When actress Sarah Winman released her debut novel – When God Was A Rabbit – in 2011, she turned many heads with her skilful writing and warm understanding of love and family. Winning several awards, including New Writer of the Year in the Galaxy National Book Awards, and picked as a title for the Richard and Judy Book Club, Sarah had a tremendous year following her debut and many readers were anxious to hear when her next book would be released.
A Year of Marvellous Ways is Sarah’s second book and once again explores love and life and the magic that can be found in the everyday. In this story we meet an isolated elderly lady named Marvellous Ways, who lives in the same Cornish creek that she has spent most of her life. Marvellous feels compelled to wait for something to come, though she isn’t sure what that is until a young soldier washes up in the creek where Marvellous lives. What follows is a spectacularly story of grief, courage, life, death, love and life affirming events.
In this short interview, Sarah tells us more about the process of writing A Year of Marvellous Ways and how it relates to her debut.
You can get a taste of what’s to come in Sarah Winman’s A Year of Marvellous Ways in the below preview chapter. Let us know what you think in the comments box below.
So here she was, old now, standing by the roadside
waiting.
Ever since she had entered her ninetieth year Marvellous
Ways spent a good part of her day waiting, and not for death,
as you might assume, given her age. She wasn’t sure what she
was waiting for because the image was incomplete. It was a
sense, that’s all, something that had come to her on the tail
feather of a dream – one of Paper Jack’s dreams, God rest his
soul – and it had fl own over the landscape of sleep just before
light and she hadn’t been able to grasp that tail feather and pull
it back before it disappeared over the horizon and disintegrated
in the heat of a rising sun. But she had known its message:
Wait, for it’s coming.
She adjusted the elastic on her large glasses and fitted them
close to her face. The thick lenses magnified her eyes tenfold and showed them to be as blue and as fickle as the sea. She looked up and down the stretch of road once grandly known as
the High Road, which was now used as a cut-through by heavy
farm vehicles on their way to Truro. The familiar granite
cottages – ten in all – built a century ago to house men for the
farms and gardens of large estates, were boarded up and
derelict, visited only by ghostly skeins of gorse and bramble
that had blown in like rumour from afar.
They called it a village, but St Ophere was, technically, a
hamlet, since the church that had given its name to the cluster
of dwellings was situated in the tidal creek below where old
Marvellous lived. There wasn’t a schoolhouse either, for that
was situated two miles west in the coastal hamlet of Washaway,
a place that had lived up to its name earlier that year when the
great drifts of snow had turned effortlessly into floods. But
what the village did have, however, was a bakehouse.
Back-along, visitors to the area had often called the village
‘Bakehouse’ instead of its saintly name because Mrs Hard, the
owner, had painted BAKEHOUSE in pink lettering across the
grey slate roof: an elegant contrast to the once-white stone walls.
Every morning, when the oven was hotten ready, Mrs Hard
used to ring her bell and her customers stirred, and unbeknownst
to her, so did every drowned sailor from The Lizard to The
Scillies as that bell had been scavenged from a salvaged wreck.
The village women would take down their uncooked pies and
pasties and loaves and load them into the burning embers. Mrs
Hard use to call her oven ‘Little Hell’, and if you got the
position of your pie wrong and took someone else’s, that’s
where you would end up. Well, that’s what she told the children
when they came to collect their mothers’ cooked offerings. It
was the cause of many a disturbed night, as children burned up under their oft-darned sheets fearing what was to come if they
ever chose wrong.
It had been a destination village on account of its bread.
Now, in 1947, it was nothing more than a desolate reminder of
the cruel passing of time.
The breeze stirred and lifted the old woman’s hair. She
looked up to the sky. It was lilac-grey and low, rain-packed,
but Marvellous doubted that rain would fall. Blow away,
she whispered.
She crossed the road and stood in front of the
bakehouse. She placed her lamp on the step and pressed her
palms firmly against the weather-beaten door. Mrs Hard?
she whispered softly.
It was Mrs Hard who had once told Marvellous that she
was so good at waiting her life would be filled with good things.
Patience, that’s what your father should have called you, she
said. Patience.
But I’m not patient, said Marvellous. I’m diligent.
And Mrs Hard had looked down on the barefooted child
with fancy words and ragged clothes, and thought how ungodly
it was to rear a child in the woods, running wild and free like a
Cornish Black pig. The girl needed a mother.
You need a mother, said Mrs Hard.
I had a mother, said Marvellous.
No. You had a something, said Mrs Hard. But I could be
your mother.
And she waited for an answer but no answer came from the
child’s horrified mouth. Mrs Hard shook her head and said,
Just you remember, though, it is patience that is a virtue and
patience that is godly.
Mrs Hard liked the word ‘godly’. She liked God, too. When
her husband moved out in 1857, lured by the promise of wealth from South African mines, Jesus and the well-loved reverend
moved in. The transition was seamless, as was the first gold
mine her husband went to, and the poor man was shunted from
pit to pit across the Rand until he died scratching in that foreign
dark for a glimpse of that golden key: the one that would fit a
lock to a better life.
‘Breathe on me, Breath of God, Fill me with life anew’.
That’s what Mrs Hard had written above the bakehouse
door when she heard of her husband’s death. Later on, someone
– and old Marvellous smiled as she could still make out the
faint ochre words that had stained her hands – had changed
‘breath’ to ‘bread’, but Mrs Hard never knew because she rarely
looked up.
Salvation, for me, will come from the dirt, she once told
Marvellous.
Like a potato? said the young child.
The weather vane creaked overhead. October dusk fell
quickly on the hamlet as crows upon the overnight dead. Must
be nearly November, thought Marvellous. Lights flickered in
the distant villages, a solemn reminder of the passing of this
one. She took out a box of matches and lit her oil lamp. She
stood in the middle of the road and raised the lamp to the hills
beyond. I’m still here, the gesture said.
A shaft of yellow light fell upon the hedgerow where a granite
cross grew out of a bank of flattened primroses. Marvellous had
always believed the cross to be an after-thought, hastily erected
after the First War, as she could call it now. ‘1914–1918’, it
read, with the names of long-gone faces underneath.
But there
was one name, she knew, that was not on the list. The name of
Simeon Rundle had been excluded from the list.
Back in 1914 when the tide of war had rolled upon the unsuspecting coast, village life had come to a sudden halt. There
were no more fairs, no more dances, no more regattas because
the men left and life froze in perpetual wait. A village without
men dies, said Marvellous, and the village slowly did. The
well-loved reverend was sent to a new parish in the City of
London and shortly afterwards Mrs Hard received news that
he had been killed in a Zeppelin air raid. She lay down on
the shores of Little Jordan, as she referred to the creek, and
willed her life to end. It obeyed straight away, such was the
force of her will, and the bakehouse oven went out and God
beat a retreat. Those left behind prayed constantly for peace but
prayers came back with Return to Sender stamped all over
them. Only the roll call of the dead grew.
But then one mild morning in May, Peace did appear, for
that was the name given to a child born six months before the
fighting stopped. Overdue, the child was, refusing to enter until
the guns ceased, until the madness ceased, as if no amount of
pushing or urging could force Peace into a broken world. And
even then, when she came, it was reluctantly. As if she knew.
Feet first and a head not budging, all mixed up, she was, feet
and hands and legs and a cord. Like a calf.
A head weighed down by the burden of a name, said
Marvellous as she whispered and twisted and pulled that child
free.
Peace. It’s just not as simple as that. And of course it wasn’t.
Old ways of life don’t return when the lives themselves have
never returned. Only Simeon Rundle returned, came back to his
new sister Peace, carrying a whole heap of horror with him.
One morning, the villagers found him down by the creek, up to
his neck in river mud and his own sh*t, waving a white
handkerchief at a large hermit crab.
With his swollen tongue flapping out of his mouth like a
slipper, he shouted, I thurrender, I thurrender, I thurrender,
before raising his father’s shotgun and blasting his heart clean
from his chest. Or so the story goes.
The villagers gasped – two fainted – as it splattered against
the church door like an ornate red knocker. The new lay
preacher rushed out proclaiming it was the Devil’s own
work. Unfortunately, such a careless declaration flew swiftly on
rumour’s eager wings, and it wasn’t long before the village of
St Ophere acquired a taint that even the welcome addition of
electric light in 1936 couldn’t completely eradicate.
There was nothing actually wrong with the place. It was
rightness that was at a tilt. Tides seemed higher, mists gathered
there thicker and vegetation grew faster, as if nature was doing
its best to correct the error, or if not to correct it then at least to
hide it. But the suspicion of ill luck remained, and that’s why
the people slowly left: a steady stream of absences like bingo
balls pulled from a hat. Migrating to distant villages whose
lights still flickered in a low autumn sky.
Marvellous took a last look up and down the High Road,
satisfied that whatever she was waiting for hadn’t passed her by.
The wind had picked up and the clouds were blowing through.
She held the lamp high and crossed the road to the memorial
and the standpipe, and made her way through the meadow
where she had once kept a cow. The temperature was falling
and the grass wet underfoot, and she thought the morning
would reveal the first crust of frost. She could see the wood
ahead, her ankles braced for the gentle incline and the careful
march through the sycamores, the hazels and the sweet chestnuts
down towards her creek. The tide was out. She could smell the
saltmud, her favourite smell, the smell, she believed, of her blood. She would rake up a pan full of cockles and steam them
on a fire that would burn a tiny hole in the night. Her mouth
began to water. She stumbled and fell next to a blackthorn
bush and made use of the mishap by picking two pocketfuls
of sloes. She saw the light from her caravan up ahead. Felt,
strangely, lonely. Never get old, she whispered to herself.
Late. An owl hooted and the dark eyes of night gazed unblinking
towards the horizon. Marvellous couldn’t sleep. She stayed
awake sitting by the riverbank keeping the moon company,
a pile of shucked cockleshells at her feet. She huddled in the
warmth of firelight, her yellow oilskin raincoat bright and
pungent and hot to touch. The stars looked faint and distant
but it may have been her eyes. She once used binoculars, now
she used a telescope; soon night would capture day for ever. She
felt comforted by the blurred outline of her old crabber rocking
gently on the tide; the familiar creak of rope against wood was
a good sound in the undulating nocturnal silence.
She had lived in the creek almost her whole life long and had
been happy there – almost – her whole life long. Islanded in the
middle was the small church that had once been a chapel but
was now a ruin. For as long as she could remember the tide had
carved around the church until the church had broken away
from the people or maybe the people had broken away from the
church? It was so long ago now that old Marvellous couldn’t
remember what had happened first. But the tide had carved its
path until church and headstones and faith had all gone adrift.
Sunday services used to be held when the tide was at its lowest
point, sometimes at daybreak, sometimes at dusk, and once, she
remembered, in the dead of night, a lanterned trail of believers
sang their way up the riverbed like pilgrims seeking Galilee.
Yes, we’ll gather at the river,
The beautiful, the beautiful river;
Gather with the saints at the river
That flows by the throne of God.
She swigged from a bottle of sloe gin. Saint’s nectar, it was,
flowing by the throne of God. Amen. Light from the altar
candle slinked out of the church, dusting the tops of gravestones
that the tide had mercifully spared. It was its own star, thought
Marvellous. She lit that candle every night and had done so for
years. A lighthouse keeper, that was what she really was. That’s
what had drawn Whatshisname to her shore during the war
years. That, and the music, of course.
Whatshisname. The American. She had watched him go
into the church as a shadow, and when he had emerged he was
still a shadow with deep hues of mauve emanating from his
dark skin, and from his mouth the glowing tip of a cigarette
pulsed like the heart of a night insect. He walked across the
dry riverbed lured by a familiar song, and as he pulled himself
up the bank, he saw the wireless, sitting in a battered pram
parked beneath the trees.
He said, Louis Armstrong.
And she said, Marvellous Ways, nice to meet you at last.
And he laughed and she had never heard laughter like
that, not in all her days, and his eyes flashed as bright as torchlight.
He sat with her, and the table rocked and the river rippled
as bombers flew over and the air raid sirens sounded and
bombs fell over the Great Port, over Truro too, and barrage
balloons cast deep shadows across the sky, and Louis Armstrong
sang of lips and arms and hearts as anti-aircraft guns pounded
against the indigo dark, and two strangers sat quietly under a tree that had seen it all before.
He talked about his grandfather back home in South
Carolina in the Low Country, talked about the fishing trips they
took along the oozy marshes, how the smell of mud and salt
were the smells of home, and Marvellous said, I know what you
mean. And he told her of the trestle bridges that glowed pink at
dusk and cedars that grew out of the lush wetlands and the
heavy scent of tea olive and jasmine, which reminded him of his
late mother. He said he missed eating catfish, and Marvellous
said, So do I, even though she had only ever eaten dogfish.
Together they toasted Life and clinked their mugs and pretended
they were somewhere far far away.
He came often after that. Brought her doughnuts from the
American doughnut factory in Union Square, and they ate them
with strong black tea even though he preferred coffee, and they
listened to the radio Rhythm Club and tapped out rhythms with
their jitterbug feet. Sometimes he brought tins of Spam, corned
beef, too; he never let her go hungry. And once he brought her
a poster of a film she had seen a couple of years before. He was
thoughtful like that.
But then days before the planned invasion of France, he
asked her for a charm.
A charm? she said.
A lucky charm. To bring me back safely, he said.
She looked into his eyes and said, But that’s not what I do.
I’ve never made charms.
Oh, but that’s what people said you did.
That’s what they’ve always said, and she held his hand
instead and the only charm she had was hers and it radiated out.
June 1944 was The Last Goodbye. Those American boys
were shipping out. He strutted over whistling, all gabardine trousers and Hawaiian shirt, gosh he looked so smart. He gave
her all he had left – chocolate, cigarettes, stockings – and they
sat down under the tree and drank tea and listened to Armstrong
and Teagarden, Bechet, too, and someone else who would never
be as famous. She watched the young man play rhythm upon
his knees, watched his mouth turn clarinet. In that moment,
either side of him, she saw two futures vying for space. In one
he lay still on Omaha Beach. In the other he sat still, head in a
book, trying to make something of himself in a country coloured
by hate. When he stood up to leave she said, Go left, and he
said, What’s that? She said, I don’t know what it means but you
will when the time comes. You must go left.
So long, Marvellous, he waved.
So long, Henry Manfred Gladstone II, she waved. Henry
Manfred Gladstone II. So that was his name.
It’s been a pleasure, he said.
The night grew wild with movement. The concrete barges
began to depart and thousands of men embarked from piers
and beaches, and there was such a kerfuffle, and yet by morning
all was quiet. The generators were quiet. The smell of diesel
subsiding. The Americans had left and had left behind tales of
romance and unborn children, and so much joy, and it was the
women who cried because they always did.
So long, Henry Manfred Gladstone II, she whispered. It’s
been a pleasure.
A Year of Marvellous Ways by Sarah Winman is out on the 18th June 2015 and is available to pre-order online today as a Hardback or eBook.
The post Sarah Winman: Read A Chapter From A Year of Marvellous Ways appeared first on WHSmith Blog.