The Book of Alice Pyett is of course based on The Book of Margery Kempe. Like Alice, Margery Kempe was married in her teens, had an unconscionable number of children, and ended up longing for chastity. This led to some truly bizarre visions of Jesus and lots of crying. She also had a sin on her conscience that she wouldn’t even reveal to her confessor. Nobody ever found out what it was.
I didn’t invent the folklore and customs of the Wakenhyrst villagers, or what they believed about the spirits that haunt the fen. Ferishes, Jack-o’-Lanterns and Black Shuck are all part of East Anglia’s rich folklore. My only invention is ‘the thing that cries in the night’. Similarly, the Norfolk ‘pseudo-saint’ John Schorne also existed and is indeed said to have imprisoned the Devil in a boot. And although I made up the Stearne family, a real seventeenth-century John Stearne was a ‘witch-pricker’ and helped Matthew Hopkins, the infamous Witchfinder-General, at the Bury St Edmunds witch trial of 1645.
I’m afraid I also didn’t invent the idiosyncrasies and/or idiocies of three medical men mentioned in the story: Jean-Martin Charcot, Gottlieb Burkhardt and Paul Broca. Only Dr Grayston and Dr Buchanan are fictional, but I based Dr Buchanan’s Plain Words for Ladies and Girls on advice in real nineteenth-century publications. I mention all this as I think it’s important to remember that these things were once perpetrated in the name of science, and some quite recently: lobotomies were still going strong in the 1950s.
But the heart of the story belongs to Maud, and aspects of her tale have a much more personal source. They were sparked by the reminiscences of my Belgian mother and aunt over the past few years (although I’m glad to say that neither my mother nor my aunt went through what Maud or Maman did).
Their mother, my Belgian grandmother, seems to have had a pretty tough childhood. Her father was a man who ‘didn’t like children, but liked making them’. He was also violent, and as a child she was so scared of him that she used to hide under the table when he came home. Her mother (my great-grandmother) was nicer, but she had a very hard life with an abusive husband, frequent pregnancies, and three children lost to illness. Being too poor to buy dolls for her small daughter, she used to ‘rescue’ porcelain angels in an Antwerp cemetery and knock off their wings with a hammer. (She was careful only to take angels from neglected graves; and although she was a devout Catholic, she felt it was the least God could do to turn a blind eye, after the trials he’d sent her.)
When my grandmother grew up and got married, she almost never signed her own name, but instead wrote Epse P. Van Mensel. That means: ‘Epouse [wife] Pierre Van Mensel’. I think that says quite a lot.
And all that was just my grandmother. There was also the male relation who was such a womaniser that not even his own daughter-in-law was off-limits. And finally, the tale of the family doctor who was overheard quietly counselling yet another male relative not to have sex with his wife every night. In Flemish the advice translates roughly as: ‘Once in a while, skip a night, eh?’
All this was well within living memory. It makes me particularly glad to live where and when I do.
On a happier note, I rescued Chatterpie myself. One June afternoon in 2014 I was reading in my study when I heard a strange panicky splashing in the alleyway alongside my house. Rushing downstairs, I found a young magpie drowning in two feet of rainwater which I’d stupidly allowed to collect in a garden urn. Having fished him out, I wrapped him in a tea towel and hurried off to a wildlife sanctuary where they cleaned him up and pronounced him none the worse for his ordeal. I’ll never forget the strength of his claws as he clutched that tea towel, or his total lack of hesitation when I set him free the next day on Wimbledon Common, where I live. He flew straight to a nearby oak, which promptly erupted with the magpie equivalent of outraged parents demanding to know where he’d been.
While I was writing Wakenhyrst, certain books were particularly helpful, and I acknowledge them with thanks. For the Wenhaston Doom and lots more besides: The Undiscovered Country: Journeys Among the Dead by Carl Watkins (The Bodley Head, London 2013); also the excellent booklet in St Peter’s Church, Wenhaston, by Judith Middleton-Stewart (2006). On eel-babbing and country life in East Anglia: The Rabbit Skin Cap by George Baldry (Boydell Press, Ipswich 1974, first published 1939); I Walked by Night, edited by Lilias Rider Haggard (Boydell Press, Ipswich 1974, first published 1935); Life as We Have Known It by M. Llewelyn Davies (Hogarth Press, London 1931); Fenland Chronicle by Sybil Marshall (CUP, Cambridge 1980, first published 1967). For East Anglian folklore and customs: County Folklore – Suffolk by Camilla Gurdon (1893); The Folklore of East Anglia by Enid Porter (Batsford, London 1974); Folklore and Customs of Rural England by Margaret Baker (David & Charles, Newton Abbot 1974); The Penguin Book of Scandinavian Folktales, translated and edited by Jacqueline Simpson (Penguin Books, London 1994, first published 1988).
Also: The Book of Margery Kempe, translated by B.A. Windeatt (Penguin Books, London 1985); The Anglo-Saxon Version of the Life of St Guthlac, Hermit of Crowland, translated by Charles Wycliffe Goodwin (London 1847); Richard Dadd: the Artist and the Asylum by Nicholas Tromans (Tate Publishing, London 2011); and Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity by Andrew Scull (Thames & Hudson, London 2015).
Lastly, I need to thank some people. First, my marvellous publisher and editor Fiona Kennedy at Head of Zeus, who from the start responded to the story with her characteristic insight, imagination and enthusiasm; my editor Helen Francis, for her perceptive comments and always helpful suggestions; Jessie Price, Art Director at Head of Zeus, for her gorgeous cover design for the book, and Stephen McNally, illustrator, for creating its splendid magpie image and the beautiful chapter illustrations; and finally to my hugely talented agent Peter Cox, for his unfailing optimism and support, even during the years when I wouldn’t even tell him what this story was about.
MICHELLE PAVER
LONDON
About the Author
MICHELLE PAVER was born in Central Africa but came to England as a child. After gaining a degree in Biochemistry from Oxford University she became a partner in a city law firm, but eventually gave that up to write full time. She is the bestselling author of the adult gothic novels Dark Matter and Thin Air and the prize-winning children’s series Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, which has sold over three million copies worldwide.
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