It's been quite a year!

Thank you, all of you

My goodness, how time flies. A year ago today I sent out my first ever Substack post:

Is your hearrt in your worrk?

It went out to my three subscribers, one of whom was me, the other two were my husband and my daughter, and over the following months it had fewer than 70 views. Today, although my statistics are nothing compared to some, I am incredibly proud of my nearly 300 readers and 450 followers, all of you (!), and a couple of my posts have been seen over 500 times, which thrills me. So I want to start by thanking you for all the lovely feedback and interest, for the recommendations and the shares and the laughs you’ve given me.

I wasn’t sure when I started Stacking why I was doing it, except that I’d just handed in the full text of Literature for the People, and the writing habit was hard to kick. Also I knew there was more I could have said, characters I had met who weren’t given their full due in the book, which had already come in rather longer than my publisher had expected. So over the past year I’ve really enjoyed sharing more on some of these lovely, interesting , or at times heartbreaking people, like Mrs Oliphant, and Anne Gilchrist. And it also gave me a chance to give the talented, almost-forgotten Nelly Erichsen some more limelight.

I’ve also really enjoyed writing guest posts for other Substacks - from AS Byatt to the Little World of Don Camillo to Parsley the Lion - it’s been quite a ride!

Meanwhile an idea for a new project has begun to form, and I have tried out a couple of pieces that seem to have gone down well, which might suggest where I’m going. This is one of them:

The girl from the Forest goes to Oxford

My plan is to write about a very particular group of women who grew up between the wars, part of a very particular generation. British women born in the first two decades of the twentieth century were gifted with markedly different life expectations from all the women before them, and then found themselves facing a uniquely challenging young womanhood. Unlike their mothers and grandmothers, they grew up with the firmly-established right to vote and with the expectation that education, for a bright working class or middle class girl, would extend beyond school, either into vocational training or even university. They would, for the first time, find white-collar and professional careers opening up to them.  Then, as they moved through the 1930s and into the 1940s, they found themselves in a world turned upside down, facing war and unprecedented levels of deprivation, danger and even death on the home front. These were often the daughters of WW1 survivors, and now they had to watch the men they loved going away to fight, with their marital and domestic ambitions thrown to the winds.

They were the first female generation with ballot box power; they were expected to hold the fort at home while their men went to war; their children were the first babies of the NHS and the Welfare State. Coincidentally, some of my favourite fiction was written by women like these, or features them heavily: Winifred Holtby, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Rosamond Lehmann, most of the output of Virago and Persephone Books…

It occurs to me that this is my mother’s generation, and sometimes I wonder if I’m actually thinking about her as I begin to write - and no-one would have been more surprised than she!

My Mum as a teenager

My mum, Eileen, was born in 1920, the only daughter of a farm labourer in Essex who couldn’t afford to marry until he was in his forties, and whose wife Annie Emma had been working as a domestic servant in West Ham. Eileen was their only child, and was born when Annie was over forty, ten years after they married. She must have been their miracle, or at any rate a very big surprise. Mum was a bright child, she won a place at Southend High School for Girls, but by her own admission could not wait to leave and get a job, to the disappointment of her teachers. She enrolled as a junior clerk in the Air Ministry some time in the mid-1930s, which is where she met my father.

I have her marriage certificate in front of me - they were married in the height of the Blitz, April 1941, at Emmanuel Church in South Croydon, my father’s home. Dad was on a weekend leave, and looked very smart in his uniform as a Second Lieutenant in the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment. They were just children, really, Mum was only 20, Dad was 21. And they had already fought and won a massive battle - my father’s parents did not approve of the servant’s daughter from Essex - after all, great-grandfather William had twice been Mayor of Gateshead. According to Mum, Granny had taken her out for lunch to warn her off the marriage, saying ‘You will be a millstone round his neck.’

My mother commuted into London from Essex throughout the Blitz and the rest of the War, while my father fought in North Africa and Sicily. They knew how lucky they had been when illness meant that he missed the Normandy campaigns. In 1945 he went back into the Air Ministry, and my mother left to start a family. Her grammar school education, her job and then the War catapulted my mother into the middle classes, where she was certainly never a millstone round anyone’s neck. In fact, as her youngest daughter, I can attest that she set the most extraordinary example of a desire to better oneself, to keep learning and, unashamedly, to be upwardly mobile. When I was little, in the 1960s, she had enrolled in the WEA (Workers’ Education Association) and was writing essays on TS Eliot and Jane Austen. Her love of literature and poetry has coloured my whole life, and I see it in my children too.

So as I move into my second year on Substack, expect to see my writing move from Victorian literature to the social history of mid-20th Century women. My mother does not fit into the small group of women who will be the focus of my attention: she did not marry an aspiring Labour politician, or ever live in Downing Street! But I will try to honour her memory, and as I learn more about the women in my next project, I hope I will begin to understand my mother more than perhaps I did when she was alive.

A toast to you all!