Writing The Earth Hums in B Flat

When The Earth Hums in B Flat was chosen as one of Waterstone's New Voices in Spring 2009 I was asked by Waterstone's Books Quarterly Online to write a piece for them about how I came to write the book. Read the article here (reproduced with WBQ Online's kind permission) or at WBQ online


Writing is a messy business - well, it is the way I do it: pulling together characters and place and time and story and deciding which of the things I want to say have to be left out, because I can’t possibly put them all in one book. And then there’s the title - or does that come first?

When I began to think about The Earth Hums in B Flat I was lucky - I already had my main character. She’d popped into my head some time previously as an image of a skinny child with wild red hair balancing on the seat of a chair with her arms outstretched. I don’t know where she came from or why she came. Words, phrases, sentences: these are usually my inspiration; I don’t tend to think in pictures. At the time I wasn’t quite sure what to do with her. But, with a book in mind, I took a closer look. It was obvious from the way the child was dressed that she didn’t live in modern times, and the chair on which she stood had seen better days. So, she lived in another age and her family was poor. But where did her story happen? How was it to be told? And what was her story?

Some of the things that interest me are how people lived in the past, how people cope in times of change, and how family works - or doesn’t. I decided that the child’s story happened in the 1950s, because she looked like a fifties child in her cardigan and decidedly hand-me-down skirt, and also because it was a time of great change as people left behind the privations of the Second World War era and aspired to a better standard of living. And I decided to set the story in a somewhat isolated small town on the west coast of Wales, where things were a little slower in changing and the changes were not confined to the standard of living: culture and language were affected as well. The town is as real as the era, and is the town where I grew up, but it’s fictionalised to some extent for the purposes of the story.

Soon, the child became Gwenni Morgan and the novel turned out to be Gwenni’s story. Once I discovered the way Gwenni thought and spoke it wasn’t difficult to see things through her eyes, and to speak in her voice. The fifties were still a time when children were seen and not heard and were never told anything. Gwenni senses that something is not quite right in her family, and she deals with this by projecting her unease onto inanimate objects and the landscape around her. She distances herself with her dreams of flying above the town. Her impending womanhood also seems an alien and perilous place: she doesn’t want to join the adult world. Gwenni realises that it’s dangerous to express her feelings: she tells things the way she sees them and allows the reader to do the feeling for her.

The story develops along with Gwenni’s unease about everything around her. Gwenni’s inquisitive nature is fed by the detective stories she is lent by her aunt, and when a local man mysteriously vanishes she decides to find him. She is not afraid to ask questions even when she knows it’ll cause trouble for her, and she’s not afraid to do what she believes is the right thing, which was not easy for a child in those times. I think Gwenni is the child I wish I had been. I’m full of admiration for her daring and bravery! Her idiosyncratic version of what goes on around her is both funny and sad as she puts her own interpretation on the talk and behaviour of the adults. She fails to find the missing man, but finds instead secrets from the past that she can’t ignore, although she would like to. These secrets will shape the rest of her life.

And the hum of the earth that she hears when she dreams of flying and all the succour that she associates with it will continue to keep her safe. The title was a long time coming to this novel, and the right title is essential for me to know exactly what I’m trying to say in a story. It was a huge relief when I thought of it - despite the cutting and re-writing it necessitated. In a sense the title is a metaphor for the whole book. And apparently, the Earth really does hum in b flat - but out there in space the note is actually far too low for the human ear to hear it.



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