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Drew Payne

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  1. Drew Payne

    With Pride

    By Drew Payne,


    With Pride
    The next six blogs form a short series, which I have called “With Pride” because they were all originally comments pieces, on LGBT rights and healthcare, published in the Nursing Standard magazine, and I am proud of having written them.
    For nearly fifteen years, on and off, I have written comment pieces for Nursing Standard and a lot of them were on LGBT healthcare. These pieces chart changes in attitudes, but they also had recurring themes and one was responding to a very disturbing piece of research, reading which just left me frustrated and angry, I felt nothing had changed.
    The first and last pieces here almost become companion pieces though they were written eleven years apart. The first one asks a question and the last answers it.
    I am posting here the original versions, with their original titles and all the links to their source material; they were edited for publication but mostly this involved reducing their word count.
    The last one was written in 2019, we had every intension of following that one up the next year, but history had other ideas. There were no London Pride marches in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID pandemic. This year was the first one since then and fate has intervened again for me.
    I want to say “happy reading”, but some of these pieces are on uncomfortable subjects. I am very grateful to the Nursing Standard for giving me the opportunity to write these pieces and to be able to shout above the crowd.
    Find out more about London Pride here.
    Drew
     
    Links to the other With Pride blogs:
    With Pride July 2008
    With Pride January 2015
    With Pride August 2015
    With Pride January 2017
    With Pride July 2019
     

  2. Drew Payne
    I was twelve years old when my grandmother died. My father woke me up, early that morning, and told me, “Your Gran has gone to Heaven.”
    I was confused, no one had told me she was that ill, they certainly hadn’t told me she was dying. I thought that her decreasing health and physical ability was because of her great age, she had seemed so impossibly old to me back then. It was much later that I’d find out what had happened to her.
    She was the only grandparent I knew. My father’s parents had died before I was born and so had my mother’s father. My gran, my mother’s mother, was the only grandparent I had. Other children at school had both sets of grandparents and would talk about them endlessly. I just had Gran, a woman who seemed so much older than the grandparents of those other kids at school. She was an old, small, white-haired woman, like a character out of children’s literature.
    When I was nine, Gran came to live with us for a while. With hindsight I realise she wasn’t well, but no one told me at the time. She would sit in the armchair next to the fire in our sitting room and tell me stories of her life. Stories of her growing up in Scotland, her time “in service” in London, running a household in wartime Kendal, Cumbria. She was full of stories and I loved listening to them.
    During that time, she was admitted to one of Liverpool’s hospitals. We visited her one Sunday afternoon to find that she had been moved off the main ward and was now in a side room. She told us that the ward’s sister had moved her into there when it became empty. At the time it just seemed like a nice gesture; now I know differently. As a senior staff nurse, working on a busy hospital ward, I’d move a very ill or terminally ill patient into a side room to give them some quiet and privacy.
    From our home she moved into a newly built bungalow, near to my Uncle Lance and Aunty Sheila, her youngest son and his wife, in the suburbs of Derby. We would drive over there every Saturday to visit her. The bungalow was small, made from cream-colored concrete and perched on the side of a shallow hill. Being a new build, the garden was untended and raw. It was divided into two by a stone-paved path that cut through its middle. On either side of it were two strips of open soil, which were made up of large clumps of red/brown clay, many of them as large rocks. I wasn’t allowed onto this clay soil because it would stain anything that touched it bright red. Our dog, Candy, a little terrier with a love of new and different smells, wouldn’t venture onto this clay garden either, yet normally she’d spend as much time as possible sniffing out the smells on a new patch of ground. My gran had loved gardening, she and my mother would spend afternoon after afternoon tending to our garden. While she lived at that bungalow, the garden was left untended, just two open strips of clay where even weeds didn’t seem to want to grow.
    It was in this bungalow that she died.
    I wasn’t allowed to go to her funeral, my mother believed funerals were no place for children, so I was left at home in the care of a neighbour. This, along with not being told she was ill, made accepting my gran’s death so difficult for me. It wasn’t as if she was dead, never to be seen again, she just wasn’t there, missing from my life. It wasn’t until I was into my teens that I was able to make the connection that she was actually dead. For my mother, though, the loss of her own mother was something that she found so difficult to accept, it was so hard on her. She spent weeks and weeks off work after Gran’s funeral. I would often find her, alone in the house, silently crying to herself. I now realise her grief had become depression, but back then I was not a perceptive child.
    It was only as an adult, after I had trained as a nurse, that I began to find out what had happened with my gran; it was only then that my mother told me what she had found out after Gran’s death. My grandmother had stomach cancer. When she had been admitted to hospital in Liverpool, it had been for “exploratory surgery.” This was long before CT and MIR scans, and cancer tumours do not show up well on x-rays, so people would have surgery as a way of diagnosing where and how big/advanced their tumour was. When my Gran had had her exploratory surgery, they had found that the cancer was extremely advanced and had spread to other organs in her abdomen, meaning there was nothing that could be done; certainly surgery was useless, so they simply sewed her back up again.
    I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know how ill she was, no one knew. My gran wasn’t told that her cancer was as advanced as it was; she certainly wasn’t told it was terminal. The decision was made by her doctors that she wouldn’t be able to cope with the knowledge that she was dying and therefore she wasn’t told. Fortunately, this doesn’t happen now, no doctor will take that God-like decision, but it still happened in my lifetime. It also meant that neither my gran nor her family had any chance to prepare for her death.
    When my mother was told that her cancer was terminal, thirty years after my gran’s death, she decided not to tell anyone else. But she was able to make that decision for herself and she took it for very personal but still practical reasons. It was also a very different time. I was an adult and a trained and experienced nurse. I had been quietly watching my mother’s health decline and I had been preparing myself. I also had Martin in my life, my partner, whom I could talk to about this and he knew what I was going through. Then I found out her cancer was terminal, though by accident. My mother was prescribed new medication, a hormonal treatment, and I recognised it as a medication used in palliative care, designed to shrink a tumour to reduce the symptoms from it, but it didn’t treat or remove the tumour. It was then that I knew she hadn’t told anyone her cancer was terminal. I was in a difficult position but I was an adult and had someone I could talk to. And when she was in the hospice, at the end of her life, I had the chance to say goodbye to her and we both knew it was goodbye.
    I work as a district nurse now and I look after people, in their own homes, who are at the end of their lives. I don’t have the input that palliative care nurses have; my role is very much providing the nursing care people need at the very end of their lives. This has given me an insight into how a death can and does affect the loved ones and family of someone dying.
    My own experience, personal and professional, has shown me what a large and life-changing event a loved one’s death can be. But I am also a writer and my computer-like mind stores all this away to be used in my writing. Death is such a life-changing event that I cannot but write about it. But I want to write about people’s personal experience of it. I don’t want to write sensationalist or sentimental prose about the death of a loved one, I want to write about the real progress and events of it all and the way these deaths affect people.
    That all said, I have just published a story, Five Days, about a child losing his mother to cancer. This child, a boy called Byron, isn’t told that his mother has cancer and that she is dying from it. It is her decision and she doesn’t let anyone else tell him what is happening. She is trying to protect him, but her actions leave Byron confused and isolated, he feels excluded from what is happening.
    Though not directly based on my own experience, I did tap into my experience as a child when I was writing this; I also used my experiences as a nurse too, especially when I was told not to tell a patient’s child that their parent was dying. I wanted to explore a child’s-eye view of terminal illness. It wasn’t an easy story to write, but so often I like to challenge myself with what I write, I want to explore difficult subjects from the point of view of characters being affected by them.
    This wasn’t the easiest story to write, I had to keep returning to the fact that the story is seen through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy without the insights that an adult character could bring to this story, but I did find it a rewarding thing to write. I had written about something important to me.
    I am very grateful to my writers’ group, Newham Writers’ Workshop, who gave me such helpful feedback on each chapter of this story. Writing can be such an isolated practice, and so often I don’t know if a piece of writing works or not, but getting feedback from my writers’ group has been invaluable and I have learnt so much from it.
    In her will, my gran left me her rocking chair. It was an item of furniture that I had loved sitting in as a child, the sheer originality of it attracting me; all the chairs in my parents’ home stayed solidly in place, none of them rocked. As a child I would always head straight towards that chair. When I moved into the first real home of my own, my own flat, I finally had space for it and it sat in my sitting room for years. It now sits in our bedroom, in a corner almost made for it.
    Happy reading,
    Drew
     

     
  3. Drew Payne

    And Then There Was…

    By Drew Payne,


    Writing
    I was an awkward thirteen-year-old (a little under ten years before I was diagnosed as dyslexic) when my mother gave me a copy of A Pocketful of Rye by Agatha Christie. At the time I loved the concept of books but I found them so difficult, my reading was so slow and finishing a book seemed like an impossibly difficult task, a mountain too high to climb. This book intrigued me. The cover was macabre, a black bird’s skeleton surrounded by its black feathers, lying on an illustrated sheet music to a child’s nursery rhythm. I began to read it and on the second page was the description of a man dying from poisoning. I was hooked and carried on reading.
    What kept me reading it, at my painstakingly slow pace back then, was the plot. At the end of the book, the twist hit me hard; it wasn’t the murderer I thought it was, I’d been certain it was. Then I looked back on the story and saw the clues she had sprinkled throughout the plot, subtly hinting at who the murderer was, and I didn’t feel cheated, I didn’t feel that she had held back important information from me. She had just got the better of me.
    I raced out, got another one of her books and started reading it.
    As a teenager Christie’s books were the first “adult” novels I read and I loved them. It was their tight plots that kept me guessing who the murderer was and their archetypical but very recognisable characters that kept me reading them.
    Those Christie novels were a gateway into the world of literature for me. From her I read some other Golden Age crime writers, some I enjoyed and some I didn’t, and from them I started to read modern day crime writers (modern day when I was a teenager). This was a very mixed experience, many of them were poor or just plain bad, but I also discovered PD James and Ruth Rendell, and later still Joseph Hansen. These authors opened my eyes to the fact that crime fiction can be about much more than just a murder (or two). They all used detective fiction to write about other subjects too and their prose was of such a high standard. They took time setting scenes and developing characters; they gave their detectives a whole life outside of work. Their writing led me to other, non-crime fiction, literary fiction and other genes, though I still enjoy a good detective novel.
    As an adult, I still enjoy a Christie novel, occasionally, but I cannot say she is the greatest of writers. Her descriptive prose is poor, just using a few commonly used colloquialisms to sum up a recognisable image; most of her description is left to the reader’s imagination to fill in. She set her novels in a very narrow world, that of the middle- and upper-class English, but her books still had strong and well-crafted plots. It was from reading them that I learnt how to plot and how important plots are in fiction.
    Her plots carefully set the scene of the story, introducing the place and characters but not giving away all the details at the beginning. Her plots dripped out the information and clues as the story progressed, they didn’t give away all the information in one go. Her plots give the reader a journey to go on throughout the book.
    At first, I thought this plotting style was only useful for crime fiction, where withholding information until later in the story was an important element. Then I read Job's Year by Joseph Hansen. Here he used the same style of plotting but in a non-crime novel. Each chapter gave more information about the central character. Reading it, I felt like a detective finding out more about a character, it was like how I felt in a friendship; over time I found out more and more about that friend, I wasn’t given all the information about them in one go as soon as we met. It felt much more of a natural way to tell a story.
    You don’t have to be writing crime fiction to learn from this style. I learnt not to give everything away at the beginning of a story, treat it like a detective story, drip out your information as the story progresses. So instead of telling the reader everything about a character as soon as you introduce them, let the information fall out as the story progresses, as a natural progression. Hold the reader’s interest by giving away clues to a character as the story flows; tell them about the character’s background and history through the length of the story, not as one, rushed chunk of information at the beginning.
    I have learnt to give the reader a beginning, middle and end to a story. I introduce the story and draw the reader into the world I’ve created. Like Christie, I don’t let interest fall during the middle of a story, the middle isn’t just there to get from the beginning to the end as quickly as possible. I use that part to build on my story and characters, I let the reader get to know my characters, I let the characters speak for themselves, to set their own motivations. There’s no need for the end of a story to tie up all the loose ends, but I give the story a definite moment where it ends. An example of this is my story The Men Who Took Their Vows Together in East Ham Registry Office. Though this story has an ending I have used a lot, it ends at a certain point of the story, not tying up all the loose ends and giving the characters a neat resolution; instead it ends with the character moving forward. I try to always give a reader an ending, just not always a neat one.
    Plot holds so much writing together; even if it is a story/piece that is looking back on a character’s life or following a character’s emotional journey a plot gives me a structure to hang all this upon and, hopefully, to hold a reader’s attention.
    At present, I am writing a short story about a man, in his late twenties, who cannot seem to attain an adult, romantic relationship. All he can find is short-lived relationships that crash and burn or casual sex. The story explores how he has got into this situation, what has contributed to him being so poor at relationships, though I want to portray him as a character with little insight into his own situation (I do like a challenge). I could just write it as the character looking back on his life, but this would be a very dry story with me just telling the reader about this character’s situation. I have decided to intersperse this retrospective narrative across one evening of this man’s life when he goes on another first date. With the date, I can show the reader some of this man’s problems, how he sabotages his attempts to forge a relationship. Here I am using a plot as a device to explore a subject.
    Agatha Christie was called the Queen of Crime, she is one of the most widely read of English language authors, she is also the most successful English woman playwright, but for me Agatha Christie was a great teacher. Her books taught me how to plot a story and I’m so grateful to her for this.
    I also have a strange link to her, not through her books. During the Second World War, Agatha Christie worked as a hospital dispenser at University College Hospital in London. This was one of the hospitals where I did my nurse training, so she and I walked the same hospital corridors, just separated by five decades.
    Happy reading,
    Drew
     
     

  4. Drew Payne

    Waiting for My Father

    By Drew Payne,


    Esaay
    The room was quiet; the only sounds there were small and slight, ones that would not normally have been noticed except for the silence there.
    There was the mechanical noise of the little pump occasionally leaping into life as it delivered another dose of painkillers. There was the hiss of air escaping as the air mattress slowly inflated and deflated. There was also the sound of his breathing, slow and almost rasping as he drew in air through his parted lips, held that air in his lungs for what seemed like an age, and then slowly exhaled it.
    He looked so small lying there in the middle of that hospital bed, almost lost in all those clean sheets. His eyes were closed, as they had been for so long now. His skin was dry and pale, it had taken on a grey pallor, while thick and dark stubble was pushing through his chin. His hair, only now thin and wispy, thinned out only by the chemotherapy and not by aging or baldness, was disheveled, more pushed back over his head than brushed into any style. My mother would have cast a sarcastic comment about his appearance if she had been here.
    My father was dying and all I could do was sit there at his bedside and wait.
    At first, I had sat silently by his bed, simply waiting on him. Doing anything else felt almost disrespectful. Unfortunately, boredom and distraction soon set in. At first, I just casually glanced at a magazine, a distraction as I flicked through its pages. Then I read one article from it, the one that had snatched my attention. Then I read another article, and then another one, and then I had read it from cover to cover. Finally, I swallowed my good intensions, took out the novel I had been reading on the train up there, and started reading it.
    As a nurse I had nursed many dying patients before and there had been so many different things to do, I had been kept busy with my tasks.  I wasn’t a nurse here, I was a relative, I was his son, and all I had to do was wait. As a nurse, I had watched so many relatives doing this, sitting at their relative’s bedside and waiting, and my heart had gone out to them. Now it was my turn and I felt so useless. All I could do was sit there and wait; nothing practical or positive about it.
    My sister had organised a kind of rota so that she, my brother or I would be sitting next to my father’s bed, keeping him company, making sure he was not alone. I had travelled up to Liverpool, from my home in London, when he was admitted to the hospice. When I arrived, he was tired and weak and barely responsive. By the Saturday afternoon he was completely unresponsive, he was unmoving in his bed, he had stopped eating and drinking, and his eyes were now permanently closed. He seemed to be waiting for something, but what? His three children were at his bedside, who was he waiting for?
    My mother had died two years before from cancer. Her death had been quiet and quietly organised, like so much of her life had been. She had made so many arrangements and kept so much to herself. But at the end of it all, after her death, my father had been left on his own, and that was the last thing he had expected.
    My father came from a generation of men who expected to die before their wives. He’d had heart disease for several decades and because of this expected to die before my mother. But the treatment and management of heart disease improved over that time, and his heart disease was managed well. My mother died before him, not what he had been expecting.
    Unfortunately, again, like so many men of his generation, my father didn’t have the emotional or psychological knowledge to survive being widowed. He hadn’t just lost his wife of nearly fifty years, but he had lost his close companion, his friend throughout so much, he’d also lost the person who had organised so much of his life and the person whose council he’d always trusted. This broke him because he couldn’t cope with his loss.
    Grief made him angry and nasty, how could we be happy, how could we carry on as normal? He was angry at me, snapping at me and saying the most hurtful things. I’d lost him to the anger of grief. Martin and I had only been together a few years then and I’d wanted him to get to know my father, but that wish was now gone. My father had been replaced with a bitter and angry old man. It felt so unfair. Some uncaring person had told my father that he’d get over the loss of his wife, someone who didn’t really knew my father, and this had only made him even angrier. A loss like his someone would never “get over.”
    That Saturday he was dying in his hospice bed, but he had started dying two years before when he lost my mother. It had been the day after my mother’s funeral; he had been such a lost and angry little old man. It had been heart-breaking and I’d not known what to say. Were there any words I could have said?
    On the Friday afternoon, my sister’s vicar had visited my father. The man clearly said that he’d seen many people in my father’s situation who had got better, got up out of bed and lived for years. The man’s naked denial had almost taken my breath away. I said that my father was dying, his hands and feet were icy cold because his circulation was slowing and failing, his internal organs were failing; he’d never get better. That vicar told me off for denying hope. He knew better than me, he was an ex-policeman and now an Anglican vicar, I was only a nurse. I was left feeling angry and frustrated, what was the use of this vicar?
    I spent Sunday afternoon was my friends Loraine and David. When they heard what was happening, they invited me for Sunday dinner and a break. I did my nurse training with Loraine and now she was married to David, an Anglican vicar, and they were living in Liverpool then. When I arrived at their home, at lunchtime, David told me he had prayed for my father at their morning Eucharist service, he’d prayed that my father’s suffering would end soon. I could have hugged him for that, I wish I had.
    That afternoon, after a wonderful Sunday dinner, we sat around and talked about books and gardening and fish ponds. Loraine and I gossiped about the people we trained with. Their dog made a big fuss over me. As I sat with the dog on my lap, patting him, I realised it had been days since I had touched anyone else, I had barely shaken hands with anyone.
    When I returned to the hospice that Sunday evening, my father was still lying there in the middle of that hospital bed, breathing in that painfully slow way. He was still waiting for something, just hanging in there.
    He died the following Wednesday morning and I wasn’t there.
    At first all I felt was relief. That awful waiting was over and his suffering was finished. He’d been so unhappy and angry as a widower, he’d not liked or even wanted the life he’d lived those last two years. He’d been so unhappy without my mother.
    Later I mourned, my father was gone and it felt strange and uncomfortable and very awkward. I went back to work too soon and had to be sent home when I burst into tears, apologising for the fact that my father had died.
    It was only after his funeral that the realisation came to me when I compared the dates. My father had died two years and two months to the date, almost to the hour, after my mother had died. That’s what he’d been waiting for.
     
    For Thomas Price Payne
    19/12/1927 to 2/07/2003
     
    Drew
     
     


  5. Drew Payne
    I never actually met Hamish (*), but God did I hate him, and that wasn’t from a personal prejudice.
    Martin (my husband) was working for a previous employer but still as a clinical nurse specialist. I know that I am biased, but Martin is very experienced at his job and he knows his subject. Hamish started working at the same trust. He had no clinical experience or qualifications and was working as a manager for a non-clinical service; he managed the trust’s buildings. But this didn’t stop Hamish. He very quickly began telling Martin how to do his job and what he “really” should be doing. Hamish’s suggestions were deeply wrong but this didn’t deter him. He was pushing himself into Martin’s role, trying to override Martin, constantly trying to bully him and generally making his working life hell by making doing his job so difficult.
    So many evenings, after he got home, I would hear Martin’s complaints about how again Hamish had made his working life so taxing and how Hamish just refused to listen to complaints about his own behaviour and wouldn’t agree to any suggestions that weren’t his own. He was making Martin’s working life unbearable and there was nothing I could do about it. I felt so useless because I couldn’t help Martin, except by listening to how Hamish screwed-up his working day.
    Then the idea came to me, I could use my writing to get some revenge on Hamish for Martin.
    I was writing a story was about a man who was being homophobically bullied by a work colleague, and I decided to call the work colleague Hamish. The man breaks one evening and ends up killing Hamish in a very bloody attack. From there the plot twists as the man reacts to his crime. My interest in the story was writing about perceptions and how easily we believe anyone can be keeping a secret, even if it goes completely against what we know about a person. When Martin read the story, he took gleeful pleasure in Hamish’s murder. It was so nice to see his stress eased, if only for a short time, by something I had rewritten.
    (Hamish left for a “better” job soon after, though he had no idea what I had written. The story remains unpublished but it is on my list to be revised for a planned collection.)
    To want revenge, especially when we have received unjust or prejudicial treatment, is a very natural human response, but it is never satisfying. Whatever that other person has done to us, we can never make them suffer the way they made us suffer, most of the time they are not even aware of how much suffering they caused; often it us who are hurt as we are eaten up with the injustice done us and the desire for revenge.
    I spent so much time, too much time, plotting how I could get my own back on those who had hurt me when I was a teenager, the homophobes who hurt and rejected me. All it did was eat me up with anger and bitterness, I wasn’t even able to put into context what had happened to me.
    Then I wrote a story based on a very traumatic event from when I was a teenager. Writing it I found I was able to take a step backwards and look at what really happened, how I came to put myself in such a position, that it wasn’t my fault, and to begin to understand why those people had behaved so appallingly. Rereading that story now, I see that it is overwritten, with far too much unnecessary backstory, too long and too slowly paced. It will never see the light of day. I was just learning how to write then, but it did show me the power of writing, how writing could open my eyes to why something happened.
    That short story also had another big flaw, it was easy to identify who the characters were based on. I’ve since learnt there is no need for anyone else to be able to identify who a character is based on; I actually do not want readers to stand any chance to. So now I take all steps to prevent this (see my blog about writing about real people).
    Writing fiction about things that make me angry or events that have caused me pain has become very liberating. Doing so, I have to look at a situation, what caused it, what led to it, the effects it caused; I have to analyse the entire situation. This can give me insight and understanding, it is amazing how the negativity of a situation is diminished by understanding it. I do the same thing with attitudes and beliefs that I don’t agree with and that make me angry. Understanding an attitude doesn’t mean that I will agree with it, but it does mean I can understand where it comes from and the harm it does. Writing against it I can explore the human effects of it.
    I have a relative who has very conversative and Evangelical Christian views. Her views are very black and white, no shades of grey, and very simplistic. She bluntly doesn’t engage with any challenges to her views. She is also someone I have known most of my life and, as such, I have been able to study why and who she is. She has given me so much opportunity and understanding of why someone would hold her views. Her attitudes have appeared so often in my writing, giving me the opportunity to explore them and the harm they cause.
    Saying all that, this approach isn’t easy and I do not always get it right.
    Years ago, and several jobs ago, I was subjected to a rant by an Evangelical Christian colleague. She objected to the Equality Bill, claiming wrongly that it would give LGBT people more protection than Christians and that Christians would be persecuted under it. She claimed that Christians were the most persecuted minority in the country (not true). When I tried to reply to her, she bluntly refused to let me speak, refusing to listen to any view that didn’t match her own. I was so angry at her. Through my anger I began to wonder why someone would take such a blinkered and untrue view and the harm such views were doing. The result of this, after much thought, was the short story “Easter Witness”, which was published in my collection Case Studies in Modern Life. I am very happy with this story because I was able to show the negative effects of those views as well as punching holes in that argument.
    But I don’t always get it right, especially if I write too quickly about it.
    During the Marriage Equality debate here in Britain, there were a lot of untruths and downright lies told about what would happen if same-sex couples could legally marry (all of which have not come to pass). I was so angry that I wrote the short story “To the Heart of Marriage”. Unfortunately, I wrote it too quickly and I was too angry when I wrote it. Its arguments are simplistic and it tells the reader what’s wrong, not showing the effects of these negative untruths. It failed. Revenge does need to be written with a cool mind.
    But also there shouldn’t be a wish fulfilment element to this, we shouldn’t be using fiction to rewrite history so that we win, so we come out on top, to enact the revenge we were never able to do in real life, because that is so hollow and untrue, and what service are we doing to our readers?
    Many years ago, I was a member of a gay men’s writing group. One of the members was writing a novel in which he rewrote his unhappy and repressed childhood. His novel made him, as a young teenager, the winner and always coming out on top of his family’s fights and wars. He had created a thirteen-year-old boy who had the debating and arguing skills of a thirty or forty-year-old man; this child was impossibly wise for his years. That novel made me feel uncomfortable because it was so untrue but he, the writer, couldn’t see that. He was actually taking deep pleasure from it. I realised the discomfort I felt was the discomfort a reader would feel and that it would make a reader stop reading. My fiction has to be honest about human emotions and reactions, otherwise how can I ever hope to hold a reader’s interest? After all, they are the ones giving me their time to read my writing.
    Art is the best revenge but only if it’s done honestly, not to settle old scores but to explore the events.
    Happy reading
    Drew
     
    (*) Not his real name.
     
     

  6. Drew Payne

    The View from This Window

    By Drew Payne,


    Writing
    My writing desk sits under the window in our front bedroom, though we have rarely used the room as such, and it gives me a clear view of the strip of grass on the opposite side of the road. It is that writers’ activity, doing anything else but write, and mine is staring out of that window and watching life pass by on that strip of grass. Whenever I do it, I stop myself, tell myself I should be writing, and turn away from the window, but so often some fascinating tableau out there will catch my attention.
    We live in a Victorian back-to-back terraced house in East London. It was the type of house originally built for factory and dock workers. Its layout is simple, almost identical to all the other ones that once filled this area. It was built with two rooms downstairs, two rooms upstairs and a tiny courtyard at the back, which backs directly onto the courtyard of the house behind us. It’s small but we love it, it’s our home. Our bedroom is the bedroom at the back of the house while the front bedroom has become our spare room/store room/laundry room/my home office; it’s rather cramped but it is amazing to have a place where I can go and write.
    There isn’t a matching row of terraced houses on the opposite side of the street to our house, instead there is a long and narrow strip of green grass, a public green space, where the opposite row of houses once stood. Our area of London was heavily bombed during the Second World War, and the opposite row of houses was a casualty of that bombing. After the war, this strip of bombed houses was turned into a green space, rather than just building on it again. It is so pleasant having this green space right on our doorstep, even though there was a tragedy behind its creation.
    This grass was always the territory of two crows, which I named Ronnie and Reggie because they always strutted across the grass as if this was their very manor and would chase away any other birds who dared to land there. They would happily chase away the starlings and pigeons who tried to encroach on their territory, though they were always wary of the seagulls. That was before the Covid lockdown. During the first lockdown, the number of crows multiplied by almost tenfold. There is now a murder of crows that can number twenty or even thirty some mornings, marching across the strip of grass, and they show such little fear of us human residents. One day, returning home from the supermarket, I found two crows sitting on the roof of our car, parked outside our house. They were angrily ripping apart a piece of bread. As I approached the car, one of them hopped away, but the other one remained standing in the centre of the car’s roof, staring angrily at me. It didn’t move as I passed within feet of it. Maybe our street has become their manor.
    Many joggers run around the strip of grass as part of their exercise. Some are dressed in the latest running clothes with the latest technology to aid them, their smartphones attached to their forearms by a dedicated strap-on pocket, their fit-bit or smartwatch on their wrist measuring every step they take. Or else they are dressed in old T-shirts and mismatched jogging bottoms. There are joggers who start their run with elaborate stretches and twists and joggers who just go straight into their slow and purposeful runs. The most memorable jogger is the jogger who has been there as long as we have been living here. She is now a woman in her late sixties or early seventies and every Monday to Friday, at seven o’clock in the morning, she runs around that strip of grass. She always wears the same tracksuit of black leggings and a DayGlo top, which is currently bright yellow. She always runs in the same way, short and fast-paced steps with her arms raised up against her chest. She will run around the grass three or four times before running off to the newsagents for her daily newspaper. She then walks home, with a long and flowing stride, the opposite of the way she runs. She’s a very lithe and sprightly woman, so her jogging has served her well.
    The dog walkers also exercise their pets on the strip of grass. Some energetically exercise their dogs there, running with the excited dog, throwing a ball for it, chasing it around. Some dog walkers bring their children too, leaving them to do the running around with the dog while they stand on the side and wait for all that energy to be spent. Other dog walkers have their dogs on a retractable lead, where they can stand and let the dog run off by itself until it needs to be pulled back. There is one dog walker who has always grabbed my attention; he and his dog look so alike. He is a portly middle-aged man and his dog is an equally portly Jack Russell terrier. Almost religiously, they walk around the edge of the strip of grass several times a day. I don’t know whether it was his doctor or the dog’s vet that recommended they get more exercise to lose weight. He always walks right around the grass with no shortcuts; his dog always follows behind him, but it always cuts off the corners, taking a diagonal shortcut across them.
    On a weekday morning there is the rush of mothers taking their children to school. Those mothers hurriedly rush their reluctant children along, their children trying to stretch out to the maximum the time they aren’t in school. Those mothers are much more interested in talking to their friends as their children hurry on ahead of them. At three-thirty the flow is in reverse, but this time it is teenage boys in their black blazers and matching school ties from the boys’ school on the opposite side of the main road that cuts this area in two. Though they may all be dressed in their neat and dark school uniforms, they still behave like teenage boys. They walk in groups, physically jostling one another, that one-upmanship between boys. They kick a football between them, shout excitedly at one another when they are walking next to each other, eating chips from the cheap fried chicken shop on the corner of the next street. Both of these different rushes of school children are over in barely half an hour each time, over and gone in a quick rush.
    Throughout the day, people walk past this strip of grass. People walking to work, people returning home with their bags of shopping, people talking on their phones as they walk, children playing haphazard games on the grass. In the summer, people actually sit on the grass having picnic lunches, though these lunches are far more often chicken and chips from the chicken shop than picnic lunches bought from the local supermarket, though some people do this. And one day there was a young woman recording a video. I noticed her walking around the grass, holding her phone in front of her face and talking in an animated style into it, her right arm gesturing to illustrate what she was saying. At first, I assumed she was making a video call, face-timing someone, but then she walked past for the third time and I realised she was performing the same hand gestures. She was recording herself. Somewhere on the internet is her video, with our street as her background.
    On overcast, winter mornings fog can cling to the grass. Some mornings it can be so thick I cannot see the blocks of flats behind the grass. Some mornings it can be just a fine layer, a foot or so deep, just clinging to the grass like a haunted fog from a gothic horror film from the nineteen sixties. And this fog will disappear with the full rays of the sun. And then other mornings the grass will be frozen white by the early morning frost.
    So many of the images and people I see out of that window bleed into my writing. They are not so much inspiration for me, but some things I use to add colour to my writing. If I want to describe a minor character or a passing tableau then often I will use something I have seen out of this window. So much of my life bleeds into my writing. In this coming year I’ll be sitting in front of that window a lot, I have so much I want to write about.
    Happy reading.
    Drew 
     
     

  7. Drew Payne
    She was smart, tart
    Dry as a martini—
    Ah, but underneath…
    She was all heart
    Something by Puccini—
    Ah, but underneath...
    Ah, But Underneath, Follies - Original London Cast, Stephen Sondheim
     
    Julia McKenzie, dressed in a white silk dress, walked slowly to the centre of the stage, dry-ice swirling around her feet, and picked out by a single spotlight. Then she stopped, looked off into the middle distance, and began to sing “Losing My Mind”. She stopped the show.
    It was 1987 and I was sitting in the audience at the Shaftsbury Theatre, London, watching Follies, my first West End musical. I had heard so much about this musical, about the A-list cast taking to the stage in it, I had already bought myself the cast recording of it before seeing it. “Losing My Mind” was a torch-song about unrequited love, but listening to that album I had no idea of the power of that song. Sitting there in the theatre, that song hit me face-on, and it stopped the show. I could feel other people around me reacting in the same way.
    Now, Julia McKenzie is a very fine actor, with a wonderful singing voice, but it wasn’t just her performance of that song, it was her performance that whole evening. We had seen how her character was deluding herself, chasing after a lost love from twenty years before and denying the problems in her marriage. When we reached the part of the musical where she sang “Losing My Mind” near the end of the second act, we knew this woman and we felt so sorry for her; we were swept up in the real nature of the song because we were hearing it in context.
    My mother always loved musicals but she loved the big, Hollywood, romantic musicals. The musicals where the action would stop for its great love songs and it always had a happy ending where the star-crossed lovers found happiness together. I hate those musicals, especially the unrealistic nature of them where the action stops for another song. Growing up, I was sure I didn’t like musicals; well, I didn’t like the ones I had been exposed to.
    As a teenager I discovered the television show The South Bank Show. This was a weekly arts show, broadcast on a Sunday night. Unlike most arts shows then, it wasn’t a magazine show, filled with short segments about different and often unrelated subjects; The Show Bank Show would dedicate the whole show to one subject, one writer, one artist, one film, or one play. One Sunday night in 1980, it was about the musical Sweeney Todd, which was soon to premier in London. I watched it in amazement. The musical was about multiple murders and cannibalism, not your usual musical fare. (It was based on the London legend of Sweeney Todd, the barber who slit the throats of his customers, and his sidekick Mrs Lovett, who cut up those bodies and cooked them into meat pies.) But it was more than just a musical horror story; the songs examined the nature of revenge and the destruction of a man’s mental health. I was fascinated and I’d discovered my first musical hero, Stephen Sondheim.
    Three years later, a touring production of Sweeney Todd came to Manchester; I was still living with my parents in Liverpool. I persuaded my parents to take me to a matinee performance. I was a teenager and learning how to “persuade” my parents to let me do what I wanted to do. It was a musical and that was enough to appeal to my mother, and my father went along with it because my mother wanted to. My mother, though, after the curtain rose and the songs began, rapidly disapproved of it, and she could disapprove with a force like thunder. The last song of the first act is called “A Little Priest” and is a comic song about cannibalism. My mother was audibly huffling throughout it. During the interval, my mother announced, “Tommy, this isn’t what I call a musical!”
    My father replied, “But it’s very interesting, dear, and those actors are taking good parts.” We stayed for the second act.
    The atmosphere in the car on our journey home that day was tense. My mother silently oozed disapproval; it had not been her idea of an afternoon spent at the theatre, especially as the second act seemed drenched in murder and madness. I sat in the car’s backseat silently because I had been swept away by what I had seen. It had been a fast-paced plot with a cast of not-so-lovable characters, but it had also discussed some big themes like the nature of revenge, how destructive it can be, and how it doesn’t give you justice or peace. This was what drama could be about.
    I had to wait until I’d left home and moved to London to see my next Sondheim musical, Follies. This was a very different musical, about the 1970s reunion of the Follies Girls, showgirls from a 1950s musical extravaganza. This musical was about relationships, nostalgia and how we can fool ourselves with both, plus it didn’t have a neatly happy ending. It showed me how fantasy can be used so effectively in drama, where the characters can step forward and tell the audience what their problems are, in this case with four very different and very original Follies numbers. “Losing My Mind” is one of these numbers.
    Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to see theatrical productions of all his musicals; some have been memorably good, some have been easily forgotten. Sondheim’s musicals do demand so much from actors and production, they are not easily staged in a room above a pub with mediocre actors. Living in London, I have been fortunate to have been able to see some amazing theatrical productions, and so many of them have been Sondheim’s musicals.
    What Sondheim’s musicals do, which I found revolutionary when I first saw them, is that his songs still carry the plot forward. In one of his musicals, the plot does not stop for a song; instead the songs are so important to the plot, moving characters and plot forward. His lyrics also capture the characters’ speech patterns; you can hear their dialog in the lyrics of the songs they sing. The meaning of the emotions in his songs deepens when you hear them in context, when you have spent an evening with the characters who are singing them, when you know who they are and why they are singing that song.
    Sondheim’s most famous song is “Send in the Clowns”. It is always sung as a romantic song, a love song, but in the musical it is something very different. In A Little Night Music, it is sung by the character Desiree who has spent the musical chasing after Fredrik, an old lover who she thinks will make the perfect husband and father for her teenage daughter. In the second act, she finally gets Fredrik alone in her boudoir and he tells her he really loves his wife. She sings “Send in the Clowns” as her reply. The song is an “oh shit” song. She has finally got Fredrik where she wants him, but he doesn’t want her and she realises she really doesn’t want him. It is such a human and awkward moment, but you do not get that if you only hear the song out of context.
    It was a great joy introducing Martin, my husband, to Sondheim’s musicals. I had worried at first that he wouldn’t like them, that he would see them just as camp froth, as so many people claim them are. Fortunately, he saw in them what I do, he too enjoys the plots and characters that are carried along by Sondheim’s sharply lyrical songs, what he also enjoys are their plots. None of Sondheim’s musicals could be described as having “conventional” plots, no two of his musicals even have similar plots, but they always have fascinating plots, even if the plot does not hit the mark, like in Anyone Can Whistle.
    When I first moved to London, the first gay men I met happily told me that Sondheim was gay, he was one of us. At first it was reassuring; such a genius like Sondheim was also gay. I found comfort in those famous and intelligent and creative men who were also gay. Later, I came to realise, as I read more about Sondheim and his life, that him being gay was one part of the outsider that he was and that his outsider-ness, not being at the heart of any of the societies he belonged to, made him such a talented composer and songwriter. He was looking in from the sidelines, not celebrating from the centre, and so could comment on all he saw, good and bad. I have found that in myself, so much of my writing is me looking in at something I didn’t fully belong to.
    On the 26th November 2021, Stephen Sondheim died. He was at home with his husband when he did.
    He has been called a titan of musical theatre and he certainly did reinvent the musical form. But I fear that we won’t get another Sondheim. He made his songs an integral part of the musical’s plot, but musicals have changed so much in the last thirty years. They now cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to stage and MUST be a hit. So we get lots of revivals and jukebox musicals, musicals based on the back catalogue of a famous singer or group or musicals based on famous eighties blockbuster films, which use eighties pop hits as their songs. Musicals with a big and ready audience before they even open, musicals that guarantee a happy ending. Unfortunately, I do not see any space for new composers and songwriters who are trying to do something different, like Sondheim. But there is always fringe theatre.
    With his death, I have lost the hope that maybe there could be a new Sondheim musical somewhere in the pipeline. He was not the most prolific of composers but always produced quality over quantity.
    I do have the hope of more productions of his work. In 2017, the National Theatre staged a production of Follies. They got every element of it right; the casting, staging, orchestration and direction were so right that they generated a perfect production and we got to see it. It is a memory I will happily never forget.
    Drew 

  8. Drew Payne

    Based on Real People

    By Drew Payne,


    Writing
    “I gave you good script,” Ma to Alan
    Cocktail Sticks, a play by Alan Bennett
     
    The writer Alan Bennett has been very open about how much he is inspired by real-life events. He has written plays and film scripts all inspired by real-life events; he has written several volumes of autobiographical essays, and every year or so he publishes extracts from his diary. I’ve seen and read all of them and enjoyed them so much. In his autobiographical play Cocktail Sticks, about his relationship with his parents, the character of Ma (based on his mother) says, “I gave you good script,” meaning he has used so many of the actual things she said in his writing.
    I cannot class myself in the same writing league as Alan Bennett, but I take so much inspiration from real-life events. That inspiration seems to fall into three different types.
    The first is when I want to write about events or attitudes that have made me angry or upset. This is when I use fiction to explore how I feel about a subject or when I want to write about attitudes in order to expose the negative/destructive nature of them. My short story I Always Knew is an example of this. It was the height of the Jimmy Savile scandal and I heard an elderly journalist on the radio saying that he’d always known about Savile’s crimes. My anger led me to explore that attitude, those people who are always “wise” after a tragedy, in this story.
    Secondly, I can find inspiration in news headlines and real events. Sometimes it a headline and a short news item that inspires my imagination. I don’t do anymore research, instead I let my imagination dwell on those sparse descriptions or even single event and then I fill out the events and with characters I’ve created. Without researching the events any further I can make sure I am not using the people and their tragedy for my own fiction, that my story is a complete work of fiction. A Family Christmas is an example of me using this type of inspiration. There was a mass shooting in America, on Christmas Eve, the year before I wrote this story. I learnt no more about that tragedy but my imagination filled in the blanks and I created a story that explored a theme that leapt out at me from this tragedy.
    I don’t always search out stories of death and tragedy, all kinds of things in the media can set my imagination off running. I read an interview with the actor Russell Tovey where he said a throwaway comment, but that comment set my imagination off. The result was the story That One Big Role.
    I have also been researching historical events for a series of stories. These take a lot more research and less of my imagination filling in the blanks, though some of that is still needed. With these stories I want to examine a historical event from a fictional character’s point of view, find the human story inside the facts. These stories do take a lot of work, but I don’t want to stop writing them, the research is fascinating. The Trial of the Century is the first one in this style I wrote.
    Thirdly, I find inspiration from my own life. It can either be just one small factor that I then spin off into a whole story, or else it can form a larger part of a story, or else I fictionalise something that happened to me as a way to explore what and why that thing happened.
    Boxing Day 1975 is a short story of mine that was inspired by one event from my life. When I was a young child, on Boxing Day, together with my family I watched the big film on television that evening, One Million Years BC. That was the only part I took into the story, it is certainly not based on my own family but I do vividly remember how my family all sat down together to watch the same television film.
    I met my first boyfriend in 1987 but our relationship did not last. Our break-up was different, difficult and not that conventional. I used that break-up scene, almost word-for-word from real life, as the opening scene of my story Out of the Valley. I used this story to explore obsessive love and not being able to let go of an ex-lover, none of which was my reaction to the end of that relationship, though this story did go through many rewrites over the years with the wish-fulfilment ending being quickly dropped.
    Then there are those real-life encounters that play on my mind and imagination and form the bases of some of my stories. Jonathan Roven Is Lost (a story in my collection Case Studies in Modern Life) is a story that started off in that way. Through my job, I saw the effect dementia has on the partners of those people with it. My blog here gives a much fuller picture of how that story was created.
    For me, there isn’t just one way that I find inspiration, but I guess that is the same for so for many writers, but using inspiration and facts from real life is very important to me, I want my stories to have that taste of authenticity.
    I don’t use overheard dialog in my writing, like many writers do, because the few times I’ve heard anything decent I’ve forgotten the actual words by the time I get home. But I do use real people in my writing or people’s attitudes and beliefs. I don’t use direct copies of people; I don’t feel comfortable if readers can easily identify the person who was the inspiration for a character. So often I combine different things from different people—the attitude from one person, the clothes style from another and the physical appearance from another. But what really fascinates me are people’s attitudes and beliefs and how they affect their lives and how people’s personalities react in different situations.
    For me, I find inspiration in so many different ways, so many different things can spark and inspire my imagination, but in the end it is my imagination that forms the story from whatever the inspiration is, though I always work to create authenticity in my fiction. I hope my stories bear that out.
     
    I do remember one of the classic things my mother said, though I have never found the right story to use it in.
    I was in my early teens and had just come home from school one afternoon and my mother was unpacking her shopping.
    “I won’t buy anymore lemonade, all you lot ever do is drink it,” my mother said.
    “What should we do with it, wash in it?” I said.
    “You know what I mean,” she told me. And I did.
     
    Happy reading
    Drew

  9. Drew Payne

    Waiting for the Postman

    By Drew Payne,


    My Story
    It was a love affair, carried out by letters and parcels, though the love was all on my side. I would wait, with both excitement and anticipation, for each new delivery, some of which would take weeks to arrive.
    Aged eighteen, in suburban Liverpool, in the early 1980s, I had little chance of finding any queer literature. The big chain bookshops in the city centre only sold bestsellers and mainstream books. The independent bookshops sold the same bestsellers and sentimental books on local history. I was starved for any gay literature; I was desperate for anything that reflected my sexuality, which showed me how gay life was lived. I would search the Central Library, Liverpool’s large city centre library, for any books with gay content, even if they were just minor characters or slight themes. I read so many offensive and homophobic books in that search.
    Almost by accident I fell upon a copy of Gay Times magazine, it was tucked away amongst the top shelf porn magazines in a rundown newsagent up near Liverpool’s two cathedrals. Almost with a nervous twitch, I bought it. It was only when I got it home and I was safely on my own that I started reading it.
    What leapt out at me, amongst all the other things within its pages, was a mail order service from the Gay’s The Word bookshop in London. They offered only gay books, several of which were mentioned elsewhere in the magazine.
    With excitement, I filled out the order form, choosing two novels, writing a cheque to pay for them, sealing it all up in an envelope and posting it off. Then I waited. Nearly two weeks later, my parcel arrived, wrapped in plain paper, and inside were my two new novels. With glee I started to read both of them right away, ignoring all the other books I’d been reading.
    Soon this became my routine, each month I would send off my order and wait for my parcel of books to arrive. The anticipation of waiting for those books was sometimes greater than the thrill of receiving them, but I was always excited when my parcel arrived.
    At first, I ordered gay romantic novels, stories where handsome men would meet and fall in love, eventually living happily ever after. They were fantasies, but I wanted that fantasy. I was deeply closeted, living in a strongly homophobic environment, and those romantic novels held the hope that one day I could find a lover and live happily ever after. I lapped them up, even with their poor plots and stereotyped characters.
    As the months passed by, though, my tastes began to expand. Gay’s The Word made book recommendations and Gay Times had its own book review section. I started to read contemporary gay novels, discovered the crime novels of Joseph Hanson (his portrait of California was so different from that of Hollywood), novels of gay life in 1980s England, and many coming out stories.
    I also began to read non-fiction books, I started with self-help books on how to be a Happy Homosexual but I soon moved away from them because of their very simplistic views. Quickly I moved on to biographies and historical studies of gay life. What did it mean to be gay in Victorian London? What was the Gay Liberation Front? Was there a gay scene before 1960? I read all those books with a voracious appetite. This was a world that had been hidden away from me.
    As those books kept arriving for me, I began to wonder where they were coming from. What did the Gay’s The Word bookshop look like? It must have been a huge bookshop judging by the variety of stock they carried. I imagined that it stretched over several floors of a big, brightly light book superstore; all smooth, laminated bookshelves, polished floors and assistants who all wore name badges telling the world who they were. I imagined it was a great palace of gay literature, where I could simply lose myself in the pleasure of buying a book.
    At nineteen, I began to explore the tiny gay scene that Liverpool had to offer back then. Even as I did this, I still relied on those parcels of books from Gay’s The Word. Those books were still such a large part of my life. They were my main entertainment, but they also offered me information and consoled me when my adventures in gay life flat-lined.
    At twenty-one, I finally moved to London. Ever since I’d started receiving my parcels of books, it had been my dream to move to London and finally throw myself one hundred percent into gay life. That dream had been created and fuelled by the books I’d read, so many of them had portrayed London as the centre of gay life in Britain, the San Francisco of British gay culture.
    The reality of London both lived up to my dream but also disappointed me; so many things were different from what I’d imagined them to be. But London was also where Gay’s The Word had their bookshop, in the heart of Bloomsbury. Even its location sounded literary.
    I didn’t rush to Gay’s The Word the moment I arrived in London; I didn’t have the opportunity. It was a month later that I was actually able to visit the shop.
    One Saturday lunchtime, I took a tube train to Russell Square and walked the short distance from there to Gay’s The Word. When I found the shop, on a street made up of Victorian buildings with a large 1970s block of flats dominating one end of it, I was shocked at what I saw. I wasn’t mistaken, this was the right shop, its name was clearly on display above the plate glass window that covered its tiny frontage, but it was so small. It was tiny. It was as small as so many of the shops squeezed onto many of London’s streets. It was no bigger than the newsagent where I bought my morning newspaper.
    It wasn’t the huge gay book superstore I’d imagined it to be. It was a tiny, dusty London bookshop, like so many others across the city. It wasn’t the glorious palace I’d imagined it to be. It was another of the disappointments I found in London. But this was a gay bookshop and I was running out of reading material, so I went inside.
    Inside, though, was a different world, an Aladdin’s treasure cave of books. Though small, miles of wooden shelves had been squeezed into there, all filled to bursting with different books. The mail order service had had a wide range of books, but the shop itself was bursting full of different ones. I’d never have imagined there could be so many different lesbian and gay books in one place, let alone that so many had been published.
    I was so excited, almost too excited to know what to do. So I simply started at one end of the shop and worked my way round to the other end of it, looking at every book I found. I was lost in the most perfect world to me, a world of books.
    Gay’s The Word wasn’t the shiny, laminated bookstore I’d imagined; it was crowded and cramped, with dusty wooden shelves that were overstuffed with books. It was perfect though and I fell in love with it in that first moment I stepped inside. It was full of the widest range of queer books, journals and magazines; I was in heaven.
    On that first visit there I stayed twice as long as I meant to and spent three times as much as I had intended to, but I didn’t care.
    I’ve returned there many times, but how could I not when they love books as much as I do.
     
    (I originally wrote this essay for a proposed anthology of true stories called My First Gay Bookstore. It was accepted, the editor liked my different take on the subject, and I was elated. But all good things… The anthology was never published, everything just went very quiet and I heard nothing.
    But this is still an essay I like; it is a personal story but it is a different telling of a familiar subject. It shows one of the ways I slowly overcame my very isolated teenage years and is about a place that is still very special to me) 
     
    Drew

  10. Drew Payne
    My latest published book is an e-book version of my story Boxing Day 1975. This story is written in the Rashomon style. This is where the same events are told and retold from the prospective of different characters, two or more. My story is about a family watching the Boxing Day film, on television, in 1975. They all have a very different reaction to the film, reflecting the changings times of 1975. The film they are watching is One Million Years BC.
    The style/effect is named after the 1950 Japanese film Rashomon, where a murder is seen from the prospective of four different witnesses who all have a very different view of what happened. It has also been called the Unreliable Witness and has been linked to real-life court trials.
    I’ve never seen Rashomon. I first came across Rashomon style by watching a BBC television play in the early 1980s (unfortunately I cannot remember the name of it). It told the story of a rape from the prospective of a wife who was raped, her husband, who witnessed the rape, and a stranger, who did or did not rape her. The wife blames herself for being raped in front of her husband. The husband is angry that his wife has sex with another man in front of him. The stranger feels used by the husband and wife in a kinky sex game. I feel uncomfortable writing this description even now, it was a very questionable story with some questionable attitudes to rape. But the style of it fascinated me, three different characters with three different views of the same event.
    I tried using this style in my writing. At first, I wrote short dramas where three different characters narrated the same event, sometimes fictional and sometimes real historical events described by fictional characters (Boxing Day 1975 is very much in this style). But over the years I have adapted and developed my own take on the Rashomon style. I have written several stories where characters react to the same event but not at the same time. One character will experience the first part of the story/event, another character (or more than one) will experience the middle part of the story/event, and yet another character will experience the end of it. I will tell a story, moving from one character to the next, each one only seeing their view of the events. I do enjoy writing in this style, I can explore how an event affects different characters and I can show how people often do not have the full picture of what is happening around them.
    Moving Pictures was the first time I used this style, it is set over one evening with each section taking place after the previous one. Each character has such little insight into what the other ones are feeling and doing; they are there in their own little world, unaware of how their actions will affect the other characters.
    Saying all this, Boxing Day 1975 did not start off as a Rashomon style story; I originally wrote it as a flash fiction story that only saw the events from one character’s point of view. A friend read it and suggested that I expand it and include other characters’ points of view. Her advice sharked my imagination and I set about rewriting it. Doing so gave me the chance to explore some other issues too. 1975 was a time that was culturally interesting; things were beginning to change, with the women’s movement, Black rights and gay liberations. But also things were staying very much the same; just watch some television from then to see how patriarchal, sexist, racist and homophobic society was.
    My own memories of watching One Million Years BC are still very vivid. It was the big blockbuster film on television that Boxing Day night. My mother, my father, my sister and I sat together in our sitting room to watch it on our colour television, while our dog slept in front of the fire unnoticed. During the film my father and sister argued about whether humans and dinosaurs lived on the earth at the same time; I was puzzled by there being no dialogue, just a lot of grunting, and at the end of it my mother announced, “That was rubbish.” She was right.
    Happy reading
    Drew 

  11. Drew Payne
    The first time I saw it she was visiting me and took out her purse to pay for a purchase. There it was, inside her purse, a picture of me. An old and unflattering picture of me. It was a passport photograph, taken years ago. My hair was in a style I’d not had for years, short and flat. I was staring fixedly into the camera, no smile on my face, the harsh light making my skin seem pale and unhealthy. I wondered why she had chosen that one, but I said nothing. It wasn’t an easy question to ask.
    I have many pictures of her. Ones from her youth, as a bright and happy young woman, her hair short and dark, dressed in pale or white summer dresses with wide belts and full skirts. Pictures of her in motherhood, her clothes changing over the years, showing her own slow change in tastes. Pictures of her taken only in the last few years, her as the rosy-cheeked, white-haired grandmother that she grew into. (I have no pictures of her at the end, a tired and ill old woman, but I don’t want to remember her like that.)
    I didn't keep any pictures in my wallet. Even if I did they would become lost in the chaos of paper, cards, loose coins and my different IDs and all the other things tucked away in there. For me pictures are placed in frames and hung on walls so that everyone can see them, enjoyed at a glance. That’s what I did with my favorite pictures of her. Not hidden away in the dark and clutter of my wallet. (I have heard people say that they carry pictures of their loved ones, their partners or children, with them so they can see them whenever they want to. I carry around my memories of her with me, as bright as any photographs.)
    I always wondered why she chose a picture of me to carry around. I am not her only child; I have an older brother and sister. Maybe that was the reason. I was her youngest child, the last one to leave the nest. After I had gone she was no longer a mother, the role she had had for over forty years. Maybe there is a special bond between a mother and her youngest child, I don’t know, and if there ever was I am ashamed to admit I never noticed. Why that picture, of all the ones she had of me, such a harsh and unemotional one, to carry with her? (It is too late now to ask these questions.)
    At the end, as she lay there in that bed being cared for by nurses who it had only taken her a few days to grow close to, I was unable to ask any but the simplest of questions. I had thought, at the end, I would be able to ask her all those questions I had been yearning to know the answers to, ones over which I had puzzled and wondered for years, not least about that picture. When the time came, all I could ask were the basic questions, "Are you comfortable?" and "Is there anything you want?" The profound forgotten and replaced by the important.
    As a child I had questioned and questioned her, why this and how that, almost challenging everything she said. As an adolescent I had distanced myself from her and her rules as I was fighting to be myself, whatever that meant. What did she know? Only as an adult, when I had become a professional in my own right, we were finally able to reach an understanding and peace with each other. I was still her son but now we could talk as equals. At the end I was the one she requested of, the one she asked to look after her husband, my father.
    After it was all ended, the funeral and cremation and final spreading of her ashes, did someone find found that picture of me? As my sister-in-law and my sister were clearing out her handbag, the final act of tidying a life away, tidying away her now unneeded things, did they find her purse? As they emptied it did they find that picture of me and what did they make of it? These questions are unimportant; I will forget them and never seek an answer. Instead, I will hold on to those memories I have of her, memories that live outside of pictures.
     
    For Joan Margaret Payne
    12/1/30 to 2/5/01
     
    (I originally wrote this in the week between my mother’s death and her funeral. It was my way of working out how I was feeling. I have rewritten it in the subsequent years, but the emotions here still remained intact.) 

  12. Drew Payne
    Jonathan Roven is Lost is a story I am proud of. It concerns a subject that I have rarely seen written about, namely how a gay couple manages when one of them develops Alzheimer’s Disease. I’m also proud of the journey this story has taken.
    Originally, it was just 900 words long, with a different ending. It was written as a flash fiction story (stories under 1,000-words long) to a prompt of Losing Your Lover. So often do I find a left-field response to subjects. It was first published on the Gay Flash Fiction website. Unfortunately, it has been deleted from that site since then, but other stories of mine are still available there. The original version can be found here. As always, I had that rush of excitement whenever I have something published, the excitement of knowing I am communicating with people I’ll never meet. Then something strange happened.
    The site’s editor emailed me because he had received a complaint. An American lawyer, called Jonathan Roven, had demanded that my story be taken down or changed. It seemed the real-life Jonathan Roven didn’t like having a fictional character named after him or sharing his name, or he didn’t like my character called Jonathan Roven, or all three.
    The editor wasn’t happy; he argued that there are probably lots of real-life Mr Darcys out there, and they aren’t writing to Jane Austen’s estate, demanding her character’s name is changed.
    I did a Google search on fictional characters with real people’s names, and I also looked up Jonathan Roven. The first page of links was all to the same American lawyer, except for a link to my story, which was surprising and interesting.
    My other Google search returned some interesting results. I’ve included the links below. Under American law, it seems, calling a fictional character by the same name as a real person alone is not libel. Jonathan Roven would have had to prove that the fictional character was based on him, with more similarities than just names, and that the fictional character had harmed his character and/or reputation. In my story, the fictional character is a 60-year-old gay man with Alzheimer’s Disease; I don’t even name his profession. Also, in America, winning a libel case where you say a fictional character libelled you seems to be very difficult. Now, I’m a nurse and not a lawyer, and this is just what I learnt from an online search.
    When I first created the character, he was to have been called Jonathan Raven, but I made a typo and called him Jonathan Roven, which I liked the sound of, so it stayed. I’m British, and the Gay Flash Fiction website isn’t run for profit; it’s much more a labour of love. Neither of us could afford to fight a court case, so we quickly agreed to change the title character’s name. Therefore, we changed it to Jonathan Raven is Lost, well in the version on the Gay Flash Fiction website anyway.
    But it left a sour taste in my mouth and created an unpleasant memory. What had so upset the man that he wanted my story changed or removed? Was it because the character who shared his name was gay and/or had Alzheimer’s Disease (and I’m not sure which one it would be), or was it because he’d lost the top billing of having all his results on the first page of a Google search?
    I’ve since posted the original version of the story, under its original title, on my old blog and on the GA website, where it can still be read, and I’ve heard nothing from the real Jonathan Roven. In these locations, I have no intention of changing the title or the story or the character’s name.
    When I was selecting stories for my published collection Case Studies in Modern Life, I naturally chose Jonathan Roven is Lost. It is such a good example of my writing, but it is also about a subject I feel strongly about. Many of the patients I nurse in my job have Alzheimer’s Disease, and I have seen what it does to lives and relationships. Like many of the stories in this collection, I workshopped it at my Writer’s Group. I received amazing feedback, and people advised me to open the story up because there was more to tell. I returned to it and started to re-shape it.
    The rewrites took the story from 800 to 11,000-words long, and as I rewrote it, so much more of the story came out. I introduced new characters; the narrator’s best friend, their neighbour, Jonathan’s sister, and his social worker, plus a nurse called Lilly. So much of the plot expanded, and I found there was so much more to tell. Other writers talk about stories and characters taking on “a life of their own”. I’ve never really experienced that. I’m a great planner of stories, and I always know where my stories are going. As I re-wrote this story, I found myself thinking about it more and more, planning it out in my mind. I found there was so much more to write, so much more of these characters’ stories to tell.
    I am also proud that I was able to write a story about Alzheimer’s Disease from an original perspective and also realistically look at how to manage if your partner does develop it. This story isn’t a road map for how to manage life with a partner with Alzheimer’s Disease, but it does provide advice from my experience.
    I also have Steve, one of the other members of my writer’s group, Newham Writers Workshop, to thank for his suggestion about a change to the story’s ending. His suggestion created a much more poignant ending to the story, highlighting the emotional cost Jonathan Roven’s Alzheimer’s Disease has taken on his partner.
    This story was originally written as a flash fiction story about losing a lover but in an unusual way. Since then, it has grown into much more. It is now about two men’s tragic journey and is very typical of the subjects I write about.
    The inspiration for this story occurred back in the late 1990s. I was working in my first District Nursing job and looking after an elderly couple. She had severe dementia, and he was her main carer, but he was also her second husband. Due to her dementia, she had forgotten his name and called him by the name of her first husband. The pain on his face every time she did this was heart breaking. I have never forgotten his expression, though he carried on caring for her.
    Happy reading.
    Drew
     
    When Fiction & Reality Collide
    Could I Be Liable for Libel in Fiction?
    “Libel in general is when somebody claims that a statement of fact made about him or her harmed his or his character”
    Law & Order' Faces Libel Suit
    A Writer's Guide to Defamation and Invasion of Privacy
    Defamation in Fiction—What’s in a Name?
     

  13. Drew Payne

    Never Write in the Dark

    By Drew Payne,


    Writing
    Writing is a very solitary activity; we sit there on our own, writing away on our computer or laptop, or even doing it “old school” via paper and pen, pouring out our stories and preserving our characters there in the written word. But how do we know that what we are writing is any good?
    We can ask our family and loved ones, but will they give us the feedback we need? They are our loved ones and so often they want the best for us and may not give us the feedback we require, or they may not be able to handle what we are writing about, especially if it doesn’t fit their image of us. As a teenager I wrote poetry, like so many teenagers. I wrote a poem about loneliness. It was bitter, angry and dark. “Nothing kills you faster than loneliness,” was its last line. My mother read the poem and said it was “Nice.”
    As writers we can get so absorbed in our own writing, get so far into our characters’ heads that we can miss the obvious. We may have failed to introduce our characters, not given them a distinctive enough voice; we may have left huge plot holes; we may have overused one particular word literally. Because we are so close to our writing, we can’t see these mistakes. We also need to know that our writing is readable and engaging, and that cannot always be achieved by rereading on our own. Good and honest feedback will always make our writing better.
    Writers’ groups have provided me with this; they have been a wonderful source of feedback and support. I’ve learnt so much just from meeting with other members.
    The first writers’ group I went to was when I was eighteen. The Old Swan Writers were based in the Old Swan district of Liverpool and it was one long bus ride away from my then home. Those bus rides gave me plenty of time to think and read. But that writers’ group told me and showed me I could write. This group of adults showed me I could create a story and characters, plot it out and write it down on paper. It was an amazing revelation. There I received feedback without any agenda. They weren’t pulling me down because they thought I was getting above myself by wanting to be a writer or else telling me polite things because that was what they thought I wanted to hear, both of which had happened before.
    (Unfortunately, after an extensive Google search, I cannot find any mention of the Old Swan Writers. Like all good things, they seem to have ended)
    When I moved to London, I stopped attending any writers’ group, not because London is short of them but because I led a very gypsy lifestyle in those early years. I changed jobs frequently and I often moved home. I only really started to settle down when I started my nurse training, and that didn’t leave me much time to write anything that wasn’t related to my studies.
    I seriously came back to writing after the millennium, when I started to find many avenues for my writing, not just fiction. It was also when I reconnected with a writers’ group, first online and then later in person.
    I’m now a member of my local writers’ group, Newham Writers Workshop, and they have been so helpful. I’ve had some very helpful feedback on my writing, how my plots and characters are working, how readable my writing is, how my descriptions work, how they paint a picture for the reader. I have also learnt so much about the craft of writing, subjects like “head-hopping”, “filter words”, distance and intimate view points and about using the “unreliable narrator”. I learnt about self-publishing from my writers’ group.
    But giving feedback to other writers has also helped me. We have a policy of always giving feedback that supports the writer in what they want to write. So there is no saying, “I don’t like this,” neither can you just say, “I liked this.” You have to explain why, what makes this a good piece of writing, where the writer could improve it, what does not work but why it does not work. I have also been exposed to some amazing writing there, listening to/reading other writers’ work has opened my eyes to how you can do things differently and stylistically. It has also shown me what my own personal style is; I like to write from a very intimate point of view of my characters, to get under their skin.
    The vast majority of my stories in Case Studies in Modern Life have benefited from the feedback from my writers’ group, in some cases I have completely rewritten them after getting some really thought-provoking feedback.
    My writers’ group has also shown me how inclusive my writing is. The previous two writers’ groups I joined (one online and one in person) were both LGBT groups. I wanted the support of other LGBT writers, it was a safe place and a safe idea, but good things can come to an end and both these groups closed for different reasons. I’m now a member of my local writers’ group and this is an open group. I’m the only openly gay man there and yet that has never been an issue. Now I am writing about gay issues and themes; the other writers there have understood my writing and have seen what I want to write about. It has shown me that my writing has a wide appeal and that is amazing and very reassuring. Newham Writers Workshop has been the last cog, though a very big one, in the machine that encouraged me to publish my collection of stories, and I’m very grateful for this.
    And then there is the social element. After each meeting, when meeting face-to-face, most of us go to a local pub for a drink. Talking with other writers about writing in general, or even life in general, is a breath of fresh air. It takes the solitude out of it all. And I’ve made some good friends there from very different backgrounds. It is nice to get out of my comfort zone.
    I would encourage any writer to join a writers’ group; no matter what your experience or level of writing, you can only benefit from good and honest feedback.
    Drew
     
    Case Studies in Modern Life (On Amazon)
    Case Studies in Modern Life (On Smashwords)

  14. Drew Payne
    Case Studies in Modern Life is my first published book and it has been a long time in writing.
    I have been writing all my adult life. I was eighteen when I discovered I could write stories. At first I was writing sketches for a drama group. It was an amazing feeling turning an idea I had into something written down that worked and then watching actors perform my words. It was also the first time I realised I had an ear for dialogue. I would hear people talking in public and remember how they spoke; later, I would be able to write in the style of their dialogue.
    I also experienced something else. If people enjoyed a sketch, they didn’t call “Author, author!” They really weren’t interested in who wrote it; people usually heaped their praise on the actors, and I liked that too. I could happily hide away in the shadows and carry on watching people and writing about them.
    The first piece of writing I sold was a short monolog to my then local radio station. It was about someone who stole pillows, and only pillows, from stately homes. It was about getting away with the “perfect crime” because no one cared about missing pillows. It was a silly piece but again, when it was broadcast, I could hide away behind the knowledge that the vast majority of people who heard it knew nothing about me.
    The first short story I had published in print was a story about a gay couple spending Christmas apart because one wasn’t out to his family. It wasn’t a happy story; I’d wanted to capture the reality of life for some people. But as I saw my own story in print, with my name attached to it, I had a marvellous feeling. The vast majority of people who read this story had no idea who I was. I could communicate with people and all they knew about me was my name on a magazine page. People read it without any prejudice against who I was. They would like the story, or not, based solely on its content. That felt so good.
    You’ll be sensing a theme by now; I like to hide behind my writing. My writing isn’t about me rehashing my life as fiction, rewriting my life so that I always come out on top, re-writing history so that I am always the winner. My writing is my way of exploring themes and events that fascinate me or make me angry. I want to find the people behind a subject. I don’t want to be the focus of my writing.
    The theme of Case Studies in Modern Life also took a long time to come about. Coming out as gay changed my life in many ways and it certainly gave me something to write about. As I explored my gay life, I found there were so many different things to write about. At first, I wrote wish fulfilment stories. I was in my twenties and wanted the best of all possible worlds. As I grew older and experienced more of life, I saw the ways in which gay men adapt to the challenges of their lives or don’t, and this started to fascinate me. How do gay men maintain relationships with lovers, friends and relatives? How does being gay affect our attitudes to health and illness? How and where do gay men find a place for themselves in this world? After reading some of my stories, a friend of mine suggested that I put together a collection about gay life that didn’t focus on the typical subjects of dating apps and finding a boyfriend. I am so grateful for her advice.
    The stories in this collection cover some of my favourite themes to write about. There are stories about sex, not sex stories about people’s attitude to sex, which I find endlessly fascinating. There are stories about relationships. Not stories about trying to find a boyfriend, but stories about how relationships work or don’t work; the compromises we make inside relationships and that unique moment of joy that I thought we might never see. There are stories about the issues gay men can face in our modern world, some that only gay men face and some that are universal to all people. And there are stories about how health, ill health and a change in health can affect someone’s life, but this is something I have seen first-hand (though all the characters in this collection are fictitious).
    If you read my collection please leave a comment about it, here or even on Amazon, and if you are minded please review it on Amazon. Comments and reviews drive people to my work, as they do for any author.
    Case Studies in Modern Life can be found here on Amazon.co.uk and here on Amazon.com
    Drew
     
     

  15. Drew Payne
    Urban legends are fascinating; they say so much about our society and the stories that it runs on.
     
    Scott Wood certainly loves urban legends. Scott ran the Southeast London Folklore Society, and it shows in this absorbing book. He doesn’t only write about those common urban legends that have been circulating for years—though they have their space here—but he has also dug deep and found some obscure items, including those that were a flash-in-the-pan in years ago. But what lifts this book above all those other volumes that merely list urban legends is that Scott Wood investigates and analyses each one himself, in person. He looks at the history and origins of each legend and how, many times, they were printed as the truth in newspapers. He also questions the sexism of some of the stories and why it is always a woman in peril in them.
    This book also works as an alternative history of London because so many of these legends are rooted in the history of the city. They are intensely wrapped up in the urban life of London, and many of them are unique to London life. 
    Scott Wood’s writing style is very readable; for example, it was perfect reading for my daily commute to and from work on the London Tube. He does not talk down to the reader or try to be over-friendly. His aim is to inform us and discuss the urban legends with his audience.
    The only downside of this book, for me, was that it ended too soon. Scott Wood knows his subject and took a refreshingly cynical look at these urban legends. I can always hope for a sequel.

  16. Drew Payne
    It was no secret that Ruth Rendell also wrote as Barbara Vine. Writing under this pseudonym, she created many gripping psychological thrillers. They are not so much who-did-it as how-they-did-it or why-they-did-it. The House of Stairs is the best example of this.
    The book opens with a chance meeting between the narrator and Bell, a woman she hasn't seen in over twenty years because Bell has been in prison for murder. The story slips back and forth in time between the 1980s, as the women begin to reforge their relationship, and the 1960s when the events that lead to Bell becoming a killer unfold. The setting is London and Vine/Rendell paints such a vivid picture of 1960s Notting Hill that you can almost taste the counterculture and see people dropping out.
    The title comes from the Notting Hill house, owned by the flamboyant and eccentric widow Cosette, around which the 1960s section revolves. It’s a tall, narrow house where it seems every room has someone different in it. The house appears as just as strong a character as any of the people who pass through it.
    The suspense here does not come from wondering who the killer is; we are told almost from the beginning that it is Bell. But rather from the question, “Who is she going to kill?” This also gives the novel a sense of doom as we wait for the inevitable death but don’t know when it is coming or who it will be. The suspense builds as the twists and turns of the complicated relationships between the characters unfold.
    The characters, with all their faults, failings, and needs, are all too human. They are not mere devices to keep the plot flowing; it is the reverse; the plot comes from them, with their human foibles and shortcomings driving it forward. The main Vine/Rendell take on human relationships is present here; all are equally dysfunctional. From the friendship between the two central women that turns into a secret lesbian affair, to the siblings who appear strangely too close, to the older woman and younger man who may or may not have found true love together.
    The tale is dark, sinister, repressed, and doom-laden, but also page-turning. The House of Stairs is one of the best Vine/Rendell creations, and, like the best of her work, it is not only a thriller; it is also a contained novel. It paints a picture of 1960s Notting Hill that feels all too real, especially to someone too young to remember it. At the heart of it is a repressed and secret lesbian affair that drives along so many of the events, but that is also one of the most important relationships in at least one of the women's lives. Some people say Rendell’s view of gay and lesbian relationships was homophobic, but I find that she treated all relationships the same and had a cynical view of all of them.
    For me, I wanted this novel to never end, so involved was I with the characters and their spiralling downward journey, but I also desired to know what was going to happen next, and that pushed me onwards. This is truly a page-turning novel.

  17. Drew Payne
    Its 1964 and the beginning of summer in the English market town of Kingsmarkham. Margaret Parsons, a shrewish and quiet housewife, disappears from her home. Days later, her murdered body is found in a copse of trees outside of the town. Chief Inspector Wexford leads the enquiry into her death, criss-crossing the almost quintessential Home Counties town to do so.
    From Doon with Death is not only the first Wexford novel by Ruth Rendell, it is very much a novel of its time. It isn’t just that the characters pay for everything in pounds, shillings and pence, but it is also a world of sexism and social inequality. The murdered woman and her husband live a sparse life with no mod cons, while two rich couples still have servants in their homes, and few women here have jobs other than “housewife”. Rendell herself, in her afterword, says this novel should now be viewed as a historical novel; our world has changed so much since 1964.
    Unfortunately, this novel also reads very much like a first novel, by a writer still obviously learning their craft. There isn’t the character insight that was such a pleasure of her later novels. The only characterisation here that stood out was that of the murdered woman’s husband as he slowly drowned in grief. The plot also felt slow, with an almost join-the-dots feel to it, and the revelation of the secret passion at the heart of this story might have been daring and shocking in 1964 but I spotted it long before it was revealed. This didn’t have the character-driven twists that made her later novels.
    What I am grateful for is that this novel was published because it introduced us to the great writer Ruth Rendell would become. She certainly learnt from this novel, the things I found disappointing here are absent from her later novels.
    I do not know if this is a good place to start reading Rendell’s Wexford novels, maybe Shake Hands Forever, A Sleeping Life or Put On By Cunning would be better places to start. These novels have all the traits that made her a great crime writer and a great writer.

  18. Drew Payne
    Alien invasion is a staple of science fiction and has featured far too many novels and films, but in The Midwich Cuckoos, John Wyndham turns that classic theme into a frighteningly original story that is still disturbing now.
    The Midwich Cuckoos begins with Richard Gayford (the novel’s narrator) and his wife Janet returning from an evening in London, celebrating his birthday, to the English village of Midwich, where they have recently moved. Midwich is the stereotype of the quiet, sleepy 1950s English country village where nothing unusual ever happens. Except this day Richard and Janet find they cannot enter Midwich, all roads are blocked. So they set off, on foot, across the fields, only for both of them to collapse, unconscious, in their tracks.
    The army, who are trying to keep everyone out because Midwich is incommunicado, rescues them. Everyone in the village is unconscious, as if they collapsed were they stood, the same happening to anyone trying to enter the village. An invisible force is surrounding the village. This lasts for twenty-two hours and then everyone wakes up as if nothing has happened.
    Soon it becomes apparent that every woman able to bear children is pregnant—some without the benefit of sexual intercourse. Also, together, the women give birth to beautiful but strange babies, all with blonde hair and golden eyes…
    There are no bug-eyed aliens or reptilian creatures fighting humans here, instead there are strange children who look and behave like humans but are not. As they grow up, the children begin to show nonhuman-like behaviour, slowly stretching their power over the villagers.
    As an alien invasion this is an original and disturbing approach, to have humans as hosts for the aliens and trick them into raising and protecting these “cuckoos” in their midst. Also, this is an implied alien invasion; no one names it as such.
    Wyndham’s novel is a slow burn, slowly and piece by piece giving the reader information, slowly revealing the nature of the children. Yet the characters here are all too real, displaying that all too human trait when faced with the extraordinary of simply accepting it as ordinary. He also taps into one of our fundamental fears, that our children are not our own but have been substituted by changelings.
    I first read this novel as a teenager and it frightened me; coming back to it as an adult I find it just as disturbing but for different reasons. This invasion almost mimics the way a virus attacks a body. It is such a simple but very original premise.
    The Midwich Cuckoos is set in 1950s England, when it was written, and so reflects the attitudes and prejudices of the time, children born out of wedlock are a source of shame and class rules everyone’s relationships. This only adds to the atmosphere and feel of this novel, the setting so real that it makes the extraordinary events that slowly unfold seem real as well—only adding to the horror.
    John Wyndham should be held up there as one of the greats of science fiction, though he seems to have slipped down in people’s memory. If you are new to Wyndham’s works this is an excellent entry into his dark universe. If you read this novel many years ago, give it a new look—it has lost none of its impact and is also now strangely relevant.

  19. Drew Payne
    For so many of us, Armistead Maupin is known for the Tales of the City series of books. Though set in San Francisco, these books chronicled so many of the changing events of the seventies and eighties in such a personal way.
    Logical Family is Maupin’s memoir, starting with his birth in very conservative 1940s/1950s North Carolina up to 1970s San Francisco when he first started publishing Tales of the City as a serial in a newspaper. This is an amazing and complicated journey that Maupin tells in an engaging and insightful way.
    The son of a traditional Southern lawyer, Maupin was born into a very conservative and privileged family, in a home that included a portrait of a Confederate ancestor. He grew up to be the perfect white and conservative son, but his journey away from that world is the fascinating part of this story, and it’s his queerness that started that move, long before he told anyone.
    His description of his childhood is very evocative, but it is his time in the Navy, posted to Vietnam, that stands out. There are tenderly erotic descriptions of the intimate rituals of Navy life, there are comic moments were Maupin struggles but succeeds in being the last American naval officer to leave Vietnam, and there are the tragic tales as Maupin grapples with his sexuality in the face of the very homophobic atmosphere of 1960s and 1970s America. The greatest and most compelling strand of his story is how his struggles and eventual acceptance of his sexuality changed him as a person, forcing him to reject his conservative upbringing and all its values.
    This is the best thing that Maupin has written since the last Tales of the City novel. Maupin’s non Tales of the City novels always felt lacklustre, lacking the fun, insight and page-turning enjoyment of those books, as if he was trying to prove himself as a “serious novelist” but not quite succeeding. Logical Family is a breath of fresh air; it is Maupin as the natural storyteller, but one with an important story to tell, and Maupin at his page-turning best again.
    The worst part of this book was that it ended too early, with Maupin beginning to publish Tales of the City as newspaper serial. I wanted to know what happened to him in the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s as the world around him changed so much. What could he tell us about those times?
    Please Mr Maupin, can you write a sequel?

  20. Drew Payne
    The premise of this book appears simple; it chronicles the 29 hangings that took place within Kirkdale Prison, Liverpool, until it was closed. But inside that premise lies a fascinating social history.
    In 1868, an act of parliament stopped all public executions; after that, all capital punishments took place within a prison’s walls, away from the excited crowds of onlookers, and Steven Horton uses this as the starting point of his book, ending when Kirkdale Prison was closed in 1892. He researched the 29 people who were hanged for murder during this time. In each section, in chronological order, Horton outlines the murders, the trials and the executions.
    At first glance, this book appears to be just another True Crime book, listing the injustices committed by one person against another, but Horton’s research lifts it out of that category. This book provides a fascinating and uncomfortable history of the Victorian working class, looking at so many of the harsh realities of their lives.
    This isn’t the warm chocolate box portrayal of Victorian society we have been presented with in films, television dramas and badly written novels. Horton highlights the hardships faced by the Victorian working class. Through his descriptions of these murders and trials come some uncomfortable themes, the results of heavy drinking and domestic violence being the two that jumped out. But also the effects of poverty, prostitution and racism are highlighted here. None of these murders are “exciting” or “complicated”, the type that populate True Crime books; they are grubby and sordid, the murderers often being quickly caught. But that is such an important factor here, so often these crimes come from poverty and disappear.
    Horton illustrates broader Victorian social themes as well. The place of religion in Victorian society. The speed of Victorian justice, sometimes indecently fast. The nature of Victorian street violence and the gangs who attacked casual passers-by. The often self-righteous and moral panic-making nature of the press, especially when they weren’t allowed to witness a hanging inside the prison, which uncomfortably echoed our present-day media. And then there was the incompetent executioner who tied the hangman’s rope too short so that the prisoner didn’t die instantaneously from a broken neck but choked to death, and then in the next execution he tied the rope so long that the prisoner was decapitated.
    I cannot say this was an enjoyable read, the stories here of human desperation and failings were too sad for that, but this a fascinating read. It gave me so many insights into Victorian society, things I was never taught in my history lessons. This was also another book that ended too soon, Horton’s style of writing and storytelling is easy to read and yet made me want to read more and more from this book. Fortunately, Steven Horton has written five other books, all of which I intend to read.
     
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  21. Drew Payne
    Philip K Dick’s name gained notoriety with a string of Hollywood films, but none of them have done justice to the dark and paranoid worlds created in his books.
    Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (filmed as Blade Runner in 1982) is Dick at his best, combining so many of his favourite themes—post-nuclear war, religion, identity, technology and dis-utopia.
    It is set in the near future, on an Earth that has suffered a nuclear war but at a high cost. This Earth is dying, everywhere is surrounded by “kibble” (rotting bomb debris), all the animals have died from radiation, people wear lead-lined underwear and anyone successful has emigrated to Mars or beyond.
    In this world is Dekker, a bounty hunter who is hunting down “replicants” (more artificial copies of humans then robots) who have illegally returned to Earth.
    Using the structure of a Private Investigator thriller, Dick asks an unsettling question: how do you cope in a world where you can’t tell the real humans from the copies?
    Many of Dick’s novels have good premises but the plot often doesn’t follow it through, leaving the reader disappointed. With Do Androids… there is no disappointment, the plot lives up to all of the promise of its premise. It has a dark, twisting plot with a truly unsettling ending. The characters here are dark too; the people are worn down by their dying world, they are not the bright and glamorous people of so many science fiction films. When reading this novel, don’t think of the film Blade Runner, they have so little in common.
    If you’ve never read any of Philip K Dick’s novels then this is an excellent entry into his dark and dis-utopian world; if you’ve encountered him before then this novel is where so many of his most unsettling themes come together.

  22. Drew Payne
    His Dark Materials was a groundbreaking trilogy of fantasy novels. They were breathtaking in their scope and originality; the concept of a person having the personification of their soul in the form of an animal called their daemon was both simple and a stroke of genius. It was also a wonderful writing device; characters could literally talk to themselves.
    For a long time, Pullman hinted that he was writing a second trilogy, The Book of Dust, following on from His Dark Materials. Finally, in 2017, the first part of that trilogy was published, La Belle Sauvage.
    This book, unlike the other two books in this new trilogy, is a prequel to His Dark Materials, but unlike so many other prequels, this isn’t an origins story. This is an intense adventure in its own right.
    Malcolm Polstead, the main character here, is a plain and non-heroic boy, not the usual adventurous type of boy found at the heart of a fantasy story, and this book is all the better for that. Malcolm’s ordinariness draws the reader into this story of cloak-and-dagger spying and sinister danger against the backdrop of the all-powerful Magisterium. Malcolm lives in an inn, on the bank of an Oxford river, run by his parents. On the opposite bank is a convent of nuns, several of the elderly nuns Malcolm has befriended.
    Three characters from His Dark Materials trilogy make an appearance here. Lord Asriel has a small but important part to play in the plot, Mrs Coulter makes a sinister cameo appearance, but it is Lyra who is an important part of the story, even though she is just a newborn baby here. The story begins with her left in the care of the nuns.
    What lifts this novel up from a well written, sinister spy adventure is the horrible event at the centre of this story. A terrible storm hits the country and overnight the whole of Southern England is flooded. What were once cities and towns and green countryside are suddenly turned into a desolate, dark sea of dank water. Suddenly the only land is at the top of hills or tall buildings. Into this dangerous world Malcolm and Lyra, accompanied by Alice, the inn’s young serving maid, must race across this now alien land in Malcolm’s small boat in an attempt to keep Lyra safe.
    Pullman’s writing is always of a high quality, he doesn’t turn in lazy or shallow characterisation because this is a “children’s novel”. The first part of this novel crackles with the sinister and dark tones of a spy thriller, but it is the second part of the novel where his writing shines. He paints the flooded landscape as an alien and dangerous world, the familiar gone as it is drowned under an unforgiving sea of water, in which the three characters have to survive.
    This book was certainly worth the wait. Pullman has lost none of his skill as a storyteller but neither has he run out of ideas and stories to tell in his unique universe. So often with sequels, especially after such original stories as His Dark Materials trilogy, there can be the law of diminishing returns, the author having used up all their ideas in the first book/books, not so here. The quality of La Belle Sauvage bodes well for the rest of the trilogy, and I am so glad to report that.
    Find it here on Amazon
     
     

  23. Drew Payne
    Before reading this collection of stories, put out of your mind any memory of the Tom Cruise/Stephen Spielberg film of the same name. The Cruise/Spielberg film was very loosely based on Philip K Dick’s story, taking only a few elements out of the story. The original story is far superior to the brightly coloured adventure film that bears the same name.
    In his best fiction, and this collection certainly contains some of that, Philip K Dick was a visionary—a dark visionary with a downbeat but all too real take on the future.
    The title story, Minority Report, is set in the Bureau of Pre-Crime where three pre-cogs (people so brain damaged that they live in permanent comas and constantly mutter their predictions) predict murders not yet committed, but this is where the similarity with the Cruise/Spielberg film ends. This is a post nuclear war world, where vast swathes of the country are a burnt wasteland. The central character is a middle-aged, overweight man with a much younger wife who finds himself at the centre of a political assassination plot. This is a twisting political thriller set in a world mutated by radiation, where every piece of new information causes another change of direction. Within this story Dick asks the question, if we know what the future holds does that automatically change the future to an unknown one?
    A lot of these stories are set in post nuclear war worlds, a theme very popular in Philip K Dick’s fiction, but they are not the same world rehashed for different stories. Whatever worlds he sets his stories in they are dark and unforgiving worlds. His future is not bright, clean and hopeful.
    In this collection there are stories about robots used for assassination; automatic factories that rule the world and don’t want to give that up power; the search for a war criminal who is more or less than he seems; a government sanctioned machine that controls your thoughts; an America where the first lady is the most important person and even if the presidents come and go she remains the same; a future where they look to 1960s sci-fi to solve their technological problems; a time-travelling business woman; and much, much more.
    A problem that can be levelled at Phillip K Dick’s novels is that, though often with an original plot premise, he did not know how to end them. This does not apply to these stories, even the longer ones. With these stories Dick ends them perfectly, whether it is an ending to a story or a question left up in the air. Most of these stories were previously published in American sci-fi magazines of the 1950s and 1960s; whether this is the reason for their solid structures I don’t know, but these are very satisfying stories to read and have not aged the way a lot of sci-fi from that period has.
    Forgot the bright, clean and upbeat sci-fi of Stephen Spielberg, George Lucas and Star Trek; try the dark and all too real sci-fi of Philip K Dick. Some of the peripheral details of his stories may have aged but their central themes are still fresh and still relevant today.
     
    Find it here on Amazon
     
     

  24. Drew Payne
    “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”
    This is the premise of Kurt Vonnegut’s greatest novel, but it is far more than that.
    As a middle-aged man, Billy Pilgrim is a successful optometrist, dully married to his wife with two children. As an elderly man, Billy Pilgrim is abducted by aliens, the Tralfamadores, and kept as an exhibit in their zoo on their home world. There he meets and starts a relationship with Montana Wildhack, a beautiful model who is abducted to be his companion. As a young man, Billy Pilgrim is a chaplain's assistant in the American army, during World War II. He is woefully undertrained and under resourced and is soon captured. As a prisoner of war, he witnesses the carpet bombing of Dresden.
    This novel does not have a linear format, the story jumps around in time with many sections not following on chronologically from the previous one, but this only highlights Billy Pilgrim being unstuck in time, it also highlights the fractured nature of this story. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make this novel easy to read, but it is only one of the elements that make this novel a difficult read.
    All that said, this is a novel worth the effort of reading it. In my opinion, it is probably Vonnegut’s best novel. The description of Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey through German-occupied Europe, as a prisoner of war, is so memorable, from moments of loss and deep atrocity (the nightmare bombing of Dresden) to moments of almost farce.
    Vonnegut presents all of this with a cool and unsentimental approach. Lesser writers would have milked the tragedies here for every drop of forced emotion that they could, but Vonnegut just presents them as events that happen. When a character dies, the narration simply states, “So it goes.”
    This novel, in part, has been said to have been Vonnegut trying to understand what he saw and what happened to him during World War II, but it is no less for that. It is one of the great anti-war novels because Vonnegut wrote about real events with real-world consequences. What lifts it well above a simple anti-war sermon is Vonnegut’s storytelling and the scope of his imagination.
    This is not an easy read but it is worth the effort. I recommend it; even if it is the only novel of Vonnegut’s you read, it is worth reading.
    “So it goes.”
     
    Find it here on Amazon
     
     

  25. Drew Payne
    This novella has a simple but enjoyable premise, which Alan Bennett exploits with his sharp and intelligent wit.
    The queen, unusually for her, is at a loose end in Buckingham Palace and goes for walk. Around a corner she doesn’t usually walk around she discovers a mobile library. Thinking it rude not to, she borrows a book from it. This first book sets her off on an odyssey of reading. She reads for pleasure, but also her reading educates her and opens her mind. And all this reading leads to a surprising ending.
    Bennett was the first playwright to include the queen as a character in a play, to have an actress portray her on the London stage. Her character stole the second act of his double bill of one-act plays, Single Spies. Here he portrays her as the central character of this story, through whose eyes we watch the gently unfolding events.
    Bennett’s prose is simple but still very enjoyable, and his wit is not dampened here. There are many jokes and comic scenes, again with the queen getting some of the best lines. But Bennett’s prose is also very readable; you can almost hear his distinctive voice as you read it.
    His characterisation of the queen is gentle and affectionate; he doesn’t send her up or portray her as too privileged and out-of-touch. But her character is written very much to serve his plot. This book is about the power and necessity of reading. Here books are a gateway into a new way of thinking and ultimately living. This story is also about the power and necessity of public libraries. The queen doesn’t discover the power of literature from the books hidden away in her own private library but from that most public of public libraries, a mobile library. It is ironic that Bennett uses a mobile library as the trigger for his plot, the thing that was invented to provide libraries to our remotest communities here turning up in the centre of London.
    This is only a slight book, a novella, but no less enjoyable for it. Bennett knows exactly when to end it and how to quietly make his points.
     
     
    Find it here on Amazon
     
     

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