Readers Place

Janette Jenkins interview/review

Why, and how, did you become a writer?

Writing, evolved from reading. I have always read. As a child my favourite place was the local branch library. I have a photograph of myself, aged about 13, hunched over a typewriter, trying to write a novel. It was very short, and heavily influenced by my favourite TV programme at the time, Edward and Mrs Simpson. I even had the gall to send it to a publisher. I received a very kind rejection letter.

I wrote a lot, I enjoyed it, but I never saw writing as a career. I wanted to be an actress and went to drama school. I left in the second year. It wasn’t for me. I was more interested in the words on the page, than in performing them. I did a degree in Literature and Philosophy. I then went on to do the MA in Creative Writing at UEA, where I was in Malcolm Bradbury’s final class. It was here I started writing my first novel, Columbus Day.

Are there any writers that you would cite as an influence on you and your work?

I have to say that I’m influenced by everything I’ve ever read in one way or another. Favourite authors include Nabokov, Paul Auster, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sarah Waters… actually, the list is endless. Coming from the north, I remember being particularly influenced by Beryl Bainbridge – An Awfully Big Adventure is one of my favourite books. It’s a complicated tale, told very sparingly, and there’s something wonderful in that. Growing up, I loved the novel Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse. I could really relate to Billy Fisher, the working class daydreamer with ideas above his station, dreaming about the bright lights of London, living through his stories and his lies. It’s funny, but it’s heartbreaking too. Bittersweet. That’s the way I like to tell stories. Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads are perfect. When a reviewer likened one of my lines in Columbus Day to Mr Bennett, I could not have been happier! (‘Well,’ she said, moving a piece with her fork, ‘if this is catch of the day, I’d hate to see what they threw back.’) It wasn’t intentional. These are conversations I’d heard all my life.

Do you have a regular writing routine?

My routine works from Monday to Friday, but falls to pieces during the school holidays, and over the weekend. Around 9 o’clock, I make a large pot of coffee and sit at my desk, and I write until lunchtime. After lunch, I carry on until around three o’clock. Having said all this, I do leave my desk for domestic duties, like taking the dog for a walk, or (yawn) shopping. I should write plenty of words, but actually, a great deal of time is spent re-writing. I do a lot of that. I often nip back to my desk in the evening. I take a notebook to bed. If I’m not writing, I’m thinking about it. Saturdays and Sundays, holidays etc, I just write when I can!

Angel of Brooklyn has a wonderful heroine in the form of Beatrice; who is your favourite literary heroine?

Without a doubt, Nabokov’s Dolores Haze, the pre-pubescent heroine of Lolita. She is an ordinary American girl, transformed by Humbert into an object of obsession and desire. She is a survivor who cannot survive.

Angel of Brooklyn is your third book – do you think your writing style has changed since you wrote your first book?

It’s certainly expanded. I use a much wider canvas. Angel of Brooklyn is set in the north, but I also tackled America, something I wouldn’t have attempted with my first book. Essentially, my style remains the same. There will always be humour, and a certain amount of tragedy and disappointment, because that’s how life works. I didn’t think I’d ever write historic fiction, but it really seems to suit me.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m putting the finishing touches to a novel set in Victorian London. It’s a ghost story of sorts, with an unlikely heroine. And for once, the north is only ever mentioned in passing…

Piece by Janeete Jenkins:

Angel of Brooklyn came from a series of images that seemed to shriek, ‘put me into a story!’ In a Manchester bookshop, I came across a book of photographs from the early 1900s. These were not the usual staid family portraits, but reclining female nudes, photographed (or so it seemed) in their own front parlours, with the drapes closed. Other images showed women out on the town, their heads thrown back, truly enjoying themselves. It was fascinating. I didn’t buy the book, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Who were these women? Why had they succumbed to pornography? What were their stories?

Beatrice Lyle became my stranger, one of those secretive women in the photographs. I made her an American, and in some ways more confusing for the locals, because she was a foreigner, but not quite foreign. These villagers would not have met or heard an American before – they had no films remember, or even a wireless. She would have arrived, like some strange exotic creature, a respite from the gloom. But, they could understand what she was saying. But would they believe her? Did her past seem like a fairy tale? What did she think of them? What did they think about her?

In America, Beatrice had a freedom. A ‘big’ life. When I was creating her history, most of my research was done on the internet. From my desk, I could read the history of Normal, her hometown in Illinois. I could look at photographs and maps, and read about the lives of the people who had lived there. But why would Beatrice want to leave? Normal was growing. Thriving. Wouldn’t it be the perfect place to settle? Then one Sunday, wandering around a museum, I became fascinated by the cases of stuffed birds. It felt suffocating enough in a museum – shouldn’t these creatures be moving? – but what if you had to live with these stuffed birds every day? And so Beatrice’s father’s hobby was born, and eventually, her way out of Normal.

Although I’ve never been to Coney Island, and I definitely can’t time travel, I have lived in Blackpool, England’s own version of Coney, and so I was able to transfer my experiences, from the roar of the rides (some Victorian rides still operate), the smells, the sounds, to those streets and darker places hidden from the tourists. Here, in her first ‘re-invention’, Beatrice is open-minded. She loves the other worldliness of Coney, and for the first time, she feels she has a ‘family’, and as part of this family, she chooses to be the Angel of Brooklyn, without realising how it will shape the rest of her life.

Coming from Coney Island, Anglezarke must have been something of a shock. It is a real place, just outside my hometown of Bolton. I have always liked the name, it’s unusual, and it seemed to fit perfectly with the ‘angel’ theme. Although it’s only a twenty minute drive away from town, in the early 1900s it was not so easy to get to. Days were often bleak and monotonous. ‘Closed in’. The women were (through no fault of their own), narrow minded, uneducated, ‘simple’ – and though Beatrice was hardly bookish, preferring magazines – she had lived amongst people with different ethnic backgrounds and ideas, including sexual liberation. In England, with her new husband at her side, things might have been bearable, but then of course the war came, taking the men away.

The First World War has been written about extensively, especially from the point of view of the soldiers at the Front. I visited museums, looked at the uniforms (so thick and scratchy), I read letters home, those few treasured words that said, ‘I’m still alive’, and then the letters of condolence, where the soldier was ‘always brave’ and never suffering. But what about the women back at home? It’s hard to imagine how isolated they must have felt. During the Second World War, at least most people had a wireless, or access to a picture house, to keep them up to date. For the women in Anglezarke, when even getting a newspaper was an effort, it must have been incredibly difficult not to succumb to rumour, backbiting, and the darkest of imaginings.

Writing historical fiction, it is the little things that bring the past to life. What did people eat then? Wear? What did their world smell like? If Beatrice walked into her pantry, what would she see? Day to day life was much more physical: think of all the energy she would have used, just to do the washing. The Castle Museum in York has a wonderful collection of old, everyday items. I also visited the Opie Collection at Wigan Pier, and the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry, which were all full of evocative, fascinating material. For Beatrice, moving to England was like stepping back in time. Where were the laundries? The ‘fast food’ outlets? Where was all the colour? Americans, who came to England in the 1950s, often say they were starved of colour and light. Imagine how dull the English world must have seemed to in 1913 to Beatrice, a woman who was used to walking beneath the shimmering lights of Coney, enjoying the kind of freedom her English counterparts would have to wait at least another decade for.

When Angel of Brooklyn arrived at my publishers, it was certainly a fatter book. I’d become quite carried away with some of the Coney Island stories, and we had to decide what to keep, and what to take away. In the first draft, the conjoined twins, Marta and Magda, had their own life history. How they were taken by their aunt and uncle from their village in Russia to Staten Island, where an immigration officer turned a blind eye, allowing them into that great melting pot of New York. All fascinating stuff, but it didn’t move the story along.

Like most people, I’ve gone through a series of little re-inventions, and throughout the writing of this novel, I became more and more fascinated by the past, and how it shapes our lives. Although Beatrice played a number of roles, from postcard seller to nude exhibit, to respectable wife, she could not escape who she was, and where she really came from. Whether hooking up her wings or standing in church, she was always that girl from Normal, whose mother died at her birth, whose father burned in front of her eyes, and whose brother became lost in the folds of religion. Beatrice was not out to trick her new friends, she was simply looking for acceptance, hiding her past, for the sake of the present. But the present was bleak, and there was little to do, but to prod and to poke, until her past became unravelled, and in the end, it strangled her.

Writing Angel of Brooklyn was at times both exhilarating and exhausting. For months it honestly felt like I was living in Illinois, visiting Chicago, Coney Island, or the Somme. Some days I’d look up from my desk and think, Oh, I’m really in Durham, England, and I’d better go and collect my daughter from school and start supper. But driving the car, or chopping the vegetables, my mind was still in 1911, or 1914. One school report said: Janette might do very well, if she stopped looking through the window, with a glazed expression on her face. Now, I can say, I am working!