Serendipity or Fate? ... by Sheila Claydon

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The characters in my books always have problems and, as is the nature of romantic fiction, they always overcome them...eventually! Their problems are varied and, because I've written quite a few books now, there are many of them. Often the book description will point the reader towards what to expect and the beginning of the blurb in Saving Katy Gray is a good example of this.

Katy was used to losing things. First she'd lost her childhood home, then her career and reputation, and finally, and most dreadfully, her identity, so she knew she should be used to it....

Katy has more problems to overcome than most of my characters but, eventually, she finds a way, as do the characters in books 1 and 2 of the trilogy. What had never occurred to me until recently, however, is that when characters find a solution to their problems this can often help the reader. It was my daughter who prompted this thought with two books she has recently read.

In the past 2 years she and her family have lost a loved one following a long illness, coped with the resultant mental health issues, helped a friend who was in an abusive relationship and then, finally,  had to completely reorganise their lives due to the demands of Coronavirus. This has included children being upset about having to miss important exams, training programmes being cancelled, reduced income and, to top it all, my daughter having to leave home and family every day and put herself at risk as a frontline worker. Yet, despite all of these drawn out problems she has remained unbelievably resilient while all the issues she has been dealing with have slowly resolved themselves, and we are so proud of her.

That is not the issue, however. We know that many, many people face similar and even worse problems, but what we don't know is how often they read about themselves in a work of fiction.  Entirely serendipitously my daughter, looking for some escapism from her stressful life, recently picked up two novels entirely at random. Unknown to her one was about an abusive relationship and how the heroine began to recognise and then deal with her problems, while the second was about the loss of a loved one and how the resultant grief was played out across 3 generations.  When she started reading she had no idea that the stories were about the issues that had affected her own family but the more she read, the more everything resonated. By the end she had not only totally identified with all the characters, she also felt much better about herself, how she had handled things, and perhaps even more importantly, why other family members and friends had acted as they did.

It made me wonder if fictional characters sometimes help readers to resolve their own problems more effectively than non-fiction help books. There is, of course, an important place for these, but when someone is dealing with trauma they often don't have the emotional energy to read the factual stuff and instead turn to the escapism of fiction. This thought has made me look again at the dilemmas my various characters have faced and solved in order to check that I dealt with them realistically. I do, of course, like all writers, always do my research, but the moment of serendipity (or fate) experienced by my daughter, has made me realise anew how very important this is. We writers have a responsibility towards our readers. It goes without saying that they want us to entertain, to make them want to keep the pages turning, even perhaps to teach them something new, but now I've added 'help them to resolve their problems' to the list of things I must think about before I start a new story. The responsibility is really quite daunting!

Chilblains and icicles by Sheila Claydon

Fortunately it hasn't actually come to chilblains and icicles but only because the weather in the UK has been warmer than usual for this time of year. What has happened though is that our central heating and hot water have packed up and the three weeks we have been without them has taken me right back to my childhood.

How spoilt I am now. The house is always warm. Hot water is available at the turn of the tap. I can have a shower whenever I want. I can even walk around the house without a sweater in the middle of winter if I want to (I don't!). My kitchen is full of gadgets from a toaster to a steam iron, an ice-cream maker to a microwave. My kitchen hob is ceramic so it's clean at the swipe of a dishcloth, and my cooker and fridge are self-cleaning, and of course there's the washing machine and tumbler dryer. How could I manage without those?

Now let me take you back to when I was tiny and my mother, father and I lived with my grandparents. It was at the end of WW2 and we lived in Southampton, a maritime city that had been severely blitzed, so there were no houses to buy or rent. In those days laundry was either done by hand, using a big block of green soap and a washboard, or it was piled into a copper boiler and the dirt was stirred into submission. Then it was rolled through a mangle and how important I felt when I was allowed to turn the handle. Then, after hours flapping on the line in the garden, it was ironed with a flat iron that had to be heated on the stove. Even so, everything was ironed. Nothing was easy care in those days.

Then there was the cooking. The milk, which was delivered daily by a man driving a horse and cart, was kept in a bucket of cold water on hot days, or, on cold days, outside.  The food, too, had its place. A big old meat safe with a fly cover was kept in a shady part of the garden and everything in it was used within a day or two. No supermarket shopping, no packaging either. Everything was weighed out and wrapped, even the biscuits. My favorite job was to go to the shop next door and fill a bag with broken biscuits because that way we got a selection instead of just the one kind.

As for central heating and hot water, forget it. An open fire and the warmth from an old-fashioned black-leaded range were the only forms of heat we had in that cold, dark 3-bedroom house, so going to bed was a sprint up the stairs to an icy cold bed made marginally more comfortable by a big stone hot water bottle wrapped and pinned into a cotton cloth. I remember the cotton coming off mine one night. I still have the small burn scar on my leg to this day.

Washing for me was from a bowl beside the range or, once a week,  a tin bath that had to be filled with pans and kettles of water that had been heated on the stove. For my grandparents and parents it was ewers and bowls in their cold bedrooms and a weekly visit to the public baths.

I can still remember how happy my parents were the day we eventually moved into a property that had a bathroom, a fridge, and a water heater, whereas nowadays nobody expects anything else.

Of course all this was a very long time ago, and because we lived with my grandparents who were still using gaslight instead of electricity, we were probably at bit behind the times anyway. Other people lived in more comfort I'm sure but I didn't have a problem because, like all small children, I thought what I was used to was normal. I didn't like the chilblains (caused by sitting too close to the fire in an attempt to warm my frozen feet), or the chapped knees and lips. I didn't especially like having to wear layers and layers of clothes either. Scratchy woollen vests, a liberty bodice with tiny, fiddly buttons, a pleated skirt that hung from a warm over bodice, then a thick woollen jumper. My knees were always bare though, above very unattractive woollen socks held up with an elastic garter, and this meant chapped knees and thighs. Little boys suffered a similar fate because in those days children were deemed too young to wear long trousers and I didn't know anyone who wore woollen tights...maybe they hadn't started making them.

So although I'm not enjoying being without heating and hot water, it's not all bad. Without the sudden upheaval it's caused in my life I wouldn't have remembered how lucky I am, and how much harder domestic chores were for my mother and grandmother.  I haven't got any chilblains either and I am very grateful for that.

None of my heroines have ever had to suffer such deprivations although Kerry, in Double Fault does have a bit of a hard time when she's a single mother. Before the path of true love can run smooth they all have other problems to contend with though.

Sheila can be found at:

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