Life Beside the Sea...by Sheila Claydon

 

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Several of my books are set on or beside the sea (Cabin Fever, Reluctant Date, Kissing Maggie Silver) while others are set in countryside close to the sea, including the three time travel books in my latest series (Mapleby Memories), where the sea is briefly a major player in book 3, (Many a Moon).  This is probably partly because I was born in a seaside town on the south coast of the UK, partly because my grandfather was a sailor with many sea faring stories, and partly because my earliest memories feature sand blown, windswept trips to the beach. 

When my husband and I married, however, we moved away from the sea and spent 25 years living  close to London, so nowhere near the sea at all, although we did spend some summer days picnicking on the banks of the River Thames as it meandered its way out of London into the Buckinghamshire countryside. It wasn't the sea though, so when we learned our jobs were moving north we decided we would look for a house as close to the sea as possible. We were lucky. The house we have now lived in for 35 years was a wreck when we bought it but it's on the edge of a nature reserve with nothing between it and the sea except fields, woodland, and rolling sand hills, so all the effort that had to go into renovating it has been worth it. Living so close to the sea does, however, have drawbacks as well as responsibilities.

Out of season it is wonderful. We can walk for miles and see nothing more than one or two dog walkers in the distance. In season, every family for miles around wants to visit, and who can blame them. So we are used to the parking problems and the piles of litter that pollute the area for a couple of months of every year. And, like most local residents, we consider clearing up the mess and the occasional traffic queues a small price to pay for the fact that we are lucky enough to be able to enjoy it everyday.

Sometimes though, the problems are more serious. This year we have already taken one visitor to the local hospital when he badly burned his foot on very hot sand after he moved a portable BBQ. We have twice been custodians of car keys when cars have broken down and the owners couldn't get them collected until the following day. We have also rescued lost dogs, one of which seemed to want to stay with us indefinitely! We have invited desperate mothers with small children to use our bathroom, and filled water bottles for others. We've had to sluice down the path outside the house when a small child was violently sick. And we have advertised many lost car and house keys on our local social media site and then held them until the owners could collect them. 

We also have to explain, myriad times, to families with pushchairs, wheelchairs, small children, and less than agile oldies, all wearing sliders or flip flops, that while the beach is close, it is a wild beach, so there are no paved paths, nowhere to rest on the way. No ice cream stops. No coffee shops. Just fields, woods with treacherous tree roots, and finally high sand hills to traverse before they climb down to the beach itself. 

We have twice had medical helicopters land in the field right in front of our house and watched the paramedics set off at a run to rescue someone who had been badly injured. Sadly there have also been a couple of deaths, one very sad one when an elderly person with dementia was lost in the sand hills. We have reported woodland fires and watched the rapid regrowth with fascination. Seen police on sand buggies drive down to the beach to break up the occasional fight. On one of our rainy days I even found an elderly woman and her dog hunched, dripping wet, under a bush, as she desperately tried to call the emergency services. She had slipped and broken her leg and was in a lot of pain. Directing the paramedics to the spot where she'd fallen, which was in the middle of unmapped woodland, took some doing with an almost non-existent phone signal, but we managed.

We've even had to help track an out of control dog that killed a mother goose and her 3 goslings, something that involved phone calls to others as we all covered the wide area surrounding the lake where the geese had been living peacefully all summer, much to the pleasure of the local residents. That was a sad day! 

Another day we had to persuade visitors to abide by the notice that asked them to keep their dogs on a lead in one part of the woodland, as a baby owl had fallen out of a tree and was being cared for on the ground by its parents until it was strong enough to fly. Most did as they were asked but some who didn't  understand the unspoken countryside code were not so helpful. Fortunately the little owl soon found his wings and flew away.

And as well as all that we have to let the National Trust that manages the nature reserve know if we find dead wild animals such as squirrels, seals, foxes etc., and also if we see live ones that shouldn't be here such as grey squirrels, as the area is a red squirrel reserve. If greys invade they kill them, not physically, but by bringing in viruses that the reds can't survive.  Once upon a time the smaller reds were too numerous to count until they were decimated by the greys squirrel pox.  The few remaining ones were captured and quarantined for 6 months. When they were released the National Trust stopped selling the small bags of nuts that visitors bought to feed them because they had by then realised that to survive healthily in the area the population needed to be less dense, so the squirrels have now voted with their feet and moved away from the visitor area to the more varied woodland at the edges of the reserve. If you know what to look for you can find still them, so showing small children how to identify chewed pine nuts and then watching them set off on a squirrel hunt is satisfying, although I'm not sure they are always successful.

So living in such a lovely area comes with responsibilities, especially on the sort of sunny days we have been enjoying for most of the summer. But it comes with so many pleasures too, such as being able to pick wild apples, blackberries, sloes, dewberries, damsons, rosehips and buckthorn. There are even nettles for those who want to make nettle soup. And while there are wild flowers in bloom for most of the year, the bluebells that cover most of the woodland in Spring are an amazing sight. Such pleasures far outweigh the occasional emergency or upset. And because it is a wild beach, dogs are allowed to run free, and the most joyous thing is to see a dog breach a sand hill, spy the sea in the distance and race towards it without a care in the world. And every dog and dog walker becomes a friend. I don't know whether it's the feeling of freedom that comes with wildness of the countryside, the unspoilt beach and the wildlife all around, but nearly everyone says hi or stops to chat. The dogs do too.  Long may it continue as it offers time out from an increasingly stressful world. 

'Crabbed age and youth'...by Sheila Claydon

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In a poem attributed to him, William Shakespeare said 'Crabbed age and youth cannot live together.' He was right about so many things but not about this, well at least from my perspective. Why do I feel this way? Well, although I sincerely hope I'm not crabbed, I am definitely aged. This means that I now have regular help with my garden and my house. Not a lot, but enough for me to no longer have to tackle the heavy jobs.

In the past 6 months my longtime gardener has retired and the woman who helped with the house has left to have a baby. So now, instead of seasoned experts, I have two young people helping me instead. My new gardener is 21 and just setting himself up in business. The cleaner 23. Both work hard but this is where the crabbed age bit could come in if I let it, because neither of them have enough experience to get everything right.

When I asked the gardener to clear the weeds that had grown up around my very small pond, he cleared everything leaving a patch of bare earth. That was when I discovered that his 5 year apprenticeship was in landscape gardening not horticulture and he didn't know a weed from a flower. Not the best recommendation for a gardener I know, but he wasn't aware of the difference and now he wants to learn. So while he does the heavy stuff, I teach him about the plants in the garden I have planted and nurtured over many years. As a bonus he has done a brilliant job of rebuilding the pond, re-laying paving stones and moving large plants, all things that needed his landscaping skills. And now we are working together I've learned all about his brothers and his parents, his dog and its recent operation, his hobbies (cage fighting...the mind shudders) and now, his new girlfriend and his plans for the future.

Then there is the cleaner. When she first arrived she seemed shy so, in true writerly fashion, I asked questions, hoping to put her at ease. That was when I discovered she is a student who is working to pay her way through university. She already has a Degree in computer science and is now studying for a Masters in Data Collection using Artificial Intelligence. Wow! I don't know how long I'll keep her as there must be a much more exciting future career out there for her, but in the meantime I'm learning quite a bit about the uses of AI while she learns some of the finer points of housekeeping. Because a 23 year old graduate who is still studying isn't ever going to be the best I consider a forgotten window or an unplumped cushion a small price to pay for our interesting conversations. So far I've learned about the use of AI in medical care, specifically the lungs, and in return she's learned how to clean windows without streaks, and how an expandable feather duster works wonders! Not a fair exchange really but it's all I had to offer other than my great admiration for how she is managing her life.

And in addition to those two I have my granddaughters, all of whom are moving forward with dreams and ambitions. A trainee vet, a college student whose final exams are almost over and is going to take a gap year, working behind a bar in addition to bringing on her young horse, while she decides what she actually wants to do, and finally a younger one just about to start senior school. They don't get to hear much about their grandmother. Instead they tell me all about their adventures, what thrills them and what bothers them.In this way I have learned a great deal about the inner workings of a horse, some rather grusome facts behind lambing large flocks, and the ethics of animal care. I've learned, too, how to mix an espresso cocktail and a mini Guinness. And the youngest one has taught me faster and better ways to use my Ipad and phone as well as how to catch mosquitos and the future of the world relating to climate change. Such a mixed and interesting bag!

We have young neighbours too, all of whom we like a lot and see regularly. So my take on Shakespeare's 'Crabbed age and Youth' quote is that old people won't ever get crabby if they open themselves up to living with the young. They have so much to tell us if we truly listen. And they are such fun.

My book Many a Moon, the third in my Mapleby Memories series, also includes relationships between the old and the much younger, and how wisdom can be exchanged for vitality and interest. Crabbed old age! Pah!

The Past is a Different Place...by Sheila Claydon

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Many a Moon, the final book in my Mapleby Memories trilogy came about because of a thirteenth century mill.

On holiday a number of years ago, I took an early morning woodland walk and discovered it. Roofless, its water wheel missing, and only a muddy ditch where there would have once been a fast flowing river, it sat close to the edge if a golf course. Surrounded by trees and ferns it was both forlorn and intriguing, and when the holiday ended the image of the mill stayed with me.  So did the village where I stayed, and, over several years, the first two books Mapleby books were written. Remembering Rose and Loving Ellen.

Although I always intended to write about the mill, I knew it would require a lot of research as there was nobody in the area who knew anything about it. I only had one piece of information, gleaned from a blue plaque. It stated that in 1250 it had been a working grain mill but, beyond that, nothing, and nobody knew who had put up the plaque!!

A story was waiting, but because it was the third book in the series, I had to tie it in with the characters in the previous two books. As Mapleby was already a village with a time warp this worked out just fine, however, and I really enjoyed introducing my earlier characters to their new friends. 

Why am I telling you this? Well I've just been back to the place where I created Mapleby after a gap of seven years.  I didn't expect to meet my characters (although wouldn't that have been great) but I did expect the old mill to be the same. What a disappointment! It is now so completely overgrown that the blue plaque is hidden, and it is easy to walk past it without even seeing it. The river is back though. Not fast, and nowhere near as wide and fast flowing as it must once have been, but it was back! And the woodland was glorious. Full of wild garlic, bluebells and fresh green leaves. 

Always intrigued by the past and by how quickly nature, people, construction and development obliterate the smaller moments of history, I felt sad that something that had once ground the corn for the inhabitants of a busy port, was now a hidden mound of crumbling stone in the middle of a wood. Then I remembered that the port had dwindled too, into what was now a small tourist village, and I accepted that times move on. And after so many centuries there is no known history to gainsay my story and my characters, so I will continue to believe in both the modern day ones who live in my village, and the thirteenth century ones who used the mill. 

Then, just before the holiday was over, I fell into a wonderful moment of serendipity. Anyone who has read Many a Moon will also know that several monks and a monastery, long since gone, also featured largely in the book. A monastery that I knew once existed but whose history has also been obliterated by the shadows of time. So imagine my delight and surprise when I discovered this.

Since I last visited, someone had built a grotto using the one remaining piece of the monastery wall. There was nothing explaining it other than it was in memory of the monks who had once worked there. It was a lovely place and for one brief moment, Mapleby, my imagined monks and all my imaginary villagers seemed very real. 

A Ticket to Romance...by Sheila Claydon

 

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Since the final book of my Mapleby Trilogy, Many a Moon, was published at the beginning of June I have had to answer a number of questions. They have fascinated me.

The first once concerns Mapleby itself. Convinced that it is a real place, a number of readers have put forward their own suggestions as to where it might be. So far they have all been wrong. They are right, however, at assuming it is based on a real village, although I doubt they would recognise it as I have taken a few liberties with the geography and the history. There really is a derelict watermill though and it was discovering that, quite by accident, that prompted me to write the story.

The second question has been about the heroine, Ellie. Is she based on a real person? Is she someone I know who has told me about her work as a Housekeeper? The answer to that is no. Instead it is based on my observations of how holiday sites have worked when I have been on holiday. They are like miniature villages with all mod cons, including small shops and restaurants, and a dedicated staff team that make sure their guests have an enjoyable and trouble free visit.

The same question has been asked about Will, the hero. As I don't play golf, how do I know about greenskeepers and golf clubs? Well all I can say about that is thank goodness for the Internet, and thanks, too, to the people I know who do play golf and have entertained me at their club in the past.

There have been questions, as well, about the castle, and the remains of the friary. Have I visited them? Are they in Mapleby or have I imported them from elsewhere? The answer is both yes and no. I have visited them.They are in my Mapleby. But anyone searching wouldn't find them because the geography has changed a bit in 800 years! 

Many a Moon has garnered more questions than any other book I've written, and I love it that readers have invested so much of themselves into the story. It has also prompted me to revisit all my other books because nearly every one of them is set in a place I've visited. Once, a long time ago, someone told me my books were like a ticket to romance. It was a lovely phrase which I have often adopted when promoting them, but it is only now that I realise it really is true. Because the chaos in airports around the world is making it is so difficult to travel anywhere at the moment, I am staying at home, but a quick look at all the covers of my books has taken me back to many of the places I have visited, places and experiences which have given me so much pleasure as well as real inspiration: New Zealand, Australia, Italy, America, France,  the Canary Islands, Russia, and then all those places in the UK from London to the Home Counties, from the North West coast to the South, to Wales and Scotland, to villages and towns and cities. It really has been a journey and one that I can take again any time I look at one of my books. Readers can as well if they want to buy a ticket to romance. 

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Goodbye but not forgotten...by Sheila Claydon

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When Many a Moon, the final book of my Mapleby Memories trilogy is published on 1 June, I will definitely be celebrating. Writing it has been a challenge but along the way I've learned a lot - about how to manage writer's block, about the thirteenth century in England, about working in an hotel, about the housekeeping duties at a country club, and most of all about how we all carry some of the past with us in our genes and hidden deep within our our ancestral memories.

How did this all start? How did this picture of a derelict building become Many a Moon?

It started with a holiday, sleepy companions, a dog, and an early morning walk. Anyone who has a dog knows that a morning walk, or at least a trip outside, is a necessity. On holiday with friends and a husband who all voted for more sleep and a late breakfast, the dog and I decided we would do our own early morning thing and go exploring. The dog, naturally, opted for somewhere he could be off lead, so we set off for the patch of woodland we could see from our holiday cottage. 

Unbeknownst to me and the dog, the far side of the long strip of woodland marched along the perimeter of a golf course, and the view was spectacular. On that particular morning, however, the only other thing we saw was a large iron statue of a stag. It was a startling find in the middle of a deserted wood and the dog felt obliged to bark at it. Long and loudly! Fortunately the cottages were out of earshot so only the birds and hidden woodland creatures heard him. That walk set a pattern for the rest of our holiday, however. Each morning we would leave the rest of the household sleeping and climb the hill to what, early in the morning, felt like our very own piece of woodland. 

We ventured further each day and then, when we had explored every path and glade we climbed down some rough wooden steps to the golf course below and began to walk around the edge of the nearest green. And that's when we saw it. The old mill!  Except that we didn't know it was a mill then. To us it just looked like a derelict cottage. However, several years later when we returned for another holiday, someone had fixed a blue plaque next to the gaping doorway that stated it had been a functioning grain mill in the thirteenth century. Of course I took a photo, several in fact. Then I stored them away with the rest of my numerous holiday and travel snaps and almost forgot about them. 

Almost but not quite. It was too intriguing. How was it still standing? Who had worked there? Why was it at the edge of a wood, far away from any useful road? And if it was a grain mill, where was the mill pond and the river that fed it? There was a muddy ditch, narrow enough to step across but nothing else, and surely the building wasn't big enough to store grain. Hadn't I read somewhere that mills were often next to bake houses? The questions never ended but I had nowhere to put the answers until I needed a final story for Mapleby Memories. Then everything fell into place because the curtain between the past and the present is gossamer thin in Mapleby as anyone who has read the first two books, Remembering Rose and Loving Ellen, will know.

This was all I needed to be able to travel back to the thirteenth century and immerse myself in its history and culture, and what a journey it has been, for me, and for Ellie and Will the main protagonists of the story. And for all my other characters who live in Mapleby as well because that's the thing when writing a series about a particular place. The characters intertwine, children grow older, jobs develop, friendship circles widen and it all has to be woven together in the story. So most of the characters in the first two books have walk on parts in Many a Moon.

Now the book is finished and about to be published, saying goodbye to them is almost like saying goodbye to old friends. Or children growing up and leaving the nest! I do know one thing though. When I next visit the old mill at the edge of the wood, and I will, the memory of the story will still be there. I will still be able to look out across the golf course and imagine modern day Will riding across it on his red tractor mower, the same as I will be able to imagine thirteenth century Ellen laughing and throwing sticks for her dog. They will always be with me the same as all the characters in my other books. 

And here's a taster:

......Before I could answer her I heard somebody call my name. The voice floated up from below. “Ellen, it’s ready now. Drat the girl, where…” The rest of the sentence was swallowed by a sudden gust of wind as a slim figure with two long brown plaits bouncing on her shoulders ran into a stone building at the foot of the hill.

Telling myself I really must remember that there were a lot of other women called Ellen in the world, I pointed. “Is that another chalet?”

She laughed. “No, it’s not. Come on, I’ll show you.”

We clambered down steep wooden steps built into a wooded slope and the closer we got to the bottom of the hill the louder the noise became. At first I couldn’t think what it was, then I realized it was a fast flowing river. There was another noise too. A creaking sound that I couldn’t identify. As the only way to make it to the bottom of the hill was in single file clinging onto a knobbly wooden handrail, Joanne didn’t elaborate further until we were on the grass at the edge of the golf course. Then she beckoned me to follow her along a narrow path, pushing some spindly saplings out the way until we reached a sun dappled clearing. I looked at the scene in front of me in confusion. Where was the river? Where was the building? I was too busy being confused to hear what Joanne was saying. Her concern brought me to my senses. 

“Yes. Sorry. I’m fine. I guess the climb down made me lightheaded. After years working in a city I’m not used to real fresh air the same as I’m not used to quiet.”

“A week or two living here will soon sort you out. In the meantime let me introduce you to the old mill. It’s not, as you can see, exactly suitable for a chalet.”

She was right, and I joined in with her laughter. Inside though, my stomach churned. What had just happened? Why had I seen someone called Ellen run into this derelict and almost roofless building? And why had I heard the rush of a fast flowing river when there was just a shallow ditch, dry now but probably muddy when it rained?

Joanne was too busy telling me about the mill to notice my confusion. “It was built sometime in the twelfth or thirteenth century when Mapleby was very different from the sleepy village it is today. I’m not even sure why the country club is named after it because nobody knows  anything at all about its history.” 

As we retraced our steps, I saw we were standing on the very edge of one of the greens. “What was here before the golf course?” I asked her. 

She shook her head. “I’ve no idea. Probably fields or maybe a farm. 

The End of the Story...by Sheila Claydon

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Writing a book is a mix of things: a hard slog, moments of elation, moments of recognition even, and of course a lot of staring at a blank screen. A writer's mood can swing from depression to excitement from one sentence to the next. And then, when the last i is dotted and the last t is crossed, there is the editing. The acknowledgement that the section in chapter ten that seemed just right, no longer works. Nor does the timeline in chapter twelve. What has been missed out? What has been forgotten?

Once all that has been rectified to the writer's satisfaction, and all names and dates checked and double checked (yes, I did accidentally change the name of the heroine for a couple of chapters in one book, which would not have been a good look if the mistake had gone to print!) then it is the turn of the publishing editor, who will inevitably find a whole lot of other things that need attention.

While all that is going on there are a couple of other things that is very important indeed. The title. The cover image and the blurb (the short description that will hopefully persuade a browsing reader to buy the book).

This can be both the best and worst of times. The blurb cannot be too long but nor must it leave out the kernel of the story. The cover image must fit with the most up-to-date publishing style while at the same time show what the story is about, and finally the title. This can be the most tricky thing of all. Does the writer use the name of one of the characters, as I did in the first two books of the Mapleby Memories series, or is it better to find another link within the story.

It took me quite a while to find a title for my latest book (due out in April) and in the end it wasn't really me who found it, but my teenage granddaughter! She was staying with me for a few days and we were discussing her English homework and, because she naturally has a very quirky way of looking at things, she was explaining to me how once, when she was given a topic to write about, with a title, she was almost at the end before she realised she hadn't tied it to the title at all. What did she do? She wrote a final paragraph cramming everything in and, believe it or not, got good marks!

I didn't do that of course but it really made me think. Was there something that had featured throughout the book that could be used in the title? I re-read the whole thing and realised that there was. The moon!  Because the story stretches across the centuries the events that took place were observed by many a moon. I had the title. Many a Moon not only trips off the tongue, it is quite a memorable phrase and, when I re-read the story I realised I had indeed used a moonlit image quite frequently. Admittedly I did copy my granddaughter a tiny bit by inserting a couple of extra moons, but only two, and then the book was complete.

In April readers will be able to discover what the moon saw. Until then I have one final edit and then Many a Moon: Mapleby Memories Book 3, the final book of the trilogy will be published, with a cover, a blurb and a title I really like. I hope readers do too.