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Alexandra Campbell |
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Alexandra Campbell is an experienced journalist who has worked for many women's magazines. She is the author of four previous novels, and has written several plays for Radio Four. She lives in Kent.
Alexandra Campbell discusses the inspiration behind Remember This.
What was the inspiration for Remember This?
I’ve read loads of books about families who feud over a fortune, but in reality, most families argue over much smaller things when someone dies. The arguments may seem to be about the money, but I think they all go much deeper than that. It’s as if people use possessions – jewellery, a picture or a piece of furniture – as a way of expressing their feelings because they can’t talk openly about loss, jealousy or grief. So I wanted to write about a family who are torn apart by an inheritance that is valuable but not life-changingly so, and which means something different to each of them.
At the beginning of Remember This, Maud Devereaux has died, and her three sons must decide what to do with the family holiday cottage. They could keep it or sell it and divide the money, but it won’t add up to all that much divided into three. And The Boathouse is unique – if they sell it, they won’t be able to buy something similar even if they could afford it. But what they’re really arguing over is their memories of their childhood summers there, their roles in the family, and, of course, the effect these have on their current lives, which are all in something of a mess. The story is told from the point of view of Lily, the wife of Tom, the middle Devereaux brother.
Most of all, the Devereaux family has never resolved the tragedy of their father’s early death. Unless they can do so, the shadow he casts will go on affecting his sons, their wives and their children. And Chris, the older brother, thinks that can only be done by selling the Boathouse.
What made you decide to set much of Remember This in the 1960s?
Much of Remember This is set in the 1960s because we are now a full generation on – the children born to the 60s generation are adults (and parents) themselves. The Sixties also shaped the lives of women today more than any other decade since the War years.
People mainly remember the fashion and the pop music but it was the legislation that really changed things. Before 1967, women were formally paid two-thirds of a man’s wage, they were expected to leave their jobs on getting married, they couldn’t get mortgages or sometimes even rent in their own names, the family home was considered to belong to the man because he paid for it - so a divorced or separated woman could find herself homeless – the Pill could not be prescribed to unmarried woman and there was no legal abortion. 1967 was an amazing year, not just a ‘summer of love.’
Two of your female characters, Lily Devereaux and Dora Savage both have difficult choices to make – one in the present day and one in the Sixties. Did you set out to contrast the roles of women from the two periods?
I didn’t deliberately set out to contrast the differences between women’s choices today and choices in the 60s, but it became inevitable once I started to do the research into the period. Lily Devereaux, her mother-in-law, Maud Devereaux, and Dora Savage have to make similar decisions on life and love, but in very different circumstances. Remember This asks if love, forgiveness and compromise change in fifty years. Is there a universal right or wrong, or are we all just creatures of our time?
The scenes set in the 60s are so detailed and evocative. How did you research them?
I researched the 60s by reading women’s magazines and biographies from the period, viewing contemporaneous films such as Blow-Up (I was really shocked at the two-dimensional, doll-like characterisation of all the women in it), visiting photograph exhibitions and digging out old newspapers. I immersed myself in it as much as I could, and it was fascinating.
Bertie Devereaux is a larger-than-life character. Is he based on anyone in particular?
I read a lot of biographies and autobiographies from the 1960s. I wanted to get inside my characters’ skins and understand their pressures. Inevitably I noticed how the most dynamic men – and women – found it easier to change the world than have successful relationships. One man in particular was Ken Tynan, who not only wrote his own autobiography, but was written about by both his first and second wives, so I think a whiff of Tynan – just the merest hint of his cigarette smoke - must inevitably have crept into Bertie.
I’ve also always wanted to write about the taut relationship between fathers and sons. Fathers want so much for their sons, and often expect so much from them that impossible tensions develop, so, in that sense, Bertie is based on many fathers I’ve met or heard about.
Finally I ‘borrowed’ my own father’s Panama hat for Bertie. Stafford Campbell was also witty and clever, although he was a much nicer person, and, unlike Bertie, a brilliant father.
Who is the intended audience for this book?
I think that this is a book for women of all ages – both those who lived through the 60s and can remember what it was like to be or to know Dora or Maud, and those of us who are making the difficult decisions about life and love now. It’s a grown-up love story for women who know that Jane Austen, wonderful as she is, leaves her readers at the church door, just before life starts to get really interesting.
What have you enjoyed reading recently?
Recently, I’ve enjoyed re-reading Middlemarch by George Eliot – I think it’s so clear and fresh that it could almost have been written last week. I’ve also loved Anne Tyler’s An Amateur Marriage, That Certain Age by Elizabeth Buchan and Joanna Trollope’s Brother and Sister. The characters are all so real, so fascinating and, like Remember This, they all tell the stories of women – and men - trying to do the best with the hand they’ve been dealt, in a certain place, at a certain time.
What projects are you working on at the moment?
I’m writing an afternoon play for Radio 4 called Moving Day about two couples whose possessions are mixed up on the day they move, which is coming out in May 2005.
My next novel, The Fortune Teller’s Code, is about Nancy and Hannah, two women in the 1930s and the present day. Nancy is an aristocratic young woman in the 1930s whose family loses all their money in the Depression. So she turns to fortune telling under the name Madame Rena - having been educated, but not equipped to earn a living, it’s all she can do. She writes the Fortune Teller’s Handbook to make a little extra money.
A dusty 1935 copy of The Fortune Teller’s Handbook is found in 2005 by Hannah, when she’s going through her grandmother’s effects. Hannah is a former City trader who decided to change her life and become a reflexologist and healer. She is finding that her new life is not quite as simple and stress-free as she thought it would be. There are some things, such as anger, pain and fear, that you take with you wherever you go. Through the fortune-teller’s code – the numbers, card, stars and dreams – Hannah deciphers Nancy’s secret message and is forced to face up to the secret in her own life. There’s a bit of Da Vinci Code-type superstitious mythology in it – it’s based on a real fortune teller’s handbook from the 1930s - but it’s essentially it’s a detective story about finding love and happiness.
