By the spring of 1985 Mum’s journalist friend had put his ideas together for the first three chapters of the novel he wanted Mum to help him write and had posted them on to her. She studied them carefully and then began to add details of her own.
She decided that the heroine would be called Claire and she’d be 27 years old. This would give her time to have got her degree and have two or three years experience working as a vet.
Mum also decided that Claire would have long dark hair and dark brown eyes – and she’d drive a bright red Mini, just like Mum had at the time.
Claire would also be a country girl at heart, even though she’d been brought up in a town and had no real experience of living in the country.
The other main character was a man in his late fifties. Luckily for Mum, her journalist friend had already put some thought into him and so she knew that he was the vet that Claire was going to work with.
Mum knew that his name was Norman Whincup and that his much-loved wife had recently died. She also knew that they’d been childhood sweethearts and that his wife was buried in the graveyard of the church where they’d been married.
This church was going to be the setting for the opening scene of the novel – and Mum knew the exact church she wanted. It was St Gregory’s Minster at Kirkdale, near Kirkby Moorside.
Though she’d never been there, she’d seen lots of pictures of it when she’d been learning more about the Vikings, as on the wall above the door it has a sundial dating back to the rebuilding of the church around the year 1060.
It also has an inscription saying it was put there by Orm, son of Gamal. These are both very Viking names, but the inscription is written in Old English, which suggests they had been settled in England for some time.
As well as visiting Kirkdale, Mum’s early research for background for this story took her to Kirkby Moorside…
Pickering…
And Helmsley, where she had lunch with her journalist friend…
Then they visited Helmsley Castle whose stone construction started in 1186, on the site of an earlier wooden castle…
Before going to visit the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey just a couple of miles away…
On another day Mum went to explore the North York Moors themselves, visiting Hutton-le-Hole…
home of the Ryedale Folk Museum…
Farndale, which is famous for its thousands of wild daffodils which bloom in the spring…
And Rosedale Abbey, a centre of the ironstone industry in Victorian times, but now a quiet village…
With plenty of maps and leaflets from the various places she’d visited, Mum was at last able to sit down and start writing up the story for her friend.
https://www.northyorkmoors.org.uk/
It didn’t take long to get the first three chapters completed and paid for – as agreed – then it was out of Mum’s hands while her journalist friend started sending it out to publishers in the hope of getting one of them interested in publishing it.
Meanwhile Mum continued writing stories and features of her own and sending them out to her favourite magazines. But there were fewer and fewer sales and some weeks her only income was what she got from her three little jobs.
Over that winter she had to keep drawing on her savings, but she was determined to keep on writing. By the spring of 1986 she’d managed to produce two novels, as well as around 20 more stories and magazine features.
Two or three of the stories sold and the rest – together with the two novels – were still being considered by various editors when the time came for Mum to go with Granny Betty and Grandpa Graham on their annual trip to visit friends and family in Wales.
As always, she had a great time there – and, as always, she was looking forward to picking up the post when she got back home. With so many things out, she was sure there’d have been some good news about one of them while she was away – she could not have been more wrong…
I’ll tell you more about that in my next post, however. Until then, take care and stay safe – and look out for some more tales from me soon!
Follow my next blog: 134. MY MUM THE STORY-TELLER – PART TWENTY-NINE
11/03/2021
Wilf the bear-faced blogger 