It is a long long time, almost a whole lifetime away, since I first tried my hand at writing a historical novel. Aged 10 I was fascinated, in a very naive and romantic way, by the Jacobites and the dramatic failure of their cause. It was a simple tale of a brother and sister who are sent on a quest to meet Bonnie Prince Charlie as he arrives on the West Coast of Scotland in 1745. The details are vague now. Somewhere high up on a dusty shelf lies the original pencilled manuscript, a sheaf of jottered paper, in a format no longer printed, wrapped in string. I haven't looked at it in years and would probably be embarrassed to do so now. Some part of me feels that I should get rid of it, but a sentimental element is reluctant to go that far. I was quite proud of the achievement at the time. I didn't know anyone else who was trying to write novels. I had a long bus journey to school and I used to write bits of it leaning on my schoolbag, until one day I noticed a middle-aged lady in a very smart grey suit and hat, in that pencil-slim 1950s style, having a sneak peak over my shoulder and smiling very benignly at the rubbish I was writing. That put me off. I never wrote in public like that again.
I have written all my life and did have some short stories published in Scottish literary magazines during the 1980s, but I could never quite master the novel. I wrote a few, none of them historical, and one publisher said of one: 'We nearly took this.' That might have been disappointing, but I was actually quite relieved because I didn't feel in the end that the novel was as good as I would have liked it to be. Then came a long gap of 20 years or so as I returned to teaching and found it impossible to summon up the energy to write against the background of all the difficulties and controversies of working in a comprehensive school between 1991 and 2007, when finally, and happily, I retired.
For a while I wasn't sure I would be able to write again. Then I joined a writing group in the National Gallery of Scotland, which met twice a month. For the Gallery, I imagine, the motivation was to enthuse us about art, which it certainly did. We met twice every four weeks. On the first of these meetings we would be taken round an exhibition or shown a collection or introduced to an artist. We then had a fortnight in which to write something about what we had seen. At the second meeting we read out what we had written and everyone else would have an opportunity to comment. Given the size of the class it was much easier if you wrote short pieces, poems in particular. If you wrote prose it took much longer to read and there was less time for comment. I found the discipline of having a deadline to write for a great stimulus, but after a time I wanted to write at much greater length and began to find the format a bit frustrating.
One day we were shown a number of prints from the Gallery's print collection and I was rather intrigued by one illustrating an episode from Scotland's 17th century history. When I went home and thought about it three scenes around that particular episode came virtually unbidden into my head. I wrote them down, did some basic research of the period, revised what I had written and asked one of the members of the group to have a look at them, since they would be too long to read out at the following meeting. She did so and passed them on to a poet friend of hers who commented, 'More, please.'
More, please? I had thought what I had written would be it. Another little item to add to my portfolio. However, the hook bit in and soon I found I wanted to expand on those initial three scenes. I needed to know much more. Where to start? It was a period about which I knew very little. I had loved history in school and had done a further year of it at university, but had, mistakenly now I think, opted to do my degree in English, although my first year History tutor at the time had encouraged me to consider doing History. Si jeunesse savait ...
Where to start? What was I getting myself into? Little did I realise at the time.
