For a long time, I had a feeling I was being followed.
I’d look up and see someone, out of the corner of my eye. Or I’d walk into a room and feel certain that even though it was empty, someone was actually there. It wasn’t frightening. Once I sensed a large figure in trousers who seemed to be very interested in our drains. Another time it was a much smaller person, sitting in the driver’s seat of my car. And then it began to dawn on me that it wasn’t just one person, but two, and not only that. They were women. One was large, one was small, and I don’t know how but I sensed they had something to tell me.
After my father died, I had a phone call with a clairvoyant. I was deep in grief and I wanted to be given some reason to believe my father was still present, and still loving me. At one point she said, ‘What about the two women?’
I said, ‘What two women?’
She said, ‘I see two women.’
But that wasn’t what I wanted to hear, and instead I asked another miserable question about my father and that was how we went on, me asking about him and her giving answers that seemed not at all what I needed. Truthfully, the whole clairvoyant thing just left me feeling even more bereft. But a few months later, I passed two women sitting on bench. One was whittling a large stick and the other was eating sandwiches. I turned to look again; they weren’t there.
Was the clairvoyant right? Were they real? And if so, could they be something to do with my past? As a child, I had an Aunty Edith who wasn’t technically an aunt, but one of my grandmother’s many single friends. She was a short woman, though not in any ways small, her bosom heavy like a bolster, the folds of her body packed within buttons and hooks. I liked my Aunty Edith. She had a soft voice and she smelt of violets, both of which I found comforting; also, she loved me and because her love was all she had to give, it seemed especially pure. Then there was my mother’s Aunty Gwen, another adopted aunt. She was tiny and annoyed my grandfather – a singularly gentle man – because she never stopped talking and wore red lipstick that bled from the sides of her mouth. Aunty Edith and Aunty Gwen were spinsters who had lived through two world wars. They had lost fathers and uncles in the first one, and brothers and sweethearts in the second. There was definitely something about the two women on my trail that reminded me of my aunts. Something solid; something kind. More importantly, something individual. And yet when I tried to make sense of the two women by turning them into my aunts, I saw I was wrong. Unlike my aunts these two had a life that was independent of mine. They didn’t belong to me in any way. If anything, it seemed to be the other way round.
Twelve years ago, we moved to the house where we live now and I wrote my first novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. I knew almost as soon as we arrived that I was supposed to be here; that’s the best way I can put it. There is an energy. The night before my book was published, every piece of electrical equipment in the house switched itself on. As my husband and I stumbled round in the dark, trying to turn off light-switches and fire alarms, and radios that had sprung to life, we put it down to a power cut. Only afterwards I began to sense that it might be something – someone – else.
Not the two…?
Finally; a breakthrough. I learnt two women had owned our home in the 1920’s. They had been nurses during the First World War and, shaken by what they’d seen, had come here to care for victims of stress and trauma in a more spiritual way. Describing them as ‘maiden ladies’ an elderly neighbour told me Miss Hudson was very tall, elegant and pale, related to the wealthy Hudson Sunlight Soap family, while her companion was altogether smaller, very dark haired and olive skinned. However, he didn’t seem to feel they were the type who would follow people. What he mostly remembered was that they dressed like nuns and had a vacuum cleaner.
It almost fit, and yet deep down the answer still didn’t feel right. One of the women I had seen wore trousers. She was also very interested in our drainage. The other, the smaller, I had caught in the act if not of stealing my car, then at the very least driving it. After that my life got taken over by other things and I began to lose a sense of the two women. It occurred to me they might have found someone else to follow. I began working on a new novel set in 1950 about a miraculous search for a gold beetle on the other side of the world.
The reasons why you choose to tell a certain story are not always clear. I like to compare the first stages of writing to finding a house in the woods that has no windows and no doors. You long to go inside, but you have no idea how, so all you can do is keep circling it, trying to find the tiniest crack. In those early months, or possibly year, nothing about my new book was clear to me – even my protagonist kept changing. One week, it was a man. The next it was a woman. Another day she would be large and broad-shouldered. A week later, she’d gone bleach-blonde and wiry. I feared I was in something that was way too big for me – no matter how many times I circled it, there seemed to be way in – and from there I began to tell myself I wasn’t a proper writer at all. I felt lost and exhausted. Then bang in the middle of all this, a Canadian friend I don’t know terribly well wrote and asked if she might come and visit. Reluctantly I put my writing and research to one side. We talked books, we walked. I took her for a picnic by a pond – until we were politely told by an elderly man in rust trousers that we were sitting in his garden – and finally I drove her to Kelmscott Manor, the once country retreat of Pre-Raphaelite artist William Morris.
It was a cold Spring day. We admired the rooms hung with Morris tapestries; the floors smelling of wax and creaking beneath our feet. We were about to leave when my eyes landed on a small black and white photograph.
The hairs stood on my neck. I felt a kind of rushing of blood and a simultaneous plummeting, as if my feet had missed a step.
It was them. It was the two women. I absolutely knew it. One was older and more frail, gazing off to the side; the other, the more dominant, stood in jodhpurs, tie and jacket, dressed like a man and broad shouldered – a large woman with short curly black hair, staring straight at the camera. She looked exactly like the woman I passed once whittling a stick, and the woman I had seen beside our drains. To be honest she also looked like the kind of woman who would know how to short fuse our electricity.
I grabbed the friend I didn’t know terribly well, and hugged her. We bought a postcard of the photograph in the gift shop and as we drove away, I knew that my book was about two women – not one – and that one of them was the leader, while the other her assistant. What’s more, I knew that their extraordinary and against the odds friendship was the beating heart of my book. The whole story suddenly made sense – the house I had been circling all that time had windows and doors after all, as well as door knobs and tiny handles. Not only that, I understood what those two women who’d been following me wanted.
Only it wasn’t me they wanted. They were asking me to follow them.
So I turned the tables. I found out everything about them. May Morris – the older of the two – was the youngest daughter of William Morris. She had been married briefly, and unhappily, and by the age of 23, she was also the director of the embroidery department at her father’s company. The woman at her side, Mary Lobb, was officially her gardener, unofficially her live-in companion. (So I was wrong. The woman who I’d believed was the one with power, was actually lower in status. We make mistakes all the time.) Mary liked the land, machinery and horses. She also like cider and sticking things in scrap books. They stayed together for 22 years, and they travelled, camping in Wales, Cornwall and Iceland. Mary threatened May’s publisher when he rejected a writing idea of May’s, and May paid for operations for Mary – who was overweight and drank too much and smoked too much – as well as a pair of pink spectacles when her eyesight failed. On her death, May left most of her effects to Mary. Mary died five months later, stating in her will that she should driven not in a hearse but a motor lorry. She bequeathed her entire collection of scrap books to the National Museum of Wales.
Search for Mary Lobb on the internet, and you will find images of her sitting astride a wall, or lounging against a haystack. She is dressed in men’s clothes. She is often controlling some kind of heavy machinery, and if she isn’t, she’s cuddling a small fluffy dog. She is always staring straight at the camera, and her face is strong, open, round. As a young woman she made the headlines of a local newspaper: “CORNISH WOMAN DRIVES STEAM ROLLER. Miss Lobb, of Trenault, a lady of independent means, is to be seen every day driving a steam roller on the main roads near Launceston.”
The more I found out about them, the more I learnt about the two women in my book. It was as if my characters had been empty vessels and now I had so much detail, so much love for them. Margery Benson and Enid Pretty would not be the kind of women who sat around, waiting for life to happen. They would be brave, they would be unafraid, they would be full of life. Together they would travel across the world to New Caledonia, despite the fact they had one passport between them. They would search for a tiny gold beetle that everyone said was not there. They would drive a jeep – no, they would steal a jeep – they would trek up mountains, sleep in hammocks, dress as men if they felt like it, dye their hair, travel by donkey, survive a cyclone as well as heat stroke and insect bites. In short, they would undertake every possible adventure I could throw at them and even though their relationship had started with Margery as leader and Enid as her assistant, the balance of power would constantly shift as they learnt from one another. In overcoming difficulties, and in sidestepping convention, they would realise their best selves. And what was more, they required of me that I wrote about them without stopping to think about whether people would like it, or whether I was a proper writer. The adventure was mine as much as theirs, and they demanded that I kept writing, even when I thought I couldn’t do it, or was too tired, or not up to the job. (Can you imagine Mary Lobb giving up on a job?) I kept the postcard of her and May Morris with me all the time, and I now have it framed above my desk.
I love the way those two women stand together. I look at them and I think, Well aren’t you great? Look, I want to say to my daughters, look what women can do. Look what friendship can do. I love the way that Mary stands square to the camera, her legs apart, one hand in her pocket, wearing her jodhpurs and button-up jacket. I love her big dark curly hair, her unapologetic stance with the camera. I love the way May, thinner and older and looking more frail, gazes off to the side, wearing a thick striped skirt (has she taken up the hem?) and a long rope of beads and a patterned jumper. I love the fact they do not have to look at one another because their love is a given. I love the way that Mary holds her cigarette in a no-nonsense way like a pencil stub, while May holds hers as if it were a champagne glass.
But most of all, I love the way that standing beside Mary allows May to become a little more ethereal, a little more May, and the way that standing beside May makes Mary a little more solid. It is in measuring themselves against one another and acknowledging their differences that these two women discover who they are truly are. And this is what I took to my novel in the end. The truest friendships are those that allow us to step out of the confines of what we were once were, and to realise instead what we might be.
So were Mary Lobb and May Morris the two women I sensed close to me all those years ago? It’s a beautiful thought. And certainly, when I saw their photo, I felt I knew them. Was the clairvoyant right? Were there actually two spirits who had a message for me? Or was the book I finally wrote just a very long time coming?
Ideas happen in many ways, and so do stories. The word inspiration is from the Latin inspire – to draw breath. What I believe happened when I first realised I was being followed was that somewhere inside me I knew I needed to write a book about female friendship; the love between women that extends beyond boundaries. Those women were with me all the time that I was bringing up my four children, reminding me that there would come a time when my children would leave home, and begin their independent lives, and after that it would be time for me to be brave, to look deep into myself for my sense of self-worth, and not demand that from my children. Moreover, they told me that the relationships which would sustain me post-children were those I had forged long ago with other women. A book can require you to write it, without necessarily being so good as to inform you what it actually is.
The other day I got into my car and there were old sweet wrappers everywhere, not to mention dog hairs and cigarette ends. And I swear I could finally see them, full on and three dimensional. I could see them squashed in the back seat of my car, smelling of violets and cigarettes, old wool and a touch of paraffin. Mary Lobb and May Morris, my aunts Gwen and Edith, Miss Kessler and Miss Hudson, Margery Benson and Enid Pretty.
Oh and what a glorious racket we made.