Interview with Judith Barrow

I have decided, after a long period of hibernation, to restart my blog, concentrating on matters of writing, authorship and books. I am beginning with a interview with fellow Honno author, Judith Barrow. Judith grew up in Saddleworth, on the Pennines, but has lived in Pembrokeshire for more than 30 years.

 

Judith has written the Shadows trilogy, a wonderfully evocative trilogy, the life, loves and tribulations of Mary Howarth and her family.

The story begins, in World War II, with A Pattern Of Shadows. Against a domestic background of family strife, jealousies and dramas, Mary is working as a nurse at the Granville mill that is now serving as a prisoner of war camp for Germans. The one thing she should not do is fall for a German doctor, Peter Schormann, but she does. In the second book, Changing Patterns, with Mary and Peter living in Wales, she struggles to deal with the prejudices of the time and to sort out her relatives who remain in Lancashire. The war is over but strife and tragedy is not. In the third book, Living In The Shadows, the action jumps forward to 1969. A new generation and new dramas, but there’s no escaping the legacy of the past. It keeps catching up.

  

So here is my interview with Judith

Question: You have written a brilliant trilogy. Did you set out to write the full cycle, or did the first just tempt you into continuing?

Nothing was further from my mind when I was writing the first novel.

The idea for Pattern of Shadows sprang from an occasion when I was in Lancashire researching for a different book. I came across an article about an old cotton mill that was one of the first prisoner of war camps for German soldiers in World War Two.

What I read fascinated me. Not only because it was in Lancashire, near to the Pennines where I grew up but also because, as a child, I spent quite a lot of time in a cotton mill.

Now, before anyone thinks I’m older than I actually am, or that I was exploited as a child to labour in a textile mill, I should explain:

In the nineteen sixties my parents worked in the local cotton mill.

My mother was a winder (working on a machine that transferred the cotton off large cones onto small reels (bobbins), in order for the weavers to use to make the cloth). Well before the days of Health and Safety I would often go to wait for her to finish work on my way home from school. I remember the muffled boom of noise as I walked across the yard and the sudden clatter of so many different machines as I stepped through a small door cut into a great wooden door. I remember the rumble of the wheels as I watched men pushing great skips filled with cones alongside the winding frames, or manoeuvring trolleys carrying rolls of material. I remember the women singing and shouting above the noise, whistling for more bobbins: the colours of the cotton and cloth - so bright and intricate. But above all I remember the smell: of oil, grease - and in the storage area - the lovely smell of the new material stored in bales and the feel of the cloth against my legs when I sat on them, reading until the siren hooted, announcing the end of the shift.

When I thought about the POW camp I wondered what kind of signal would have been used to separate parts of the day for all those men imprisoned there. I realised how different their days must have been from my memories of a mill.

So I knew I had my setting. An industrial town with a POW camp on the outskirts of that town.

I knew what kind of story I wanted to write: I would write a love story, a life story, a family saga.

And I knew the type of family that I needed to live in that town, be involved in some way with the camp. They had to be as real to me as I hoped they would be to my future readers. (See how optimistic I was before I’d even started the book?!!) They had to be a set of diverse characters with interesting lives and one of them had to be the protagonist.

And I knew right away what the protagonist would be like: a young, strong, sometimes feisty woman, with a great strength of characters, loyal to family and friends, independent yet mindful of familial responsibilities. Finally I knew her name, Mary Howarth.

What I didn’t know was how much she and her family would come to mean so much to me.

And that, when I finished the first draft and the story was neatly tied up, I would be so lost. I didn’t want it to end there. I re-wrote it. And then re-wrote it again. In fact I re-wrote it six times. Until, in the end I realised that the family hadn’t finished with me; those characters wanted more of their story told.

So I wrote the sequel, Changing Patterns. Set in 1950/51 it is a continuation of their lives in the aftermath of the war, during the hardship of rationing, and shows how each copes with the result of their actions during the war.

It felt natural, then, to leap forward in time to reveal how the next generation of the Howarth family was affected by all that had gone before. So I wrote Living in the Shadows, set in 1969


Question: Your books are set in industrial Pennines and rural Wales, both areas that you know well, and that comes across strongly in the books. Do you find either one easier to evoke?

One of my favourite things when I’m writing is to evoke a sense of place through description. It only takes a few words or sentences here and there. You don’t need a great dollop of narrative to create a setting. I just close my eyes and picture what I want to see. Sometimes an image will come to me that I know I’ll need as a background for a particular scene, a certain part of the story. When that happens I write it and keep it in a separate file.

But in answer to your question, I have to say it was easier to evoke a town in the industrial Pennines because I grew up a few miles away from such a town in the sixties and, although at the time I was oblivious to the fact, that it wasn’t too long after the war. And I do remember a lot of the late sixties, which is the era of the last book of the trilogy.

Ashford, the fictional town in the book, is actually loosely based on Oldham. I say loosely but for one fact which I’ll tell you about later.

I was brought up in a village in the Pennines. I loved the hills and the moors so it was simple to picture the surrounding area; to describe how it was then. And every Saturday my mother and I would catch the bus to Oldham to go shopping and pay the bills. So going back in time to the days of the old-fashioned Woolworths, the market, the shops on the High Street was a brilliant reminiscence for me.

We moved to Pembrokeshire in the late seventies so I needed to combine the research of rural Wales during the war, immediately afterwards and in the sixties with how I’ve seen it since we’ve lived here. I love the coastline, the countryside, the farmland and the slower pace of life here in Wales. And I know that much of the natural areas haven’t changed too much. But I have to admit, putting together the two, the research and what I saw was a little more difficult. It took me a lot more time and a lot of effort before I was happy with the descriptions, the evocation of the little village of Llamroth

Question: The trilogy is a family saga, covering a period from World War II to the trendy 60s, and each period is conveyed very convincingly. How much research did you have to do?

Simply put… loads. I have thick files of the research I did for each book. Each folder contains a section on the society during each era: the politics and politicians’ names, the social attitudes, houses, furniture, domestic appliances (if any and, if not, what was used beside a sweeping brush, donkey stone and, on washing days, a dolly tub and mangle) clothes, food and recipes, the newspapers and magazines at the time (including children’s comics), toys, films, radio (or television) programmes, shops. Anything and everything to bring the world that the characters move around in to life.

I have to admit, though, I didn’t have to do quite as much research for Living in the Shadows; I was very aware of the life around me in 1969!


Question: A central presence in all three books is the Granville, an old cotton mill that serves as a prisoner of war camp. Is it based on a real place?

Ah, now. This is what I meant when I said the industrial town in the Pennines is loosely based on Oldham except for one fact. The Granville is based on reality. It is created from Glen Mill, the actual POW camp on the outskirts of Oldham.

Glen Mill was a disused cotton mill built in 1903 it ceased production in 1938. At a time when all-purpose built camps were being used by the armed forces and there was no money available for POW build, Glen Mill was chosen for various reasons: it wasn't near any military installations or seaports and it was far from the south and east of Britain, it was large and it was enclosed by a railway, a road and two mill reservoirs.

The earliest occupants were German merchant seamen caught in Allied ports at the outbreak of war and brought from the Interrogation centre of London. Within months Russian volunteers who had been captured fighting for the Germans in France were brought there as well. According to records they were badly behaved, ill disciplined and– oddly enough, I thought–hated the Germans more than they did the British. So there were lots of fights. But, when German paratroopers (a branch of the Luftwaffe) arrived they imposed a Nazi-type regime within the camp and controlled the Russians.

Later in the war the prisoners elected a Lagerführer; a camp leader. This hierarchy ruled the inner workings of the camp and the camp commanders had to deal with them.

The first ever talk I gave was to about a hundred and fifty people who, I was told just before the talk were, ‘Friends of Glen Mill… you’d better have done your research.’

I had. It went okay. But I’ve never known such sheer panic about a talk since.



Question: There’s a love story running through the books, but because it is a family saga rather than a simple romance, you follow a host of diverse characters. Do you enjoy playing with a large and complex cast, rather than concentrating solely on one protagonist?

I do! It’s like life; we’re all intermingled with one another in this world. We don’t live in a vacuum. As John Donne says” No Man is an Island.”

It’s fun, thinking about what one character will be doing while another takes over the plot, the story, for a while. A bit like characters on stage; they never stop acting.

As long as I remember that whatever the others in the cast do, ultimately it affects the protagonist (and/or the antagonist) in some way, I can keep an eye on everyone. Obviously it can go wrong in the first few drafts but, in the end, it works well.

Perhaps I just like making life difficult for myself.

But the way I write is to give separate chapters, different times, to the main characters’ point of view. I think it works. It’s important that the reader knows just who they are following, exactly whose perspective they are reading.


Question: Do you plan to add to the story, or do you think it’s now complete?

I thought the series would be over by the end of the trilogy. It’s not! My WIP is the prequel set between 1912 and 1924. Working title, Foreshadowing. And it tells the story of Winifred and Bill, Mary’s parents.


Question: Have you always wanted to be a writer, or did it creep up on you?

We were rather isolated as a family so I was a bit of a loner as a child. From being small, I wrote to invent characters that would fill my world and I’m embarrassed to admit I would act them out when I was on my own. I loved English in school and would write huge long stories that the poor teacher had to plough through. I had wonderful English teachers that always encouraged me. Depending what was happening in my life I either wrote a lot or hardly anything but I wrote every day. As an adult I began sending out short stories and poems with moderate success. The novels I wrote I hid away. It was only after I had breast cancer that I found courage to let the world see my books.

It was the best thing I did. But there is a tale to it. Perhaps it’s best I just share it here: http://bit.ly/1Usy8xI


Links to Judith's books, website, blog etc.

Pattern of Shadows http://amzn.to/1toWbaY

Changing Patterns http://amzn.to/1U1AzHM

Living in the Shadows http://amzn.to/1Uc0Ghp


Website: http://www.judithbarrow.com

Blog: https://judithbarrowblog.com/

Twitter: @barrow_judith

Facebooks: judith.barrow.3

Pinterest: judithbarrow

Goodreads: Judith_Barrow

Google+: JudithBarrowauthor

Linkedin: judith-anne-barrow-02812b11

about me: http://about.me/jbarrow

the very being or legal existence of a woman

In India, one of the rapists who brutalised and murdered a young woman on a bus, has offered an excuse for his crime. "A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy. A decent girl won't roam around at 9 o'clock at night. Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes."

In Britain we are tempted to give smug thanks that we live in a country where women are not treated with such utter contempt. We are and always have been so thoroughly civilised here.

Except, of course, that we haven’t.

1982 a motorist raped a teenage hitchhiker. I remember the case very well, because the judge at Ipswich crown court, Bertrand Richards, merely fined the rapist, since the victim was obviously just asking for it. ''I am not saying that a girl hitching home late at night should not be protected by the law, but she was guilty of a great deal of contributory negligence.'' It’s one of a vast ocean of cases where rape victims have been let down by the courts or the police, and the belief is still widespread that in many cases, the women victims are responsible for the crime committed against them.

Not so long ago, some women could be raped repeatedly without the law even recognising it as a crime. They were called ‘wives.’

1736 Judge Matthew Hale established that as marriage was a legal contract, the wife ‘hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract.’ Refusal was not permitted.

1991 R.v R: The House of Lords finally declares Hale’s ruling to be a legal myth. 1991.

But still, we think, Britain is a better place for women than many other countries and cultures. Yes, there are still glass ceilings to break through, and a great many theoretical equalities that amount to squat in real life, but we’re not generally treated as possessions, as second-class citizens, as sex-slaves, oppressed, covered up, despised, subjected to forced marriage, mutilated…

Not now. But we haven’t been where we are for very long.

Women allow themselves to be ‘given away’ by their fathers at their weddings, and, okay, it’s on a par with wearing something borrowed, something blue: cute and meaningless. But for centuries, it had plenty of meaning. Parents arranged marriages, and girls were the property of their father until the moment they became the property of their husband.

1870 – 145 years ago – Married Women’s Property Act: a wife was allowed to keep her own earnings. Before that, any wealth she earned or owned became her husband’s property. She couldn’t draw up a will or dispose of anything without her husband’s consent.

1882 Married Women’s Property Act: wives were granted the legal status of ‘Feme Sole.’ They existed in their own right. Previously, a wife was legally defined as a ‘feme covert.’ In the words of 18^th century lawyer, William Blackstone, "By marriage, the very being or legal existence of a woman is suspended, or at least incorporated or consolidated into that of the husband, under whose wing, protection, or cover she performs everything."
 Mind you, when my mother’s cousin writes to her, she still addresses her as Mrs. Peter Moore.

1990 – just 25 years ago – She’s finally taxed separately.

Which is okay if she’s allowed to work. My grandmother, a seamstress, marrying in 1921, had to make do with a quiet civil ceremony, in order to keep the marriage secret from her employer. Once he found out, she was unemployed. Married women couldn’t work and be economically independent.
Not that they had much of an income to give up, because women could expect to be paid pin money, while men were entitled to a proper wage. As wage slaves, at the beginning of the industrial revolution, they were in demand, as a source of very cheap labour.

1842 Mines and Collieries Act: women were excluded from working in mines, not because the work was too hard or dangerous, but because it involved them wearing trousers and working bare-breasted: it “made girls unsuitable for marriage and unfit to be mothers.”

Women proved themselves capable of any job, in times of war, when the men were needed for cannon fodder, but they were pushed back to the kitchen as soon as the surviving men wanted their jobs back.

The marriage bar on women in most professions, including the civil service, lasted until the 1950s.

1970  Equal Pay Act: at least employers were required to pay lip service to equal pay for equal work. Amazing how tiny distinctions in job descriptions could get round it.

1975 Sex Discrimination Act. You’d think it was simple, wouldn’t you? No more discrimination in jobs, services, etc on grounds of gender. But…

2015: first women members of the Royal and Ancient Golf club, first woman bishop…

Equality in employment requires equality in eduction of course.
Women have struggled for it for centuries, from Margaret Cavendish in the 17^th century and Mary Wollstonecraft in the 18^th. Tudor royal women were educated as well as their brothers, but it was downhill after that. Young gentlemen learned Latin and how to run the Empire. Young ladies learned deportment. When education began to be regarded as a good thing for the lower orders, in the 19^th Century, the girls had their share, but the 11 Plus, in operation after World War II was still deliberately skewed in order to prevent girls consistently out-doing boys. At my Comprehensive school, in the late 1960s, no argument: girls did housecraft and biology (fluffy bunnies and how to cook them) and boys did metalwork and physics (how to get to the moon).  There’s still a struggle to get girls to study STEM subjects.

12^th Century: Oxford university already up and running, for boys, followed by Cambridge in 1209.

1869: a mere 660 years later – Girton, Cambridge, first college for women. The founding of a women’s college in Oxford was condemned by theologian Henry Liddon as “an educational development that runs counter to the wisdom and experience of all the centuries of Christendom.”

1948: Cambridge finally awards degrees to women. 1948

1865 Elizabeth Garrett became first woman qualified to practice medicine, courtesy of the Society of Apothecaries, which promptly changed its rules, to stop other women getting uppity ideas.
Of course, women had always been concerned with medicine, and probably did less damage than the official male doctors. But then if they did too much and were suspected of being a little too wise, they always ran the risk of being condemned as witches.

1727: Janet Horne was the last woman executed for witchcraft in Britain. Being Scottish, she was burned. England hanged its witches.

Women’s function was not to be educated and employed, but obedient wives and mothers. .  In the 1940s, The Queen Mother explained why a proper education wasn’t necessary for her younger daughter Margaret: “After all, I and my sisters only had governesses and we all married well—one of us very well.”

Their role was ordained, by law and by God. The Book of Common Prayer recommended this reading for marriage services: “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church: and he is the Saviour of the body. Therefore as the Church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing. And again he saith, Let the wife see that she reverence her husband.”

1928; The bride’s vow to obey became optional in the Prayer book. Optional.

1837: civil registration removed the church’s monopoly on marriage – but not on divorce, which was virtually impossible for anyone not called King Henry.

1857 Matrimonial Causes Act: men could divorce their wives for adultery. A woman could divorce her husband if adultery were accompanied by cruelty, incest, bigamy or desertion.

1937 Matrimonial Causes Act: the situation was equalised.

Why would any woman possibly want a divorce? Marriage was a state of bliss – at least, she’d better find it so, or else. A man was allowed to lock up and beat his wife, without restraint.

1853 Aggravated Assaults Act: a wife was granted the same legal protection from assault as a poodle.


1895 The City of London prohibited wife-beating at night, because it kept people awake.

1976 Domestic Violence and Matrimonial Proceedings Act: wives could take out injunctions against violent partners. We’re still struggling to convince the police to treat domestic violence as a crime and not a private matter.

1351 Treason Act. Husbands were never actually permitted to kill their wives. A husband who did so would be guilty of murder, and might even be hanged. On the other hand, a wife who killed her husband was guilty of petty treason against her rightful lord. The penalty for treason for women was burning at the stake (hanging drawing and quartering involved stripping and was therefore indecent for women. Burning was okay).

1784. John Wesley was busy saving the world. Jane Austen was 9. The Prince Regent was just about to start building the Brighton Pavilion. And Mary Bailey was the last woman to be burned at the stake for murdering her husband

1828 the crime of petty treason was downgraded to murder.

Wives existed to have babies and had no legitimate business preventing conception, even though they’ve been trying to for millennia. Moderately reliable methods have only been available from the 1870s, and it wasn’t until the 1920s that the likes of Mary Stopes ensured they were publicly advocated (for married women). Real control only dates from the 1960s, with the pill and the Abortion Act.

When a couple with children split up, it’s usually the mother who gets custody, much to the resentment of many fathers. Their resentment is nothing to that felt by women in earlier times. Children were the property of the father, who not only gained automatic custody but could deny the mother any access.

1839 Custody of Infants Act: a non-adulterous wife could have custody of any children under 7, if the Lord Chancellor agreed she was of good character.

1873 Custody of Infants Act: a good wife could have custody of children under 16.

1886 Guardianship of Infants Act: a widowed mother was permitted to be sole guardian of her children, without being monitored by a sensible man.

All these laws, concerned with the welfare of women. Passed mostly by men.

1832. Reform Act. Started the redistribution of the franchise. Sounds good, except that it actually withdrew the franchise from women who might previously have been permitted to vote on property grounds.

1838 The great Charter. The radical revolutionary chartists demanded votes for all men. Not women.

1869 Municipal Franchise Act: women ratepayers could vote in local elections! BUT

1872 a court ruling limited it to single and widowed women.

1918 Representation of the People Act: all men over 21 could now vote, and, be still my beating heart, all staid and matronly women over 30. But girl, did we have to fight for it, against not merely ridicule, but torture. It certainly put paid to the notion of chivalrous English gentlemen who treated women with respect. Force-feeding for jailed suffragettes, not always through the obvious orifices, was a form of violence not far removed from the way rape is used as a weapon of war.

1928 Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act. We hadn’t all turned up at the ballot box, simpering, giggling and asking for help to hold the pencil, so finally – equality.

1929 Margaret Bondfield first woman Cabinet Minister.

1958 Life Peerages Act: women were allowed to sit in the House of Lords. Phew.

1979 – oh, let’s pass over that one.

2015 – Harriet Harman’s Pink Bus. Hang on. Are we going backwards here?

So here we are. Still woefully under-represented in Parliament/government, which remains a public-school boy’s club, but we’re getting there. We’ve broken into all the professions, if only by our finger tips. If we’re brave enough, or well-enough funded, we can take employers to court when they treat us unfairly as women, as entire city councils have discovered. We can marry who we like, even if we make a complete pig’s ear of it and make ridiculous choices for all the wrong reasons. Or we can choose sex without marriage, or complete and utter independence, and we will not be hauled before the village elders and flogged or stoned.

We can dress how we want, let the world see our faces and our hair. We can believe and think what we want, and voice our thoughts, loudly, without permission. We are not usually gang-raped if we’re suspected of being lesbian. We don’t have to live in shuttered quarters and avoid the sight of the opposite sex. We can walk and drive, unaccompanied. Our small daughters are not subjected to genital mutilation or sold off in marriage to dirty old men. We are free to use contraception, to have many babies, or just one, or none at all. If we conceive outside marriage, we are not sent to Magdalen laundries, to have our babies stolen from us by nuns from Hell. We are not shot in the head if we dare to demand education.

We’re lucky. We don’t live in that nasty, patriarchal, misogynist, Mediaeval world out there, full of fear and hatred of women. But it wasn’t so long ago that we did, so smugness really isn’t called for. We have what we have because we’ve struggled for it, and sisters, we need to be sober, be vigilant, because our adversary, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking to drag us back into the dark.

Scotland the possibly brave

I don’t live in Scotland, have very little Scottish blood, and I won't be voting in the referendum, but… I have come to the conclusion that it’s really time to end the “union” that is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The thing about our union is that it came about, piecemeal, through conquest, repression, persecution, feudal genealogical alliances, bribery and incompetence among capitalist interests, hundreds of years ago, before any of our present values were remotely acceptable, let alone the norm.

When the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was at its height, Wales had been conquered, Scotland had been bought, Ireland had been starved, any English workers who wanted rights were transported, and democracy was a dirty word. So how about ending the Union, not so that little nation states of Scotland, Ireland and Wales can go off into isolationist ghettoes, but so that we can re-form, not a union, but an alliance, of modern adult societies who share civilised values, cultures, interests, and even a currency, who can agree with each other without having to submit perpetually to rule by an Eton-dominated public school ra-ra debating chamber in mock Gothic in the middle of London.

Kindling interest

So I have this book, A Time For Silence, which is published by Honno as a paperback and as an e-book, on Kindle, Kobo etc. I think I may have sold one through Kobo, and perhaps a couple through etc, but really I mean Kindle. People use Kindle. This still surprises me. A book is a paper thing, with pages you can turn, flip through, mark and scribble on, and why would anyone want an electronic device instead?

I discovered why they might, when I started reading Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell books and found my wrists snapping under the strain of wrestling with 24 kilos of paper. So I bought a Kindle. I still thought of it as a minor addition to the library and surely people didn’t them on a regular basis.

Having featured on the Kindle monthly deal, in June, I have concluded that people do use Kindle. Lots of people use Kindle, and even actively look for books to load on them. Better still, they keep an eye on such things as Kindle deals and buy accordingly. Not just dozens of them, but hundreds of them. Thousands, even. I hadn’t realised there were a thousand people with Kindles. We live a sheltered life in West Wales.

When you feature in an Amazon deal, you can pretend to be as blasé or dismissive as you like, but it is impossible not to become hooked on checking your rankings. There’s the general ranking of hourly Kindle sales, but there are also the genre rankings. It was hugely gratifying to find myself #1 in literary fiction. I would never have presumed to define my book as literary fiction, which is surely reserved for writers like Iris Murdoch or A.S.Byatt, but then I found it also contained Jeffrey Archer, which pricked the bubble a little. And I also did well as popular fiction, which is, presumably, the opposite of literary fiction, all with the same book.

I was listed too in Crime/thriller/mystery. This worried me. I never considered my novel to be a thriller, or even really a mystery. Would readers be disappointed at the lack of police procedure and car chases? But at least it does contain a crime. How I found myself as #1 in contemporary romance I can’t imagine. My book deals with domestic abuse, depression, suicide, murder, but not a trace of romance. Still, who’s complaining? Now that the monthly deal is well past, I have settled down to being #1, on and off, in Welsh Crime, which is almost as good as being the No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.

What I gained most from the monthly deal, apart from sales of course, was an astonishing harvest of reviews. There was one who denounced it as rubbish suitable for women, and another dismissed it as cheap and cheerful (cheerful?), but mostly they were written by people who liked it. Genuinely liked it, thought deeply about it and would like to read more.  People who don’t even know me. Which made me feel for the first time that I’m truly an author. Published. Promoted. Approved.

Very reassuring.

Now I can just concentrate on the next one.
Motherlove, out in February. Thought I'd just drop that in.

So fare thee well, Pete Seeger

I remember my parents buying their first record player. Or gramophone player. It was covered in cream and maroon vinyl, and it was placed in the dining room, where we all looked at it and wondered what it was doing there.

My brother knew what it was doing there. He seriously bought records, EPs and LPs – still has all the original Beatles records, and he followed the charts religiously.

I wasn’t really interested in music, and in this, I took after my parents, which is why I wondered why they’d bought it. The purchase did compel them to invest in some records. There was, as I recall, an EP of Ella Fitzgerald. We also had a few classical LPs stamped with ‘Fire Salvage,’ which might explain why the labels couldn’t be trusted. It was years before I discovered that what I’d thought was Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony was actually Mendelssohn’s Violin concerto.  My parents really felt far more comfortable with the spoken words, so we had Dylan Thomas reading some of his poems, Under Milk Wood and several Shakespeare recordings. This is why I can still quote most of Henry V from end to end.

But there were music records that made an impact in the family: songs by Pete Seeger. We played them religiously, and every Sunday we would go to the pub at lunch time (long before serious campaigns about drink-driving) and come home roaring ‘The Banks are made of marble’ or ‘If you miss me at the back of the bus’ or, if we were too tipsy to manage complicated words, ‘We shall overcome.’ We were, of course, a radical left-wing family, which we demonstrated by singing Pete Seeger songs on our inebriated way home.

So perhaps, the best song to commemorate Pete Seeger, for me, is not one of his but ‘As soon as this pub closes, the revolution starts.’

How to climb Snowdon

For a start, you don’t use the railway. Who would dream of travelling on a train that’s given to falling off the mountain? All right, it fell off on the opening day in 1896 and has never done so since, but never mind the safety issue, it’s just cheating. Snowdon is a mountain and you climb it. Or you claim to have climbed it. George Burrows claimed to have climbed it in a couple of hours in 1862, accompanied by his daughter wearing a crinoline (it was his daughter wearing it), and to have seen magnificent views from the summit, whereas anyone who has climbed it knows that there’s a high probability of not even being able to see the summit when you’re standing on it, let alone anything else.

What you do see at the top is the café, which used to be dire, and is now far far better – unless you arrive in lousy, windy, wet weather, exhausted and longing for a hot drink, only to find it shut. In which case, it’s worse than dire.

I‘ve been climbing Snowdon once a year since about 1978, primarily to convince myself I can do it. Haven’t managed for the last couple of years due to arthritic knees, which is very depressing, but I’m going to do it again if it kills me.

My first attempt, from Llanberis… no, it wasn’t really an attempt. I and my sister set off from Llanberis wearing skirts and sandals, because we were passing through and thought a stroll was called for. We did miraculously reach the half-way café (is it still there?) before turning back, but seeing the mountain, a real mountain, rising up before us, and a footpath showing us the way, we decided we’d return with proper boots and rain coats. For years, we continued to climb from Llanberis, because it seemed so obviously safe. If a train could do it, surely we could.  Eventually, we discovered the other paths, and, after trying them, concluded that the Llanberis path is not only unnecessarily long, but also slightly boring. Matched only, in this, by the Snowdon Ranger path.

The best path, if you want to have a scenic walk and cheat, is the one that starts at Pen y Pass. Cheating, because the car park which is the start of the path is already halfway up the mountain.  This is really a double route. Take the left hand fork for the Miner’s track, via the lakes, or the right hand fork for the Pig (or PYG) track, and if you make it to the top, you can return by the other route and make a round trip of it (who wants to retrace their own steps?). Back in 1984, going Up the Miners and Down the Pig was, of course, a political statement, but it has probably lost some of its meaning by now.

One of the benefits of the Miner’s Track is that it takes you past the lakes, Llyn Llydaw and Glaslyn, and if you can’t cope with the thought of carrying on, but you are embarrassed at the sight of small children frolicking past you as you wheeze and pant and clasp your sides, you can always pretend that you only intended to walk to the lakes, and never had any intention of going any further.

If you do decide to go on, you have to cope with The ZigZag. Our coping mechanism for this was Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut. You get two squares at each turn. This ensures that you are actually heavier by the time you reach the top, instead of several pounds lighter.

The paths from Pen y Pass are very popular. So popular that we’ve had to give up trying to park there on several occasions. The Rhyd Ddu path, from the other side of the mountain, is usually a lot less cluttered with people. It benefits from a great pub at the bottom and a spectacular ridge at the top, and it was also just about within walking distance of our Beddgelert campsite. Within easy distance at the start, that is, but it seemed like a million miles away by the time we got back to the bottom and realised that we still had a couple of miles to walk before we could collapse, groaning, on our deflated lilos.  I would say that the Rhyd Ddu path is not the most interesting, at least on its lower sections, but it was on the Rhyd Ddu path that I first saw my Brocken Spectre. In fact the only time I saw my Brocken Spectre. It’s something you can go through your whole life and never see, so if you want to know what a Brocken Spectre is, it’s your shadow cast onto the top of clouds that are below you – except that it’s a shadow only you can see. Three of us were standing on the Llechog ridge, looking down on clouds, and each of us saw our own shadow, but nobody else’s. Very weird, very enchanting.

The most challenging of the listed routes is the Watkin path, starting from Pont Bethania between Llyn Gwynant and Llyn Dinas, the lowest starting point of any of the paths, so you have the highest climb. After all, if you’re going to climb a mountain, you might as well climb it all. It’s a route that has wonderful views throughout, up towards the summit and back down into the Gwynant valley, taking you past beautiful waterfalls, with pools where sweaty walkers can’t resist swimming in the summer. It’s a stretch that always reminds me of Gerard Manley Hopkin’s Inversnaid; ‘Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern and the beadbonny ash that hangs over the burn,’ and it leads you to Plas Cwmllan, an old house wrecked by war-time target practice.

 The route then passes the Gladstone rock , where a plaque commemorates an address given by an elderly Gladstone on the subject of the rights of small nations. As he had climbed a good way up Snowdon and was addressing a crowd of local Welsh, you can hardly blame them for assuming he was referring to Wales, although he was actually talking about the Balkans. An easy mistake.

After the Gladstone rock,  the path climbs – seriously climbs – up past  and through abandoned mines and slag heaps, to the ridge, Bwlch Ciliau, between the sheer cliffs of Y Lliwydd and the summit proper of Snowdon. A note about this ridge. Climb in thick cloud, as we did on our first attempt, and you don’t really appreciate where you are. Whatever the weather, sometimes you really need a pee. Modestly clambering behind a rock when you’re on Bwlch Ciliau in order to relieve yourself might seem like a good idea, except that clouds on Snowdon can lift as quickly as they come down, and you can find yourself, knickers around your ankles, in bright sunlight, facing across the lakes to a group of boy scouts climbing up the Miner’s Track. It is worth the embarrassment however, because after Bwlch Ciliau, you have to climb the last slippery slithering scree slope at the top of the Watkin path and if, like me, you’re not very good with heights, sheer drops and balance, you may very well want to wet yourself.

This is why I no longer take this route up the Watkin, much to the relief of all boy scouts. What I do is follow the lower part of the path, past the waterfalls, up to Plas Cwmllan, and then head off across the valley – admittedly, you do have to wallow through a couple of acres of bog – and scramble very satisfyingly up the ridge beyond, to join the last section of the Rhyd Ddu path, taking in the narrow Bwlch Main ridge (don’t attempt it in a high wind). The best of all possible worlds.

What you do not do is take the route via Crib Goch. I did. Once. Mostly on hands and knees, and at one point I did decide just to freeze and wait to be rescued by helicopter. Don’t do it.

Scott of the Pond

Everyone knows about Captain Robert Falcon Scott of the Antarctic. They know how he sailed in the Terra Nova with a band of fellow explorers in 1912, intent to be the first to reach the South Pole, only to find that Roald Amundsen had got there first by eating his dogs (typically disgraceful foreign trick), and that Scott and his companions perished in a blizzard on their return journey. They know that he was a magnificent hero of the Empire who honourably gave his life in the exercise of gallant British pluck in the most inhospitable place on Earth, a national icon: the epitome of glorious failure – or alternatively, that he was a typical ill-prepared, glory-seeking bungler, responsible for the deaths of himself and his companions.

What very few people do know is that Scott set sail on his fateful  expedition from the boating pond in Cardiff’s Roath Park. I know this because I have seen the lighthouse memorial erected there, to Scott and his companions, “Britons all, and very gallant gentlemen.” I was with my great aunt who explained its significance, because she was a great aunt who delighted in stories of ghoulish horror. This is why Scott is always confused in my mind with the grisly fate of three children who plunged to their deaths from a crumbling cliff in Taff’s Well, and an Edwardian picture book with an illustration of an escaped bear creeping up on a small toddler whose mother is looking on in horror. Took me some years to get it straight that Scott did not fall off a cliff and was not eaten by a bear.

I had to rely on my great aunt’s explanation, because when I first saw the Roath Park memorial, I was far too young to read the inscription. As I grew older, naturally I began to wonder. All very well setting sail from that spot, but how did Scott get his ship out of the boating pond?  There came a time when I thought to read the inscription and learned that he had actually sailed from Cardiff Docks.

Such a disappointment.