Newsletter

I've started a newsletter, largely with the aim of engaging more directly and personally with readers and answering questions I am asked about my life or writing. It will also be about Brittany, of course, as all my work whether fiction or non-fiction is centred on the history, legends and landscape of this remarkable place. Regular short features like Speaking of places, In the hut and a question box will combine with quirky facts around my writing and daily life. The new novel I am currently engaged on will also figure largely, as the (fictional) Breton village where it is set evolves.
Anyone who would like to be on the mailing list to receive about 10 issues a year of this emailed PDF document, can contact me at mewes@orange.fr or on Twitter @brittanyexpert  Your details will only be used for this purpose.

Mr Patch

My primary school reports

I've often been asked about why I write but never about the origins of the impulse, about what made me a writer from a very early age. The most obvious influence was my father, a teacher of English and Latin with an equal interest in history, a phenomenal reader and throughout his adult life a maker of notes and diaries. After retirement he devoted a lot of time to writing, including an account of his experiences during WWII which he called with habitual irony 'A good war'. I read very widely from his suggestions from the age of 4, having an excellent library of books to draw on.

The first book I wrote was at the age of 8/9. It was about, of all things, the Greek islands. I still have it. Of course I'd never been there or anywhere outside of Gloucestershire and Wales. The Homeric tales and Greek mythology had generated the interest, and islands were an excitingly stimulating whilst unknown phenomenon. My method was organised and surprisingly good: books collected from home and the local library, extensive notes made, a process of selection and then a text in my own words. Not that far from what I do now, except today I have the luxury of airing original thought as well as words. But I did pretty well then without the element of personal experience or widely acquired knowledge.

But here I want to honour someone who had an enormous influence on my writing career. When I was 10 years old, he arrived as a student teacher at the primary school I attended in Stonehouse. His name was Mr Patch. Not only did he teach my class daily English lessons, but we also had extra individual lessons together as my mother had quarreled violently (her speciality) with the RE teacher and withdrawn me from all religious teaching. As I had consistently avowed my desire to be a writer, it was deemed fitting that I concentrated on this in these spare lessons. What lovely and sensible people there were in that school!

Mr Patch set me a series of imaginative and demanding exercises, to write in different styles, to develop character studies, to describe places, to produce dialogue and most of all to stimulate my already maturing imagination. I remember now a newspaper article about an imaginary accident and the physical description of a Red Indian chief and desert setting. I realise now that he must have been an avid writer himself. He praised, corrected, encouraged and challenged me throughout. He gave me scope with discipline. He made me feel like a writer, with a serious purpose and a process of development to follow. He wanted me to be my best self in a context that has mattered to me more than other as my life has progressed.

What gifts for a solitary, serious, hyper-sensitive and hyper-imaginative 10 year old child! Recently finding my primary school reports stimulated this memory of a man who had an enormous influence on my writing, although I have never forgotten him. I'd thank Mr Patch from the bottom of my heart, if he wouldn't gently respond with a word or two about cliché.

new novel

Progress on the new novel Walking for the Broken-Hearted is following my habitual and irritating pattern. Something triggers the first thought - in this case an incident related to me by friends - and I know by writer's instinct that conception has taken place. I try and fail to get things written down. The experience is still theirs and I have a long wait for the germination process that brings it into my consciousness and makes it mine. Usually this means several months of nothing at all or the odd desperate thought that leads nowhere. Even co-incidental visits to the setting of the opening scene made no impression, and I started to wonder if maybe I was wrong this time. But yesterday, whilst walking on the moors and thinking about something completely different, I suddenly got the measure of the story, the characters and several clear sequences. And on return to the house I managed to write for half an hour - so alea iacta est and all that.