I was born in Bristol and lived there until I was 18: my family and my past and my imagination are all entangled with the city. My parents went on living there until they were in their eighties and retired to the seaside – my father played trumpet for 50 years in a Bristol jazz band, the Avon Cities. There’s a black and white photo of the band in front of the Suspension Bridge on my father’s first LP, and the story goes that his great-grandfather, a tailor, carried a banner across the Bridge at its opening. When Dad’s grandmother’s house in City Road was bombed in the war, she came to live with them in Ashley Down. Her grandsons loved her. She had a sense of humour and drank a bottle of stout every day.
I think I write about Bristol more than any other city. It seems to me a roomy place, easily accommodating the kind of stories I want to tell. I don’t necessarily name it as Bristol – yet there aren’t really any other contenders for a big city in the south west; it floats usefully between specifics and anonymity.
When all of your upbringing was in a certain place, everywhere in it is charged with power for your imagination. I’m moved by all of it, from the Observatory tower and the Dumps on the Downs, to the old Wills factory in Bedminster (I went to Ashton Park School), and the grandeur of Temple Meads station. Everything’s saturated in memories. I owe so much to my local Redland library on Blackboy Hill, which was a temple to reading, and fed my early addiction to books. I revisited the library a few years ago, to make a podcast there with Ben Holden and local councillor Asher Craig, who’d also loved the library as a child. I’m so glad it’s still open – we’ve lost so many libraries in Cardiff, where I live now.
My new novella The Party is set in the post-war Bristol of my parents’ youth. Ruins everywhere, and rationing, a very cold winter. Two sisters go to an arts students’ party in a sleazy docklands pub, where they meet a couple of posh men slumming it; later they’re invited out to the stuffy wealthy house in Sneyd Park where these men and their friends are drinking and dancing. Are the girls out of their depth? We’re afraid for them, but they’re hungry for life and bold for themselves.
A wonderful memory I have is seeing My Fair Lady when it first came out, with my Nana, at the Whiteladies cinema. Then as teenagers in the seventies we haunted sleazy Dick Turpin’s Tavern below the cinema. Nowhere has ever seemed quite so glamorous since.
Mostly I set my Bristol stories in the recent past, because that’s the city I know best. In The Party the girls have seen men unloading the ships in the city docks, carrying planks on their shoulders: I can remember those scenes from my childhood. I think the city has changed hugely since the mid-century, becoming more dynamic and radical; it used to be a more stiff, hierarchical place, more divided. I still feel in touch with the city now though, and I often visit, as I have relatives there.
I’m halfway through a new novel – which is set partly in Bristol and partly in Cardiff. So that’s my focus for the next few months.
The Party is available to buy from all major bookstores; penguin.co.uk
