Please give a warm welcome to Historical fiction
author, Beryl Kingston. Bery is going to share her inspiration behind her fabulous
book, Everbody's Somebody.
Author’s
Inspiration
I have to admit I cheated over this book,
because I began by trawling back into my own family history, not because I
wanted to search out all my long-lost relations but because of three of the
people I grew up with. All three of them had very interesting tales to tell and
I sat at their feet as a very young child with my ears flapping and afterwards
and in secret wrote up everything I could remember of what they said in my well
hidden, very secret, diary.
One of them whose name was Jesse Garnsworthy,
had been a soldier in the First World War and served in the trenches for the
full four years, I heard things from him that I’d never heard before and have
never seen in any history book. One of them was the ‘morning hate’ which I’ve
described in the book exactly as it was described to me but he also told me
about the food, the rats, the lice and the general filth of the trenches.
Respec’ Jesse.
The second one was Jesse’s wife whose name was
Minnie but whom I always called Dardy because Garnsworthy was too difficult for
my infant tongue and the nickname stuck. She told me almost casually that she
had been sent out to work the day after her twelfth birthday, I was absolutely
horrified to hear it and thought how cruel it was, but she said that was the
way things were in the old days and they all had to put up with it. I loved her
to bits. She was the most hardworking and loving woman I’ve ever met, she worked
every day of her life, from twelve years old until the day before she died when
she was in her eighties. And she became my heroine as she always was. Respec’
Dardy.
PICTURE OF DARDY – WIFE’S NAME
IS MINNIE.
The third, was an Aunt called Vera Dawson and
she (Respec’ again!) was a Suffragette who chained herself to the railings in
Parliament Square and of course was arrested, she told me how Suffragettes were
despised and openly abused especially by what she called ‘rough-necks’, so
there’s another thread for my book and again it was verbatim.
Beryl Kingston
I was born in 1931 in Tooting, and when I was
four was enrolled at a local dancing school run by a lady called Madam Hadley,
which I attended until I was eight when the war began. Because of the war my
school career was – shall we say – varied. I was evacuated twice, the first
time to Felpham which is near Bognor Regis and the second to Harpenden in
Hertfordshire, and consequently went to ten different schools. I ended up at
Streatham Secondary School, an LCC grammar run on the Dalton system, which
offered a few lessons as sparking points and then required pupils to be
responsible for their own learning, either in study rooms with their teachers
on hand to help and advise, or on their own in the library or the school hall.
It suited me to a T. Then to King’s College London, where I read English and
enjoyed myself a lot, but wasn’t particularly distinguished, having other
things on my mind by then.
I am proud of the fact that I was in Tooting for
the first four months of the blitz, and only left it to be evacuated again when
our road was bombed and our house was uninhabitable. I spent the middle part of
the war in Harpenden and returned to live in London again at the end of the war
at the time of the V2’s, this time without my family.
When I was just sixteen I met the love of my
life, who arrived on my doorstep in Air Force blue one February evening in the
coldest winter on record.
Despite heavy opposition from my parents, we
married three years later during my first year at King’s and spent the next 53
years 11 months and 6 days living more and more happily together.
We had three much loved children and five much
loved grandchildren and once I’d embarked on my career as a novelist,
researched all the books together, which was great fun. We finished work on
‘Gates of Paradise’ six weeks before he died. So this publication is special to
me.
I have enjoyed two careers in my life – as a
teacher from 1952 to 1985 (with ten years off to bring up my family, which some
might consider a third career) and as a published writer from 1980 to date. I
am also, although it sounds immodest to say it, an easy and charismatic public
speaker, usually unfazed by any audience no matter how big or how small or what
questions they might throw at me.
In the two schools where I was head of the
English department, I deliberately covered the full range of age and ability,
believing that as I was paid the largest salary I should carry the heaviest
responsibility. My work was filmed by KCL Education Department for use in their
PGCE course and I have given talks at various colleges and schools on a variety
of educational subjects, from teaching poetry to ‘tackling’ sex education. I
have never subscribed to the Gradgrind theory of education which is current
now, but always believed that the job of a teacher is to enable her students to
learn.
I have always been a political animal, taking
part in street demonstrations, walking from Aldermaston to London, involved in
the 1945 election despite the fact that I was only fourteen, taking to the
streets again, along with a million others, to protest against the Iraq war
when I was 72. And as a last and rather lighter touch, I was a beauty queen in
1947. It wasn’t all protests!
Everybody's Somebody
It follows her from Binderton to Arundel and then wherever jobs take her, to the RAC club in London, to the Borough where she lives in Newcomen Street and discovers the suffragette movement and meets and falls in love with a Docker called Jim. The First World War pulls them apart and we follow him into the trenches and when he is wounded to the Military hospital in Tooting. Some years later when she is married and has a daughter she finds a job as an artist’s model in Cheyne Walk and as a bit-part player in Alexander Korda’s new film ‘The private life of Henry VIII’. It’s a hardworking but eventful life.
Such an interesting post. Thank you for sharing your inspiration with us!
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