he resolved there and then to restore it.
Over the next quarter of a century, he resisted death threats from the Satanists as he rebuilt St Mary’s Houghton-on-the-Hill, brick by brick. The local TA were finally called in to help protect him. He found the font being used as a birdbath by a local vicar, sourced the old bell in another church and failed to persuade a local woman to return the stoup. “I just took it,” he later recalled.
Nothing stopped Bob Davey. There was no access road to the church and the farmer refused to let him use the track. Undaunted, he simply built his own road from crushed concrete. Four years after he began, the Friends of St Mary’s was set up to help replace the windows.
So far, a great story. But it became something even more when one day, Bob noticed a patch of ochre through the cracked Victorian plasterwork. “When a piece of plaster fell off, the first thing I noticed was the head of an angel.” He had uncovered the oldest Romanesque wall paintings in Britain, dating back to around 1090.
Suddenly, everyone was interested in this tiny church tucked away in the Breckland district of Norfolk. Today, it’s a site of pilgrimage for thousands, the Prince of Wales has visited three times and Bob was given the MBE. He died last month. What a hero.
The other story which caught my eye was that of Wilf Davies, a 72-year-old Welsh farmer based in the Teifi Valley.
Wilf Davies never married, never lived anywhere but on the farm, left Wales just once, only ever done one job and eats the same dinner every night (two pieces of fish, an onion, an egg, baked beans and biscuits). You might think he’s a bit of a stick in the mud, but not a bit of it. Mr Davies is that rare creature, a completely contented man who knows what he wants and where he wants to be.
“This valley is cut in the shape of my heart.”
His story was touching. Although he’s had offers to go and work elsewhere, he never has. As he says, “This valley is cut in the shape of my heart.” He loves his sheep, enjoys working outside and has no interest in spreading his nets. “People might think I’m not experiencing new things, but I think the secret to a good life is to enjoy your work. I hear London is a place best avoided.”
This is a person who knows every inch of his habitat, when and where the cuckoos call and who is filled with wonder by his surroundings. There aren’t many people like him left, I don’t think, and he should be cherished. The piece ends beautifully. “Most evenings I walk right up to the top of the valley. I look down and everything looks small and far away. And I feel like I’m on top of the world.”
I love research. You go looking for one thing and you find another. Or two others, in this case. Bob and Wilf, two amazing people, two amazing stories.
*I also had no idea what it meant