Sarah Dunnakey's Blog, page 3
March 19, 2017
Pictures and Pins
The desk where I do most of my fiction writing is also the desk at which I work as a TV quiz question setter and verifier. Switching from one mode to the other can be tricky. To help me dive back into the world of my novel I have a pinboard covered with photographs and other pictures relating to my characters and settings.
I’m not talking Pinterest (tho I do use that too), I mean an actual corkboard. With pins in it. It’s not attached to the wall, so I can take it with me if I fancy writing at the kitchen table, in the garden or in bed.
I have dismantled my The Companion pinboard and am building up a new collage for my current work in progress. But here are some of the pictures that were on that original board.
[image error] [image error]
Two family photographs. The first one is my Dad, taken in the early 1950s and the other is of my Great Uncle Cyril from the 1920s. Although Billy in The Companion is sandy haired, it was this picture of my Dad (who was also known as Billy) with his freckles and shy smile that was in my head when I began to tell his story. Uncle Cyril, who I’m sure was a lovely lad, struck me with his brooding stare and sulky mouth – add a mop of unruly curls and you have Jasper.
[image error]
This has always been one of my favourite photos, showing my Dad and Grandad and known in the family as ‘Billy’s first pint’. It features in The Companion under a slightly different name.
[image error]Credit: Pennine Heritage Digital Archive
In my previous post I included some pictures of Gibson Mill and Hardcastle Crags, all of which were on my pinboard. Alongside them was this postcard. Taken in 1912, twenty years before The Companion begins, it was the inspiration for a scene in the novel. Billy is revisiting The Palace when he sees “on the stepping stones a row of women posed for a photograph, hats held out in front of them like they’d each caught a fish.”
And finally, the rink at The Palace is an important setting in The Companion. Roller skating was very popular in the 1930s and Arnold Binns from Hebden Bridge, pictured below, was a local celebrity.
[image error]Credit: Milltown Memories
In 1930 he established a new world endurance record by skating non-stop for over 60 hours, apparently surviving on a diet of tripe and Horlicks. He then skated from John ‘o Groats to Lands End. I love his pose in this picture and liked to imagine him in his suit and cap circling the rink at The Palace, weaving serenely among the less able skaters, and maybe even avoiding a close collision with a determined but erratic Jasper.
More information about Arnold Binns can be found here
Details of the Stepping Stones postcard are here
February 25, 2017
Location, location…
Anyone familiar with the Calder Valley in West Yorkshire and its history will recognize the inspiration for some of the places in The Companion. In particular Potter’s Pleasure Palace and Ackerdean Mill, whose fictional location and history was inspired by the real-life Gibson Mill in Hardcastle Crags near Hebden Bridge.
[image error]
My love for the Crags woodland and the huge stone building at the heart of it began when I first moved to the area over twenty years ago. I lived by the entrance to the woods and spent many hours exploring the valley and riverside paths and admiring the mill, which at the time was empty, a relic of its former glory.
Gibson Mill, like Ackerdean in The Companion, is a nineteenth-century cotton mill that at the turn of the twentieth century was transformed into an entertainment emporium. It offered first and second class dining, a dance floor, a roller-skating rink and boating on the mill pond. Further refreshment rooms and kiosks could be found in the surrounding woods. At its peak in the 1920s, the number of visitors to the Crags exceeded half a million.
[image error]Gibson Mill, early 20th century (credit: Jack Uttley Photo Library)
Unlike the fictional Ackerdean, which was left in the hands of a small local charity, Gibson Mill was part of a bequest in the 1950s from its owner Abraham Gibson to the National Trust. In 2005 the Trust gave it a new lease of life when it was completely renovated, including the restoration of the 1920s turbine. It is now an ‘off the grid’ visitor centre and café.
Despite the changes, on a visit to Hardcastle Crags today it is possible, in a quiet moment inside the mill or standing on the old bridge, to feel that time has slipped. To experience moments as Anna does in The Companion, when you can believe that you might just catch sight of dancers foxtrotting behind a window or hear the splash of oars on the water, the roar of roller skates or the squeal of a child flying high in one of the old swing boats.
After reading about Gibson Mill’s past and seeing some of the fantastic photos in collections such as the Jack Uttley Photo Library and Pennine Horizon’s Digital Archive, I knew I wanted to write a story in a similar setting: a place where people had lived and worked and played for over two centuries and which had adapted and survived. Ackerdean isn’t Gibson Mill and the Potter family who own and run the mill in my novel are not based on the Gibsons. But I hope in my story of Billy Shaw and Potter’s Palace I have managed to capture some of the life and energy that over the centuries has filled the place that inspired it.
For more information about Hardcastle Crags and the history of Gibson Mill visit the National Trust website
Historical photographs of the mill and its surroundings can be found at
Pennine Horizons Digital Archive
February 4, 2017
Beginnings
Browsing the personal columns of old newspapers is one of my guilty pleasures. They are ripe with intrigue, imagery and unfinished stories. Did ‘S.T.’ ever get to say to ‘R.P.’ the ‘three or four words that in all probability will make much difference’ and did the ‘nice quiet gold-cream Bedsitting room in Chelsea’ find the ‘careful tenant’ it desired?
It was on one such rich page from a 1938 edition of the The Times that I spotted, squeezed between adverts for Whitsand Bay Hotel in Cornwall and Miss Oliver’s High Colonic Irrigation, the two-lines that sparked my idea for The Companion:
CHILD COMPANION WANTED age 6-7, for boy
7 – Capt. Hall, M.F.H., St Breward, Bodmin.
Who was this lonely boy who lived on Bodmin Moor? Why had Captain Hall decided he needed a companion? What would be the circumstances of the family who would put forward their own child for the position? Would the boys become bosom friends, or mortal enemies? Was there a Mrs Hall?
I found some likely answers. The boy on Bodmin Moor was probably Robin Hall, son of Captain Robin Henry Edwin Hall, Lord of the Manor and his wife Margaret Hall. Mrs Hall was a founder member of St Breward Women’s Institute in 1928, although she apparently later said the WI was “not really my cup of tea. Dressmaking and cookery are definitely not for me”. They had an older son Samuel who died aged 20 in the Second World War. Of the ‘companion’ I can find no further mention.
But by the time I’d found this out my own version of the story had already started to form. My two boys are Billy and Jasper, aged 11, going on 12, and living not on Bodmin, but on the West Yorkshire Moors between Haworth and Hebden Bridge. Jasper’s guardians are not a Master of the Fox Hounds and his wife, but Edie and Charles Harper, brother and sister novelists who have sought seclusion and inspiration in the wilds of Yorkshire.
I’m pretty sure Edie would be in agreement with Mrs Hall about the lack of appeal of ‘dressmaking and cookery’. An evening of gin-tasting, as recently hosted by my local WI, would be more her style.
If you’re tempted by the thought of historical personal columns, a good place to start is The Times Digital Archive. Editions going right back to 1785 are fully searchable and browsable. Most public libraries offer it as part of their online reference resources, so all you need to get started is your library card. Some libraries also give access to The Guardian from 1821 and The Observer from 1791. If you are very lucky they may also subscribe to ‘British Library Newspapers 1730 – 1950’, which includes local as well as national newspapers and is a wonderful place to lose a few hours! For the fully committed the British Newspaper Archive with over 200 searchable titles is a fantastic resource for research and inquisitiveness, though access is by subscription.
