Janet Gogerty's Blog: Sandscript - Posts Tagged "three-ages-of-man"

What’s in a name? Unless an author writes science fiction set on another planet, or fantasy in a fantasy world, he has to set his story on earth. I once read a novel by a well known writer; unlike his other books it was a tale of wanderings in vaguely European lands, in an unspecified century. I felt no attachment to the characters at all and did not enjoy reading it.
But a crime thriller or romance can be set in a village with an invented name, helpful to avoid a libel case; you only have to look at the map book or drive around Britain to know real villages and towns have names stranger than a writer could create.
I recently read ‘The Cornish Coast Murder’ by John Bude, written in the 1930’s. His pen name is derived from a real Cornish place, the name of the village in the story is invented, but Boscawen sounds genuine. You can read my review of his book here on Goodreads.
Authors are safe in big cities, they are sprawling and anonymous. London has a well know centre surrounded by an endless variety of suburbs. In ‘Brief Encounters of the Third Kind’ the story starts in the back garden of an ordinary house, in the large suburb of Ashley. You won’t find Ashley on the map, but like many other outer London suburbs it has a common popular with walkers, several underground stations, a busy bus service, a hospital, a town centre and local shops. The residents of Ashley think nothing much ever happens there, but they are wrong.
When the characters hop on ‘the tube’ to go into central London well known landmarks feature in the plot. In ‘Three Ages of Man’ the stranger who appears at the beginning of the novel is overwhelmed by sprawling Ashley and the city centre, luckily he has an author to look after him. Waterloo Station is Britain’s busiest station, characters can slip through unnoticed. Here you catch the train to an obscure part of Wiltshire; a good walk from the station, near a little known village, is Holly Tree Farm; an ideal place for people who need to keep a low profile.
Perhaps one day I will set a novel in my current home town. It is big and busy, with students and holiday makers and occasionally, bizarre real life murders; plenty of scope for a novelist. Its real name is Bournemouth, but Thomas Hardy called it Sandbourne in his Wessex novels.
In the meantime it is June at Holly Tree Farm and I am busy writing the third novel in the trilogy.
In my two anthologies ‘Dark and Milk’ and ‘Hallows and Heretics’ you will find stories set in London and the Bournemouth area. In ‘Hallows and Heretics’ you can read the Hambourne Chronicles. Google Hambourne to see if it is a real place.

Sandscript in Step

We are staying at The Lying In Hospital, Waterloo; it has been here since 1767, but only a Premiere Inn since 2013. If you want somewhere to stay a few minutes walk from Waterloo Station and the London Eye big wheel, if mauve and purple are your favourite colours and if you want to visit some locations from my novels and short stories – this is the place for you.
Inside are the familiar purple carpeted corridors and mauve uniforms to be seen in Premiere Inns all around the country, but here the rooms are smaller, the windows even smaller and ours looks out onto a wall one foot away. But the staff are friendly and in the restaurant below on Floor -2, purple striped blouses and shirts flash by as the waiting staff serve dinner and breakfast at running pace.
London is at our feet and we walk everywhere, except when we go nowhere on The Wheel.
The unexpected is always welcome and at Piccadilly Circus we are amazed to find four floors devoted to M&M World – M&M the sweets, not some kind of sexual deviancy. Life sized plastic M&M characters in primary colours depict iconic human scenes. There are cuddly M&Ms and souvenirs of every description. We buy the cheapest – a plastic clip to seal your bag of M&Ms; the initials make it an appropriate gift for a young couple called Michael and Michelle.
In contrast we descend many steps down into the Criterion Theatre to see ‘The 39 Steps’, the hilarious and clever play of the Hitchcock film, of the novel by John Buchan written a hundred years ago… so many incarnations of one story and a reminder to authors how important it is to choose a memorable title for your novel.
In Trafalgar Square we see part of The Tweed Run, a tradition since 2009 – riding penny farthings or the oldest bike you can lay your hands on while dressed in tweed.
Our various wanderings around galleries are punctuated by coffee and lunches, mostly taken in the ‘Café in the Crypt’ below St. Martin’s in the Field, a pleasant retreat from the bustle above ground. In ‘The Gallery in the Crypt’ we visit a photographic and biographical exhibition of forty people, ‘Outsiders in London’ - http://www.outsidersinlondon.org/Outs... - ;
it gradually dawns on us that the man chatting to us about the pictures is the photographer himself, Milan Svanderlink. We enjoy an interesting discussion and I toy with the idea of telling him that the hero of my novel ‘Three Ages of Man’, very much an outsider, takes sanctuary in the crypt restaurant, but perhaps he would get confused if I launched into a description of my Brief Encounters Trilogy.