It started with a search for family
Back in the 1990s, way before the internet, Ancestry, Findmypast, and a hundred other genealogy sites were available, I started to research my family history. Why I bothered at the time I can’t remember, but I do know I’d been given a photograph, allegedly of my great-grandfather. Something about this young man, clearly very proud in his uniform, piqued my interest.
My father knew nothing but he did have a short-form birth certificate for my grandmother, and this told me she’d been born in Rathdrum, County Wicklow, Ireland, in 1899 ,and her father’ and mother’s names. I had no connection with Ireland then, other than an Irish wife, so knew I couldn’t easily take the research any further. I put this line to one side. But now the family history bug had bitten.
I decided to research my Garratt surname instead. I knew my father and his father had been born in Manchester, where I visited often, so the first couple of steps were straightforward, just a slightly uninformed visit to the local register office. On this line I was able to go back to the 18th century fairly easily when I traced the family back to Coventry and to Hartshill, a village only a few miles from where I then lived in Warwickshire – local libraries had the parish records on microfiche.
But the Irish family line still eluded me until a holiday in 1994 took me to County Wicklow, where I was lucky enough to obtain a full birth certificate for my grandmother, and the marriage certificate of her parents, taking me back a generation.
The whole family history journey was too long to go through in lots of detail, but I discovered much about my grandmother and the lives of her father, grandfather and great-grandfather. All of these men were soldiers, serving in the Mediterranean, India, South Africa and Canada. The lives of all of them were riddled with poverty, my great-grandfather dying in the Rathdrum workhouse, my grandmother being placed in an Industrial School for being found ‘destitute and begging’ on the streets of Arklow. She later lived through two world wars, married a British soldier and was chased from Ireland, then had ten children.
This, surely, was a story to be told. It took me many years to do it.
I started what was to become A Handkerchief for Maria long before any of my detective novels, but I didn’t know how to write it. I just didn’t have the skill. In 2008 I started to write fiction more seriously, and five novels were published before I returned to the family story. I knew it needed to be a fiction, there were too many gaps in the narrative for it to be otherwise.
I had the beginnings of a draft but because the story spans almost a hundred years, from 1847 to 1945, several generations, and multiple locations, the structure needed to be right. I didn’t think a straight chronological form would work and each attempt at writing stumbled.
Then I remembered that an aunt had died of tuberculosis at age eighteen. My great-grandmother and great-grandfather had also died of this disease. Here was a link, of sorts. What if the main character, Maria, based on my grandmother, sat by her unconscious daughter’s bed, telling her stories of where the family came from?
A new draft began to emerge and eventually, with the help of my very supportive friends in the Tir Connail Writers Group (formerly MEAS Writers), I got to the end. I redrafted, wrestled with the structure some more, redrafted again, and again. Finally, I reached a point where I was happy – more or less (a writer is never fully satisfied).
I followed the usual round of submissions and rejections then decided I’d self-publish. I simply wanted it out there in the world – at the least for what was left of the older generation of my family to read. And that’s a whole other story for another time.
A Handkerchief for Maria is a book I’m proud of, even if it isn’t a runaway success. People who have read it tell me they cried. I know I cried a lot in the writing of it. This, as authors, is the best we can ever hope for, that something in the story we tell touches the lives of the people who hear it.