I think I've had this blogpost in my heart and my mind for years, ever since I decided to set three novels on Hayling Island ( off the south coast of England, opposite the Isle of Wight.)
Mud is a major geographical feature of the Island and one of its greatest attractions. Which might sound a bit weird but bear with me.
Hayling Island is not much more than a sandbank or a 25 mile square mudflat itself. It is ruler flat, five miles in length and when the tide goes out it drains from the mainland to the Solent revealing the most marvellous terrain and providing food and sanctuary for thousands of birds. The mud for me is one of the greatest attractions and I never tire of the landscape.
I've been down on the mudflats at low tide at all sorts of different times of the year and of the day. This photo was taken at 7.00 am on an August morning this year, in the week of Hurricane Bertha. That was quite an exciting time to be down on the Island. At high tide the water flowed straight over the top of the quayside flooding the cars and benches. Our holiday let sprang a leak and I even wrote a poem about it. But despite the flooding, at low tide everything drained away completely to leave the mudflats bare, exposed and in all their glory.
That week in August was also the time when the moon was closest to the earth for 20 years. I went out to photograph it and nearly got blown down by a Force 4.8 gale.
The mudflats have their dangers too and I am very careful not to walk away from the pebbly edges. People have to be regularly rescued by coastguard as they can get stuck and it was this feature of the mud which became a focus in my second Hayling Cycle novel, ILLEGAL, which is hinted at in this extract :-
"If the boat goes to ground here we'll be stuck," said Jess.
"Don't be stupid," said Sean. "We can walk, it's not far."
"Too far in this mud. Once when I was little I walked away from my Dad and started to sink. Dad had to heave like mad to get me out. He sunk to the top of his gumboots. Hayling mud sucks you in and never lets you go."
It's like a prophecy of what is to come in the book.
Hayling Island didn't have a bridge until 1824 and it was a toll bridge. Before that the only way to reach the mainland was by ferry or by the Wadeway. This was a path built across the nudflats, marked by wooden posts and ensured that the traveller stayed out of the mud. I've walked on parts of it and it takes you right out into the middle of Chichester Harbour.
You can't walk right across to the Island anymore because they dug a deeper channel for the boats. It's a very slippery muddy walk, but quite safe because the water comes in so slowly you can easily avoid getting wet. Not like Morecombe Bay!
The mudflats change colour almost each time the tide changes. The birds swoop and settle, pecking in the mud, and out in the middle of the harbour there is a silence and a smell of wet and salt and seaweed which takes you back to another age, a time when life was slower and if you wanted to take your potatoes to market on the mainland, you loaded them on your cart and pushed them right down the Wadeway, timing your return with the tide.
I still return to Hayling several times a year despite finishing my Hayling cycle and I am never happier when messing about in the glorious mud.
This autumn I was invited to the Havant LitFest, Hampshire, to run a workshop for teenagers and to give a talk about my Y.A. novels, Hidden and Illegal, which are set on Hayling Island, near the festival venue and opposite the Isle of Wight. Once I had agreed the organisers then asked if I would like to be on a panel the night before where I would have to champion the best book ever written.
So – what to choose? The Bible? – a bit obvious. Crime and Punishment? Yes, but even Dostoyevsky muttered to his wife that he had rushed it and should have done a good edit. Ultimately I had to choose a book and it had to be one I could talk about enthusiastically. I chose A Town Like Alice, by Neville Shute.
Here are my reasons :-
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| Langstone Mill - Neville Shute wrote here during the war. |
- Neville Shute wrote for a period of time in the Old Mill, at the top of Hayling Island, five minutes from the venue for the LitFest. One of the books he completed there was Pied Piper, a very unusual war story. Shute is a much loved local literary figure so I had a local connection.
- Shute wrote 23 novels but Alice is the only book based on a true story.
- The true story is the remarkable account told to Shute by a young woman who had been a prisoner of the Japanese along with a group of around 80 Dutch women and children during the occupation of Sumatra. Their story is particularly unusual because the Japanese never settled them into a camp. They simply made them walk round the island for two and a half years until less than 30 were left alive.
- The main character, a young woman called Jean, says in the novel, “People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had. They don’t know what it was like not being in a camp.” The entire novel pivots around this heart-breaking statement.
- I don’t want to spoil the book for you so I won’t say any more about this part of the story.
- However, if Shute’s great novel had only dealt with the war story then it would not be my choice for the greatest novel ever. But the war story is only the first half of the book. The second half of the book is set in the remotest part of the Australian Outback. This is a wonderful and fascinating contrast. The book was written in the late 1940s and Shute knew the country very well. At that time Australia was a very different country to the modern high tech place it is today. Shute gives us a wonderful picture of life in the Outback and shows how the Australians established their towns – a town like Alice. He really makes the reader want to leap on a plane and go there.
- By bringing alive two such contrasting settings and placing at the heart of his novel a wonderful love story, Shute has written a classic and a book which I have enjoyed re-reading again and again.
It was therefore easy for me to stand up and champion my book but I have to say, all the other books were brilliant and so well presented that it made for a marvellous, stimulating booky evening.
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| From left to right : Sarah Butterfield, me, David Willetts, Lynn Pick, Mark Waldron, Naomi Foyle |
Here are the other books :
The Sea Around Us by Rachel Larson – presented by Sarah Butterfield, professional artist.
A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume – presented by David Willetts, MP for Havant and husband of Sara Butterfield.
The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giona – presented by Lynne Pick, local resident and artist.
Biggles Takes it Rough, by W.E. Johns – presented by Mark Waldron, Editor of The News, Portsmouth. Mark stated that his first Biggles book started him on the road to becoming a serious and committed reader but without his local library he wouldn't have had access to books at all. For the Dickens centenary celebrations in Portsmouth this year he read the entire works in 14 months – so he has come a long way from good old Biggles and all because of the library.
Queen of Heaven and Earth by Wolkstein and Kramer – presented by Naomi Foyle, poet and author.
Sarah Butterfield won – which was wonderful ( although we all thought Biggles was looking like the front runner)
The audience loved the whole process, which included questions and comments to the panel and a voting system – marbles in jars. ( The better half reckons I came second...but who knows!)
It was an inspiring way to spend an evening on books – many of which were lovingly falling to pieces and a reminder that if we had all stood there with our Kindles it just wouldn't have smelt and looked and felt the same.
What would you have chosen as the best book ever written?
I must admit when I started to write my cycle of three novels set on Hayling Island ( off the south coast of England), Hidden, Illegal, Stuffed - I didn’t give a thought to Shakespeare, but somehow the Bard has presented himself on the Island in more ways than one. As a natural fan I have embraced it with open arms.
Hamlet appeared first. Perhaps I should say here that apart from being one of my favourite Shakespeare plays, as far as I’m concerned Hamlet is a teenager, about to be sent over to school in England and this is why he never really takes the plunge and avenges his father’s murder. When writing, Illegal, with the main character Lindy Bellows as a vulnerable lonely girl from a dysfunctional family, I decided that Hamlet is the play she’s studying in school. At the back of my mind I had a quote from an article written at the time Paul Schofield died, which described Hamlet as a ‘spiritual fugitive.’ But that altered in my mind to ‘spiritual refugee’ and my image was born. Lindy starts to think of herself as a spiritual refugee in the first chapter and this image continues throughout the book. When she teams up with fellow misfit Karl, who has been mute for two years, she tells him he’s also a spiritual refugee.
However, I am not keen on books which take well known plays or books and put them centre stage. I kept a firm grip on the role of Hamlet in Illegal. Lindy is not about to turn into a literary boffin. My point was that even the most unlikely of students can be captured by the greatest literature and find something which is significant to their own lives. This is what happens to Lindy. She doesn’t suddenly become an expert on Shakespeare, but throughout the novel there is a strand which moves to the foreground from time to time because Lindy has identified with this particular Shakespeare character in her own way.
2 Comments on Othello and Hamlet on Hayling Island by Miriam Halahmy, last added: 3/28/2012
My parents moved to
Hayling Island, opposite the Isle of Wight in 1971 during my first year at college. They bought a house a minute's walk from the beach at Sandy Point, right down the bottom of the Island where a well known yacht club is situated. They lived on Hayling for over twenty years and my brothers and I and our families all came to love this quiet little backwater. Hayling Island is completely flat, twenty five miles square and before the steam train, the Hayling Billy was built, the only way to reach the Island was by boat.
Hayling Island has been settled since the Iron Age and there are wonderful chalk and flint beds around the site of the old oyster beds. Oysters were once a big industry on the Island.
There was also another way to reach the Island at low tide before the bridge was built and that was on the
Wadeway. The Wadeway is believed to be a thousand years old and is a rocky footpath which has been laid out at the top of the Island right across the treacherous mudflats to the mainland. You can't use it now because the channel has been widened in the centre for sailing. I've tried walking along the top end which is uncovered at low tide but its incredibly slippery and if you slip into the mud you can sink up to your waist. The coastguards have to rescue one or two people a year.
You can just make out the line of the Wadeway in this photo which also shows the old mill and the Royal Oak pub on the mainland, facing out into Langstone Harbour towards the Island. Nevil Shute wrote one of his novels while staying in the mill and swans and ducks swim about in the sea and on the ponds behind it. Smuggling was rife around the Island in the eighteenth century and local gossip claims there was once a smugglers' tunnel between the mill and the pub. But its unlikely as the sea would have flooded it.
My life has been linked to Hayling Island for over thirty years and therefore I decided to set a child
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Where the Wild Things Are.
Interesting mix of titles. I've never read A Town Like Alice - on reflection, because of a long-ago cover image - so I am now feeling intrigued.
Best book ever written? Very sorry but I think there are so many good books that It's impossible to choose. What mood? What moment? What kind of language and vocabulary does one feel like reading at the moment? Does a strong plot win over an enticing voice and descriptions you could drop into? Mrs Indecision here so I'm opting out of that question, Miriam.
Good choice Heather! And yes, Penny, it was a bit of a tough call but really a lot of fun on the night.
I've read and enjoyed A Town Like Alice several times, and it's a fascinating read, for all the reasons you describe.
I have to admit I haven't read any of the other titles so you would probably have won my vote!
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Ah - thanks Emma - but I have to say everyone was so completely passionate about their books and gave such wonderful talks it would have been a very hard choice.
What a hard thing to do - champion just one book. A Town Like Alice is not a title I've ever read but from your it is one I'll add to my list.
I can't answer that question either, Miriam. But I read A Town Like Alice several times during my teens and twenties and absolutely loved it. It fascinates me that it ought not to 'work', because of the way it falls into two halves, and yet it succeeds brilliantly.
What an impossible question! What a dilemma!
No doubt in it to say that "The Best Book Ever Written.......... Miriam Halahmy" .The entire novel pivots around this heart-breaking statement.Good one.
A dilemma yes - but also such a fun challenge - in the end we were all just completely passionate about our books. Its a great way to get people fired up about reading - maybe it should become a schools challenge. I bet the kids would love it!