Rohase Piercy's Blog

Review: Skint Estate by Cash Carraway

Skint Estate: A Memoir of Poverty, Motherhood and Survival by Cash Carraway

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I'm not part of the intended readership for this raw and harrowing memoir - the privileged, comfortably-off majority against whom the author periodically rants - in fact, I was put in the way of reading it by my (now adult) daughter, who pointed out the similarities between Cash's story and our own! So I approached it in a spirit of sisterhood and shared experience, and did indeed find many parallels - University educated but finding myself living below the breadline as a single Mum, constantly moving from one privately rented flat to another, fitting low-paid, casual work (in my case, cleaning jobs) into school hours, running out of food at the end of each week (I remember once picking up and eating bits of fish finger my baby dropped from her highchair), writing novels while the children slept in hopes of future fame and fortune ... Even the six years' celibacy was a match (is that an actual proven thing, btw? After six years, you start to feel a bit desperate?)
I was fortunate compared to Cash in that I was not escaping an abusive childhood or relationship, and had a supportive Mum to stand as my guarantor throughout multiple moves, but still, there were enough similarities for me to feel empathy ... weren't there?
As it turns out, not entirely.

For one thing, I experienced my poverty in the 1990s, under Labour, so couldn't really bang the drum to Cash's oft-repeated mantra 'this is single motherhood in Tory Britain!' In my view, this is single motherhood under any government outside of Utopia, so the political angle didn't really work on me.

For another, as viewed from the 'inside', some of Cash's decisions just made no sense to me. Why would someone who'd searched for housing on Gumtree (to the extent of almost accepting a dodgy sex-for-a-free-room contract) get herself into over £6,000 worth of debt to Bright House for a washing machine and flat-screen TV?? I mean, if you're familiar with Gumtree you're familiar with FreeCycle and Shabitat and all sorts of places where you can find a working TV/washing machine for cheap or even for free ... Similarly, why does Cash feed herself and her daughter nothing but pasta for weeks on end? Pasta with sugar for breakfast, plain pasta for dinner, etc ... when she's obviously a street-wise gal who admits to filching pregnancy tests and sanitary supplies from supermarkets and would surely be aware of the just-past-its-sell-by-date counter at the end of the day where she could pick up all sorts of stuff to either put on or substitute for this never-ending pasta...

When Cash and her daughter are finally referred by the GP to their local Food Bank, she describes this as the experience that 'finally breaks her' - not the sex chat lines, or the peep-show where she worked while pregnant, or the domestic abuse, or the stints in a women's refuge. I have to say I found this incredible - I mean, there were no food banks in my day, but if there had been, I'd have been round there like a shot and no, I wouldn't have felt in the least bit ashamed. (Disclaimer: I am not implying by this that the need for Food Banks is a Good Thing!)

So I can't entirely relate to the picture Cash paints in this memoir, and in addition I'm sufficiently prim and prudish to feel the need to point out that it's possible to survive as a single mother, under Labour or Tory Governments, without having to work in the sex industry. Honestly, it really is.

HOWEVER, having said all that, I have to take my hat off to Cash Carraway. Because she's a bloody good writer, her style is honed to perfection and it's no surprise that she's been taken on and published, it's no more than her skills deserve. So whatever creativity (laced with buckets of anger and lashings of contempt for the middle class) may have gone into this memoir, she's got a brilliant career ahead of her and now, surely, she's out of the poverty trap and finally able to provide a good life for herself and her daughter. Good for her!







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However Improbable ...

Last month I had great fun being interviewed by the However Improbable Podcast gals Marisa and Sarah about My Dearest Holmes. We did the interview via Zoom (negotiating time zones), and it was great fun to revisit those heady days of the late 1980s when Charlie Raven and I first discovered Sherlock Holmes, and the process by which both MDH and A Case of Domestic Pilfering came to be written.
Here's the result - if you're a podcast fan, do have a listen - Marisa and Sarah's post-interview discussion about the phenomenon of Sherlock Holmes pastiche generally, and gay fanfic/romance/pastiche in particular, is very insightful I think!
And if you'd like to hear more from them, the preceding podcast on the various ways The Woman (aka Irene Adler) has been depicted on film is also well worth a listen. Enjoy!
https://www.howeverimprobablepodcast....

'The Smallest Man' by Frances Quinn

The Smallest Man by Frances Quinn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This wonderful book by fellow Brighton author Frances Quinn is based on a historical character - Jeffrey Hudson, court dwarf to Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of the ill-fated King Charles I. Here he is renamed Nat Davey, and given the opportunity to tell his own extraordinary story.
As the author herself admits, 'This is a novel ... not a fictionalised biography or a history textbook, so not everything that happens to Nat happened to Jeffrey Hudson, and here and there, I've changed the order of events, or their locations'. However this matters not one whit, as we follow the tumultuous events of the English Civil War through the eyes of a young man sold by his father as a ten year old boy and presented to the Queen of England in a pie. Seemingly destined to spend his life as a Royal plaything and attendant, Nat knows himself to be 'as big on the inside as everyone else', and is determined to prove it.
Nat's loving and courageous character shines throughout the narrative, and his perceptive depiction of the arranged marriage between a weak and indecisive English despot and an intelligent young French Catholic princess brings both King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria to to life, warts and all. In addition, Nat's friends and relatives - his wily, abusive father, quietly courageous mother and dense but loyal younger brother Sam; his giant friend Jeremiah, his tormenter and nemesis Charles Crofts, and the feisty Catholic noblewoman Arabella Denham, whom he loves from afar - all spring vividly to life from the page, immersing the reader in a world nearly five hundred years away with no leap of imagination or suspension of disbelief required.
A wonderful story, and you'll find yourself hoping against hope for a happy ending ...



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Review - 'The Motion of the Body Through Space

The Motion of the Body Through Space by Lionel Shriver

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


So, picture the scenario ... you've been a fitness fanatic all your life, but now, in your sixties, you discover that all those miles spent pounding away have played havoc with your knees, and your body is telling you in no uncertain terms to kick the addiction or risk it giving up on you completely. At the same time, your spouse - recently sacked from his job for failing to understand, never mind live up to, the cautious and placatory behaviour demanded of an ageing white male in today's PC culture - announces that he intends to run a marathon in six months' time. You think it's a ridiculous idea, given that he's only ever run for a bus in his life - he thinks your attitude is sour grapes.
This is the challenge that faces Seranata as her husband Remington develops a new and all-consuming obsession with challenging his sixty-year old body in precisely the way that she's now discovering can cause irreversible damage. And of course, being a man, he's not content with just buying a pair of trainers and running a little further every day, he has to have an 'online schedule' and all the (latest, expensive) gadgets - gadgets that what with his enforced redundancy and her work as a voiceover artist drying up, they can now ill afford.
When Remington, having not-so-successfully limped through his marathon, declares that instead of putting his feet up he's signed up for a full triathlon and introduces Seranata to his new (expensive) trainer, a fundamentalist fitness guru named Bambi, things go from bad to worse. Throw into the mix a born-again Christian daughter, a drug dealer son and an ailing father-in-law who increasingly becomes Serenata's responsibility, and you have a marriage teetering on the brink. Will their relationship survive? More fundamentally, will Remington himself, increasingly gaunt, fevered and accident-prone, survive?

This is a brilliant read, and Lionel Shriver skilfully weaves into the narrative some challenging questions for the modern Westerner - where will the new 'cancel culture' lead us if taken to extremes? Why do the 'baby boomers' generation seem to think they must not allow themselves to grow old? Is punishing one's body through excessive exercise - to no discernible benefit for society at large - the new zealotry, on a par with self-flagellation, extreme fasting and the Judeao-Christian rejection of the physical world?
Maybe, just maybe the boring old adage 'moderation in all things' is the best advice after all....
A rare five stars from me! 🥰



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Trying (and failing) to gather energy ...

Well the Spring Equinox is upon us, and here in the Northern Hemisphere this moment of balance between day and night, before the daylight hours begin to get the upper hand over the hours of darkness, is supposed to generate a great gathering and pooling of energies, all milling about and waiting to be directed towards the high point of Summer. New life is pushing forth from earth, egg and womb all around us (our racing pigeons are laying eggs like nobody's business, and we're letting each pair raise one chick), and here in the UK we're all getting vaccinated and the end of lock down is in sight - so why, with all this upsurge of vitality and positive expectation, do I feel absolutely stumped when it comes to my latest writing project?

I never have been able to write fast, or to write long. I do it in dribs and drabs and take frequent rests - nothing wrong with that, I tell myself, Jane Austen wrote that way after all - but right now I'm finding that even a couple of hours at the PC leaves me with brain fry, neck and shoulder tension, and an unpleasant sense of defeat. The project in hand is a Mrs Danvers' eye view of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca - working title 'The Most Beautiful Room In The House' - and I'm hoping it'll flow more easily when I get parallel with the events described in the original book. That is what I do, after all - I pinch other people's stories, and write them from a different point of view. But it should and does involve a certain amount of original material, and Mrs Danvers' back story, set in the second decade of the twentieth century (a period of history I know little about except that it was dominated by WWI, so am having to research) is being coaxed onto the page sentence by reluctant sentence, even though it's fully formed in my mind! To add insult to injury, the first two chapters flowed beautifully from imagination to page, I felt the Muse at my shoulder, and then - she left.

Ah well, I'll keep plodding along, and hopefully get through this dry bit (which can always be reworked) and out onto open water and plain sailing again! In the meantime, here's something I wrote earlier - over thirty years earlier, in fact - the Weird Sisters have kindly featured My Dearest Holmes on their blog this week:
https://weirdsistersink.blogspot.com/

Time for a new perspective on Daphne du Maurier's 'Rebecca'?

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I guess nearly everyone knows the story ... gauche, inexperienced young girl attracts the attention of rich widower twice her age who owns rambling country pile with resident housekeeper, and accepts his proposal of marriage little knowing that there's something he's not telling her about his first wife ... It was recently pointed out to me that it's a very similar plot to Charlotte Bronte's 'Jane Eyre', updated to 1930s Cornwall!
If by any chance you don't already know the ending, you're in for a roller-coaster ride with thrills and spills a-plenty right up to the dramatic conclusion ... but even on the third or fourth reading it's still gripping and immersive, thanks mainly to Daphne du Maurier's intimate and psychologically spot-on portrayal of her heroine's thought processes. Every doubt, suspicion and niggling worry is revealed in vivid detail, in exactly the kind of inner monologue we all indulge in from time to time - the long paragraph towards the end, speculating as to whether or not hanging is a quick death, is a tour de force.
Also, the characters are unforgettable, and instantly recognisable: the shy, awkward, unnamed heroine desperately in love with the dark and brooding hero, Maxim de Winter; rich but vulgar Mrs Van Hopper; jolly-hockey-sticks sister-in-law Beatrice; tactful, kind estate manager Frank Crawley; and of course the eponymous Rebecca, Mrs de Winter#1, enigmatic, beautiful, wilful and universally beloved - or is she?
The real star of the show, though, has got to be obsessive, infatuated, scheming housekeeper Mrs Danvers, who deserves a novel in her own right ... a thought that's occupying much of my time at the moment ... watch this space!



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A heart breaking story with a universal theme.

The Only Story by Julian Barnes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


'Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.'
This is a haunting and beautiful novella about an unconventional relationship and its consequences for both parties - the 'Only Story' of the title being a person's experience of love. It is, says Barnes, everyone's story in one way or another; and for student Paul Casey, aged nineteen, it starts when he's partnered with Mrs Susan Macleod, aged forty-eight, in the Mixed Doubles Tournament at his local tennis club.
In many ways this story is reminiscent of Barnes' earlier novella 'The Sense Of An Ending', featuring as it does an older man reminiscing about the naive young undergraduate he used to be, a passionate relationship that goes awry, and the consequences of a middle-aged married woman's ill-fated affair. But this is my favourite of the two novellas, being more straightforward, and also bolder in its exploration of the relations between men and women.
Over a period of many years, as his relationship with Susan evolves, Paul keeps a notebook in which he writes down various statements about the Nature of Love, periodically revising them and crossing out those he has come to believe are false. It's so insightful, so honest and so sad, and part of Barnes' genius as a narrator is his ability to switch from first to second to third person as the story requires.
There's the straightforward reminiscing - 'At the end of my first year at University, I was at home for thee months, visibly and unrepentantly bored.' There's retrospective self-analysis - 'You are an absolutist for love, and therefore an absolutist against marriage. You have given the matter much thought ...' Then, as events get more and more painful, the narrator distances himself from his own memories by using the third person - 'As an adolescent, he had longed for more complication ... at times, he felt he had had enough of life's complications' - even commenting at one point that 'It was as if he viewed, and lived, his life in the third person. Which allowed him to assess it more accurately, he believed.'
Like 'The Sense Of An Ending', 'The Only Story' proves that a novel doesn't have to be long, or complex, to completely immerse and enchant the reader - all that's needed is vivid narration, thoughtful commentary on a sad story, and good writing.



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A fascinating twist on Groundhog Day ...

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I stand in absolute awe not only of Claire North's creative powers, but also the intellect required to write a book like this!
The eponymous Harry August is a kalachakra, an ouroboran - an immortal, doomed to live the same life, in the same timeline, over and over again. He is also a mnemonic, able to remember every detail of every one of his lives with all their minor variations and different personal decisions, leading to different careers, relationships and times and places of death. He is born in 1919, and experiences the events of the 20th century variously as a humble groundsman, an academic, a historian, a scientist, a businessman, an entrepreneur, a criminal mastermind ... take your pick. But he remembers everything.
He's not the only one of his kind, though mnemonics are apparently rare ... there exists, and has existed since ancient times, an institution known at the Cronos Club, which seeks to ease the path of ouroborans though the Groundhog Day of their many lives, offering support through the confusion of childhood, rescue in times of crisis, and passing chain messages into the future from older to younger members, and back into the past from younger to older.
Thus it is that on one of his deathbeds, Harry receives a 'cataclysm' - a message passed down from future generations - to the effect that the catastrophe that precipitates the end of the world is occurring earlier and earlier in time. The only possible explanation, in the opinion of the Cronos Club, is that one of their own has been indulging in forbidden activity - changing the established course of events.
It becomes Harry's task to hunt down and eliminate the culprit - no easy task when one is dealing with an immortal, whose massive intellect and perfect recall are a match for Harry's own.
It's all incredibly complicated, with fifteen lives narrated in no particular order - like putting together a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. But boy, is it worth sticking with to the end!
A truly gripping read, and thoroughly recommended.



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Happy New Year!

Well, to start by stating the obvious ... it's been an unusual twelve months. A friend said to me back in January, 'Astrologers are saying this year's going to be so significant that people will be referring to "Before 2020" and "After 2020" for some time to come.' Spookily accurate, or what?!!

I THINK that Mr B and I caught the lurgy back in March - it was around in Brighton (UK) from January - but since in spite of having some really weird symptoms (uncontrollable shivering, rash, muscle cramps) neither of us had a cough, we were told it 'couldn't possibly be Covid-19'. Of course we now know that it's quite possible to have it without the cough, but it's too late for us to be sure. We've been fortunate in that with one exception, close friends and family have all been spared the worst and we haven't had to go through the horror of losing someone dear to us without being able to say goodbye. The loss that hit us hardest was that of our dear old dog, Spike, who'd been our lovely companion for twelve and a half years; and we were able to say goodbye to him at home, thanks to the wonderful Vets2Home people who helped him find peace with us by his side.

Spike left us in June, just as the first set of lock down rules were being relaxed; and this meant that in sharp contrast to many of you, we actually got out and about more than usual during the Summer months! Because we don't drive and couldn't take a nervous dog on train journeys, we hadn't been able to do things like go up to London for a river trip on the Thames to Greenwich until this year. And when restrictions have been in place, we haven't found them too irksome, as we're used to not getting out much and living on the edge of the South Downs there are some lovely walks within easy reach guaranteed to lift the spirits.

Anyway, whilst being confined more than usual at home, I've been doing lots of ... no, not writing I'm afraid, the Muse hasn't put in much of an appearance for me this year ... I've been doing lots of READING. According to Goodreads I've got through no less than fifty-nine books! As well as finally tackling the wonderful Wolf Hall Trilogy 3 Books Collection Set By Hilary Mantel, I've discovered several new favourite authors to binge on - Philip Hensher, Ben Aaronovitch and Ruth Hogan spring immediately to mind - and as always, it's been a pleasure to read and review books by author friends such as Jill Gardiner, Maggie Redding, Richard Gough-Buijs, Jill Bush and Angela Patmore. Thank you all so much for your wonderful words and stories, and here's to a New Year that will be for all of us, whether writers or readers, blessed with health, happiness and creativity.

Better times are coming, folks - let's all raise a glass of hope to 2021!

A fast paced, satisfying tale of yummy mummy comeuppance!

The Baby Group by Caroline Corcoran

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


What would you do if someone uploaded a sex video from your past, taken at a time when you were at your very lowest and most desperate, to all your friends, family and work colleagues?
This is the situation faced by Scarlett Salloway on her very first day back at work following the birth of her baby. Suddenly the picture-perfect middle-class life she's fought so hard to build, complete with handsome husband, listed period village property and online Mummy blog, starts to fall apart - and the only people she can turn to for comfort and support are her fellow new Mums in the local baby group.
This is a very well-paced thriller, mostly narrated by Scarlett herself in first person but with occasional commentary from an anonymous source - the sender of the video, who ups the ante in a series of cruel and calculated steps whilst Scarlett's job and marriage fall apart and she scrabbles around frantically to find the identity of her tormenter.
There are a few red herrings placed tantalisingly in the reader's path, and although I did guess quite early on who the perpetrator was there were enough alternative candidates to keep me on my toes right up until the end.
The viciously competitive life of the yummy mummy is presented in all its lycra-clad, turmeric latte swilling awfulness, and is satisfyingly exposed as the brittle and cruel facade that it is as the narrative progresses.
Thoroughly enjoyable and highly recommended!



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