By Jane Davis
St Mary’s Church in
Beddington is normally bolted during the week, but on my mother-in-law’s tenth anniversary,
I found the doors unlocked, and so I stepped inside and lit a candle.
But at
the same time as thinking how much Maureen would have liked the building (pointing
out that the vicar would never have agreed to play ‘Fat-Bottomed Girls’ at her
funeral, as hers did), I was aware of two other presences: Jim and Aimee.
Who are Jim and Aimee?
They’re old friends of mine.
There’s something
transportative about living in the same neighbourhood all of your life; walking
around familiar geography, knee-deep in the history of the place. And
superimposed over a street map carried both inside and outside your head (the housing
estate that now stands on the site of your old high school), are important milestones.
When you learned to ride a bike. Your first kiss. The first flat you owned. But
when I started setting fiction within my personal geography, I added an
additional strata.
Let me explain. In Smash all the Windows, my character
Maggie takes several walks. I work in the City of London so I’m familiar with its
streets, so familiar that I was afraid I might neglect the detail. As research
for my novel, I walked her routes – from Tower Hill, down the Thames riverside
path, over London Bridge, through Borough Market and along Bankside to Tate
Modern. I made notes about all of the sights and sounds, notes that made it
onto the pages of my book. But now, when I take the same walk, I think, ‘Here’s
where Maggie saw the starling’, and ‘Here’s where Maggie bought her copy of the
Big Issue’. Her presence is real. Particular locations are now imbued with a
certain energy. And by some definitions, such a presence might be called a
ghost.
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In fact, ghosts are
frequent visitors in my daily life. I might park in Shere at the beginning of my
favourite walks in the Surrey Hills, and see Sir James Hastings crossing the
square from his home, past the war memorial, to the pub he drank in, his elderly
German Shepherd called Isambard in tow. (I Stopped Time). I take a short cut
through Honeywood Walk in Carshalton and see the tree that caused the collapse
of the wall that Judy Jones was buried under (These Fragile Things). I cross
the small wooden bridge at the foot of the waterfall in Grove Park and Aimee
swirls round, elbows on the rail. (A Funeral for an Owl). I come across a lone stag
when out walking in Richmond Park, and somehow it is the stag that blocked
Alison’s path, looking her straight in the eye (An Unchoreographed Life).
We live with our
characters so long, they’re kin to us. In a way, we know them better than
friends and family, because we’ve seen through their eyes and know their every
thought. Every single one of these things was a memory of my own, a memory that
I’ve since given to a character, and in editing my novels – that constant
re-reading – I’ve made the memories more theirs than mine. You might even say
that I’m the intruder. Perhaps, inadvertently, I’ve become the ghost.
Publication Details, Smash all the Windows:
It has taken conviction
to right the wrongs.
It will take courage to
learn how to live again.
For the families of the
victims of the St Botolph and Old Billingsgate disaster, the undoing of a
miscarriage of justice should be a cause for rejoicing. For more than thirteen
years, the search for truth has eaten up everything. Marriages, families,
health, careers and finances.
Finally, the coroner has
ruled that the crowd did not contribute to their own deaths. Finally, now that
lies have been unravelled and hypocrisies exposed, they can all get back to their
lives.
If only it were that
simple.
Smash all the
Windows will be released on 12 April, but you can pre-order it now for
the special price of 99p/99c (Price increases to £1.99 on 12 March. Price on
publication will be £3.99).
From 13 February to 10 March, US readers can also enter a Goodreads
Giveaway for a chance to win one of 100 eBooks.
About Jane Davis
Hailed by The Bookseller as ‘One to Watch’, Jane Davis is the author of
eight novels.
Jane spent her twenties and the first part of her thirties chasing
promotions at work, but when she achieved what she’d set out to do, she
discovered that it wasn’t what she wanted after all. It was then that she
turned to writing.
Her debut, Half-truths & White
Lies, won the Daily Mail First Novel Award 2008. Of her subsequent three
novels, Compulsion Reads wrote, ‘Davis is a phenomenal writer, whose ability to
create well-rounded characters that are easy to relate to feels effortless’.
Her 2015 novel, An Unknown Woman, was
Writing Magazine’s Self-published Book of the Year 2016 and has been
shortlisted for two further awards.
Jane lives in Carshalton, Surrey with her Formula 1 obsessed,
star-gazing, beer-brewing partner, surrounded by growing piles of paperbacks,
CDs and general chaos. When she isn’t writing, you may spot her disappearing up
a mountain with a camera in hand. Her favourite description of fiction is
‘made-up truth’.
CONTACT DETAILS
Press enquiries: janerossdale@btinternet.com
