Lindsey Barraclough
About Author
Lindsey Barraclough was born in Essex. She worked as a music teacher and lives in London with her husband and their five children. Long Lankin is her first novel.
Interview
LONG LANKIN
April 2011
Published by Doubleday
Long Lankin is a spine-tingling, tense and atmospheric novel by debut author Lindsey Barraclough. Here, the author talks about what inspired her to write the book.
Q: The story is based on the ballad of Long Lankin. When did you hear that and why has it stayed with you?
A: I first came across the ballad of Long Lankin as a teenager in The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs. Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams collected these songs on their walks together through the English countryside before World War I.
The song exists in many versions across England and Scotland. The tune is weird and tortuous, and it's quite a combination - an odd melody and a spooky story.
The idea of the 'false nurse', the hint of the supernatural and the blood ritual are all fascinating, especially in such an ancient song. I think my own take on the tale was fermenting for a very long time without my even realising it.
Q: Is Long Lankin set in a real place?
A: Essex has a coastline broken up by a number of river estuaries, areas where freshwater and salt come together in flat marshy wastes which I have always found rather beautiful.
There were many small village communities like Bryers Guerdon when I was a child but since World War 2 much of the landscape in which I grew up has changed beyond recognition.
There are now huge multi-laned roads, landfill sites and intensive housing developments on the marshlands where my friends and I played and explored. The landscape in the book is a remembered impression of a place that has long since gone.
Q: The book is set in the past, in the 1950's. Why didn't you make it a contemporary story?
A: I set Long Lankin in the past for many reasons. As the two main storytellers are children, I felt I should give them voices I was comfortable with myself.
Many of the small details of their lives are the details of my own childhood. We had terrific freedom - were out all day long in every kind of weather, with maybe a bag of jam sandwiches or some biscuits if we thought to take food at all. We made camps in all sorts of places, played on farmland, in woods, out on the marshlands, in derelict ruins and in ditches and rivers, but in the background was always the familiarity and stability of the small community in which we lived, young and old coming together for garden fetes, cricket matches, church and so on.
I remember always feeling a strong connection with the past, in the historical buildings that surrounded us and in the timeless landscape.
There seems to be so little of that wilderness left now. Long Lankin himself could only have had the possibility of existence somewhere remote and isolated, so I don't think it would work in a modern setting. The emergency services would be too heavily involved nowadays, anyway.
Q: The children in the story come in for a lot of casual violence; was it really as bad as that then?
A: In schools and in homes at that time, and for many years beyond too, children were caned and slapped frequently for even minor misdemeanours.
I know nobody of my generation who was not chastised by teachers, parents or relatives. Im pretty sure if you asked anyone over the age of fifty, they would regale you with stories of the canes, rulers and hard hands used to mete out punishment.
If you were smacked by a teacher, you would never even tell your parents for fear they would give you another whack for being naughty in school.
Mercifully, times have changed, but this was the reality of life then, Im afraid.
Q: Did you enjoy horror stories or thrillers when you were a teenager?
A: In my teens, I enjoyed many different kinds of books, much as I do now. The only chilling books I remember reading were a series of volumes of The Pan Book of Horror Stories. These were passed around the family and we really enjoyed talking and laughing about them together.
Knowing your dad had read them first somehow took a bit of the fear out of them, and we used to make jokes out of the tales or the titles.
There was one story called Risus Sardonicus (probably the source of Roger's anxiety about lockjaw in Long Lankin) and for months after we read it we would turn to each other in silly moments with this horrible grin.
Q: When and where did you write Long Lankin?
A: I wrote Long Lankin, usually late at night, in my eldest daughter's bedroom at the top of our house. She was away at university at the time and as I have five children, it was the only space of my own I could find, and the only time I could be alone.
The writing of the first draft was a very strange experience for me. The children went back to school after the Christmas holidays and I just started the story, in longhand at first.
On the last day of March, I wrote the last sentence, which is still the last sentence, and sat back and said to myself, 'Ooh, how did that happen?' It all came out in a strange rush, very quickly. I then spent the next couple of years working on it, improving it.
Q: Were there any characters in the story that you particularly enjoyed creating?
A: I absolutely loved creating Auntie Ida. Young people sometimes think that middle-aged or elderly people have always been as they are now, have no experience of love, loss or disappointment, have probably never even been attractive, so Auntie Ida's back story was a very important element for me.
I wanted the reader to understand why she had become the person she is at the beginning, and maybe to have sympathy for her at the end.
I also enjoyed writing the passages about Roger's family. That was all quite familiar territory I have to say!
Q: What are you writing now?
A: I am quite far into a second book at the moment and have an idea for a third. I hope my experience with Long Lankin will encourage budding authors of all ages. You don't necessarily have to be young to publish your first novel, and indeed I couldn't have written mine without being the person I am now.
