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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

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Going back: Janet Watson on writing her memoir Nothing Ever Happens in Wentbridge

1/5/2014

8 Comments

 
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HAVE you ever wondered what it would be like to go back to your teenage years? To your first love? Close friends? Not just as an idle thought, but to really immerse yourself in those years, actually talk to those people and see whether their memories match yours?

Dusty Springfield sang about Going Back – the song was played at her funeral – to “the things I learned so well, in my youth”. I carried my story with me for many years but what was it I learned back then? When I started writing notes for a memoir, I knew I too had to go back.

Moving away from home was something we all did after school. In the sixth form we were a close group of nine friends, sharing the boredom of school days, waiting for the excitement of the sort of nights everyone recalls from those vivid, growing-up years; high on the future, bonds strengthened by alcohol, and a new awareness of selves and sexual power.

Then it was university, new lives, friends, marriages, children. But I never forgot the feeling of belonging I had with those friends. Had they felt it too, those three girls and five boys? And when a tragic death ripped the heart out of the group, could we ever be together again and feel the same?

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I was lucky, as I wasn’t relying on memory alone. I had my diaries, written every night between 1974 and 1986, from age 11 to 23. I stopped writing when Mark, my first love, was killed. That event so twisted my life out of shape that for years, choices I made were unconsciously rooted in that loss.

More than 20 years after we’d set off on different paths, I went on a road trip south from my Edinburgh home to visit each of my old “gang”, interviewing them ostensibly for the book but also because I needed to be with them again, to recreate teen me. The “interviews” were some of the best times I’d known, slipping back into relationships that had stayed strong. I drove across England tired, hungover, and happy.

Sian used to yawn when anyone played an Eagles record, but said she’d not heard one since our schooldays without thinking of Mark and me. Julie recalled us all cycling in the dark during that first magical winter together in 1979, “memories I can feel, breathe and touch”. Nick remembered how Mark hated dancing, would only do it “at the end of the night … a lean-on dance!” Adrian couldn’t bring himself to go to the funeral in Hull, our home town. “I wanted to remember the good times. Funerals are horrible sad things.” For Gary, Mark was the brother he never had. “There’s no doubt I’m a lesser person for him not being around and I think about him every day.” Every day.

For two, Mark was more than just memories. Mandy said: “I was driving home and really, really tired. I heard a voice saying, ‘Wake up Mandy, don’t fall asleep.’ It was Mark, his voice, very clear.” Tony saw him. “I bumped into him once, on the landing in my parents’ house. He looked just as he always did, and I shouted at him, told him off. Called him a bastard and said how much he’d hurt everyone. It didn’t feel like a dream.”

I learned that my version of my teen self – clumsy, gauche, ugly even – jarred with my friends’ memories of a pretty, flirtatious yet aloof girl, and I left each of them with a new picture of myself that I really liked.

But the best memory of going back is the night we were all together, sharing a bottle of Laphroaig, sitting in an entangled heap on a hotel room floor, passing round my diaries and laughing like drains. How had I lost sight of the “things I’d learned so well in my youth”? Trust and love. Simple yet priceless. I brought them home with me and then I started to write.

What a process it was. I would walk the boys to school then return home, sit at my dining table in front of the laptop, open my old diaries and step back in time.

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Writing Wentbridge was intense; totally absorbing. Martin Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology, talks about ‘The Good Life’: “This is all about being in a state known as ‘flow’…a state of concentration and absorption where time seems to stand still… Those times when you are completely absorbed in the present moment and simply don’t seem to be aware of time passing.”

I wouldn’t move from where I was sitting, writing and recreating scenes from my diaries. I relived conversations, images, thoughts and sounds, all the joy, pain and domestic banality. I would set my alarm to a half hour before the end of school, and when it went off I would come to, stretch, and then realise I was hungry/thirsty/needed the loo!

By reliving it, I excised it. Setting it out on a screen, capturing overwhelming emotions and events in a narrative divided into chapters and finally bound in a cover - pages all ordered and numbered - made it a manageable, separate thing. I was ready to let it go, in all its ‘bookness’, and take on a life and meaning of its own.

Undoubtedly, my gravitation towards psychology and then a counselling career came from a need to understand how I lived in denial of love and loss for more than 20 years.  My first voluntary counselling job was with Cruse Bereavement Care, working with people who were unable to assimilate their grief in such a way as to live their lives alongside it.  As I have moved into more generic work, I saw how Cruse had been my attempt to get close to death, like someone who is scared of heights forcing themselves to stand on a cliff edge. I wanted to remove its sting, become impervious to its pain, to never let it hurt me again.

But of course it will.  And does. Writing Wentbridge helped me work through my loss and I really hope it will help people who read it, in some small way. While aspects of loss are universal, our reactions are shaped by our own individual ways of being, and by everything that has gone before. Sometimes we just have to go back.

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Janet Watson was born in Hull and worked as a journalist in Yorkshire and Scotland for 30 years before retraining to be a counsellor and psychotherapist. She lives in Edinburgh with her husband and sons. Her memoir, Nothing Ever Happens in Wentbridge, was published in 2012 by Route and is available direct from the publisher or from Amazon 


Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
8 Comments
Norah Colvin link
2/5/2014 01:01:42 am

This is a very sad and touching post, but as Janet said, it helped her through her loss and may help others too. I'm certain others will find strength in her story, just as they may share her sadness. How great to have kept a diary over all that time, and to be able to go back and reconnect with the friends would have been wonderful.

Reply
Janet Watson
2/5/2014 01:56:03 am

Hi Norah,
Thanks for your comment. Mum used to call the diaries my 'emotional props' but I didm;t think of them that way...I imagined people reading them, and not just my mum having a nosey into my teen angst! There were times when I thought about throwing the diaries out. When I got the urge to write Wentbridge I can't tell you how relieved I was that I still had them and could take myself back into the past to reconstruct what happened to me and my friends.
I guess the post is sad, as is the theme of the book, but many readers report social embarrassment (laughing out loud on the top of buses/in stations etc) so it's not all doom and gloom.

Reply
Annecdotist
4/5/2014 11:24:47 am

Thanks, Janet for this marvellous post. There's potentially so much to comment on here. I like your idea of the road trip visiting friends from your past. The year we turned fifty I met up with some old school friends, some of whom I hadn't seen since we were sixteen – it was fascinating how they were so grown-up (one now a grandmother) yet still the girls we used to be.
I'm also thinking how helpful it could be to have your loss made tangible in the book, while also transformed into something you can be so proud of.
I've been working on a post today for the bite-size memoir challenge:
http://sharingthestoryblog.wordpress.com/2014/05/02/bite-size-memoir-no-1-school-at-seven/
but still ambivalent about the genre. Even in such a tiny piece of under 150 words, I'm not sure I've been entirely faithful to the facts, a challenge that must be magnified for a book length project. I know you had your diaries and the perspective of friends, but I do think fiction is a lot easier when you can just make things up!!!

Reply
Janet Watson
4/5/2014 11:57:05 am

I would definitely say that when one has attained grandmother-dom, then one is a grown-up, yes! It must have been strange, meeting your school friends again after so long. I didn't feel that we were at all grown-up, especially not when we were attacking the bottle of Laphroaig!
I am proud of Wentbridge, and while it made tangible my loss, I was very aware of my responsibility to others, and their feelings. In that respect, it was very important to try to be faithful to events, although there are some of the more light-hearted scenes when I allowed myself a little flexibility with dates to enable more of a flow to the structure. My editor, Ian Daley of Route, really helped with the mid-section of the draft he received as my submission. It was a case of taking an outside perspective on my muddle and untangling the knots, which I think he did with great aplomb. I was far too close to events and emotions to be an effective editor...
I found Wentbridge easy to write in terms of wordage mounting up, but as I said above, a very intensely emotional experience.

Reply
Charli Mills link
5/5/2014 08:28:11 am

This post, poignant and brave, makes me think about the power of sharing memory. Emotion and logic both shade memory and each person tends to hyper-focus on what was most emotional or remarkable. Yet, this idea of going back to a hometown, to one's original gang of friends and culling memories from multiple perspectives rounds out the end result. What a powerful book this must be. Also, the added benefit of having diaries to reflect upon must have helped. I'm intrigued by the process as much as the book that ensued. Oh--and I know what Laphroaig is! :-) Thank you for sharing your memoir!

Reply
Janet Watson
5/5/2014 10:11:11 am

Thanks Charli... I really hope you'll read it and let me know what you think! I remember Sian (one of my school friends) telling me she received the manuscript through the post, sat down by her door on the bottom stair, and that's where her sister found her hours later, tears rolling down her cheeks after she read it in one sitting. And she was there at the time... but of course, her memories were different from mine, and as you say, her emotions and logic will have taken her focus to a different 'angle' on the group.
As the song goes, 'the way we were' was different for all of us, but also the same. Thanks again and I hope you enjoy it if you decide to have a read!!

Reply
Lori Schafer link
7/5/2014 10:08:20 am

Sounds like a deeply moving memoir, Janet. You were very brave to tackle such a project, which must have been as heartwrenching as it was uplifting. Congratulations and best of success to you!

Reply
Janet Watson
7/5/2014 11:08:19 am

Hi Lori, thanks for your comments and I'd say - re writing Wentbridge - brave or utterly foolhardy! To be very honest, the heartwrenching aspect of the memories etc came before I sat down to write. There were moments when I was overwhelmed by thoughts of 'if only things had been different' but I soon shrugged those off and got on with the practicalities of sentence construction. I get so much pleasure from the craft of writing that it pulled me out of any dark holes.

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