I am happy to be hosting Shadows Of Time and having Jackie here to share her thoughts.

Guest post – The World of Shadows of Time – the significance of the settings

I lived in a village in Yorkshire, so it was natural for me to begin my novel there. Most of the farmers have retired and sold land for building, so when June brings Cathy back to the small-holding or Bob goes in search of the house his mother lived in, new housing reflects what was happening around me. It was somewhere people like June were rooted, generations having lived in the same place.

Wickham Hall needed some explanation. When I wrote the novel, I was an English writer, writing for an English audience. It hadn’t occurred to me that someone from across the Atlantic would be unfamiliar with the label “Hall”. I had to give it a specific name, so that it was more obvious that it was a mansion. To me, it was very familiar. In the next village was one at the centre of the school I taught in. I borrowed the fountain and rose garden, and stags’ heads eyes following Cathy round the reception area. I borrowed the grand staircase, which I’d walked up and down to lessons. Many such buildings have become hotels in this country, but they only exist because of the social hierarchy of the past. The Hall reflects change over time, but the permanence of memories.

I opened the novel in Scarborough, Yorkshire, a typical English seaside, not known for being always sunny and warm! My husband and I visited on a hot day, and the description of the crowds on the beach formed itself in my head, as we rode the open-topped bus along the sea front and ate fish and chips at our favourite seafood restaurant. The original version of what I saw that day wasn’t part of a novel, but I wove it into the beginning and end, as the story began to form itself in my head. It did need some explanation, when my editor couldn’t quite picture the way the fishing boats and pleasure boats are all in the same harbour, and there were definitely no sail boats out on the North Sea on a typical English day. The boats are just opposite the amusement arcade, right next to the sandy beach, and the funfair is at one end of the south bay. We had a Zoom meeting, and I was able to show a photograph that won’t be in the book, but readers from overseas might need to Google Scarborough! The mock pirate ship really does take people out for a pleasure ride, and the lighthouse really is there. Peasholm Park is a real park, visited many times. I wanted to capture a place where people were enjoying themselves, so that the opening hinted at what was to come and the end brought us back there, on a positive note.

Because I was thinking about the ways in which a mother could experience the loss of a child, I included the fact that Cathy emigrated to Australia. My own daughter emigrated, with her family, so this was a loss I knew. I’d visited Australia twice, so the bits of Perth I describe are what I’d seen for myself, for example the children running in and out of the fountain and the seat at Point Walter, with its profound dedication to the “lost generation”. Cathy is not my daughter, but I could use her as a vehicle for the experience of being a mother of a child who emigrates. I wanted to represent all those mothers who, like me, couldn’t tell the world how it felt.

The other location I used in the novel is Cornwall, in the south-west tip of this island. When I created Maggie’s pilot, I was reminded of my own father’s time in the RAF during the Second World War. I went to Cornwall on holiday, so that I could go and pay tribute to those who served where he did, at a place called St Eval. It was during this trip that I was struck by the timelessness of the rocks off the shore, and this gave rise to the photo on the cover of the book. They’d seen so much, including my father standing where I stood. Echoes of the past were all around me. I gathered together ideas for characters and plot over about two years, the places seeming to acquire a significance of their own, as they embodied both timelessness and time passing.

Thanks for sharing, Jackie. Good luck with the tour.

Shadows of Time by Jackie Meekums-Hales

GENRE: Women’s Fiction

BLURB

Maggie’s daughter, Cathy, is a successful business woman in Australia. After the failure of a relationship and her mother’s death, she returns to England for the funeral, hoping to rekindle her childhood sense of carefree life in the Yorkshire countryside. She is confronted by revelations about Maggie’s tragic past, which has a legacy of loss overshadowing her family’s  present and future. As Cathy and her sister June unravel the truth, her mother’s story unfolds in a flashback to 1945. Life for the young Maggie before they were born reflects the world of mid-century attitudes towards women who dared to have a baby out of wedlock. The illusion of the Maggie her daughters knew is dispelled.

Meanwhile, two young women explore family history, and fate takes a hand. Three families are linked through coincidences and circumstances they did not know they shared. Cathy must decide how far, and for what reasons, she allows herself to live in the shadows of the past.

EXCERPT

The wind was roaring down the side of the house and through the chimney, and the daffodils were bending their heads in submission. It might be nearly spring, but that news did not seem to have reached the village yet. The smell of burning wood always brought back memories of bonfires at the bottom of the garden. Cathy’s thoughts lingered on bonfire nights at the farm next door, when the children had ridden down to the middle field on bales of hay on a trailer pulled by an old tractor. How simple everything seemed then.

Cathy sensed that June’s tense shoulders meant she was steeling herself for something unpleasant. Cathy was busy trying to work out how to ask her what was wrong, when suddenly, staring into the flames, June announced, “We may have to sell the house, you know.”

Cathy heard the words but didn’t believe she had. “What?”

“We may have to sell the house. The solicitor phoned today about the reading of Mum’s will. The house may not be ours, Cathy. We may have to move.”

“WHAT?”

“Stop saying what! It seems that someone has appeared out of nowhere since Mum died. Something about someone else being entitled to something. I don’t know the details. I’ve been dreading telling you, and I didn’t want to say anything in front of the twins.”

“How on earth could that be? I don’t believe it! There can’t be anyone else, can there? There must be a mistake!” She felt the cosy, comfy world she had come back to claim crumbling to ashes and dust.

AUTHOR Bio and Links

Jackie is a member of the Society of Authors, whose debut novel Shadows of Time was the fulfilment of an ambition nurtured during her working life as a teacher, inspired by her research into her own and others’ family histories. She has been writing as a hobby since childhood, contributing to poetry anthologies since her undergraduate days and being a Poetry Guild national semi-finalist in the 1990s. She has also written short stories for friends, family and students. Since retiring, she has contributed to Poetry Archive Now (2020), with 20-20 Vision, uploaded to YouTube, and has had poetry and flash fiction published online by Flash Fiction North. One of her flash fictions is to appear in an anthology, having been selected from entries during the Morecambe Festival  2021. She had a creative memoir, Shelf Life, published by Dear Damsels in 2019, a precursor to collaborating with her sister on a creative non-fiction memoir Remnants of War, published in 2021. She writes a blog about her walks and thoughts in the Yorkshire and Somerset countryside.

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