Talking Location With … Stephanie Dray / Laura Kamoie: WASHINGTON DC
Talking Location With Lesley Thomson – Sussex Land and the Sea
11th June 2022
#TalkingLocationWith… Lesley Thomson – Sussex Land and the Sea.
The Companion’by Lesley Thomson is published by Head of Zeus in hardback on 9th June at £18.99
Ever since an A-level exam question on Thomas Hardy’s Return of The Native asked if Egdon Heath is akin to a character in the novel (yes), I was struck by the importance of location to a story.
Like Jack in my The Detective’s Daughter series, I’m fascinated by the landscapes through which I journey. Invisible – personal – paths that are not necessarily the quickest route. I prefer the one that improves my mood, perhaps with a cheering association or memory.
I make up my characters – it would limit me to base them on living people. However, I rarely invent a location. I do shift places to suit, take the water tower in The Detective’s Secret, now by the river Thames in Chiswick, but originally – it still is in ‘real life’ – in London’s Ladbroke Grove.
Blacklock House (West Dean College in real life)
In The Companion, Blacklock House is a meeting of two stately homes in Sussex. West Dean House and Sheffield Park House, the latter near Lewes. West Dean is now an arts and conservation college, but you can blot out fire exit signs and directions to the café in favour of armour – swords and what-not – and say, the dispirited tiger’s head affixed to the wood panelled walls. Sheffield Park House, like Blacklock Hall, is now converted into flats. Again I’ve cut and pasted woods (from the edge of Lewes) and chunks of heathland (Chailey Common and Ditchling Common) as my locale. I moved the house nearer to the seaside town of Seaford. As the novel progresses, my landscape takes shape and I get to know my way around.
Fifty years ago, our family holidays with my fabulous Aunty Agnes in her one-bedroom Brighton flat with a shared loo seeded my attachment to Sussex. This Londoner finds peace amidst the sweeping hills, chalk tracks and, as I write, the twittering of skylarks high above meadows of cowslips and primroses.
Alfred the poodle accompanies me along the beach at Newhaven, where in Death of a Mermaid a boy fatally crashes his car, and within a battery set into the cliffs a woman hides. Our routes depend less on my mood, than on Alfred’s. His increasing recalcitrance – he lies down if he wants to go a different way – will be a plot point in my current novel.
Blacklock House staircase (West Dean College in real life)
My mood can be coloured by the story unfolding in my imagination or by the novels I have written. Best avoid woods, trunks merging to blurred brown, the snap of a twig unexplained, a murderer of my own invention is lurking. It might satisfy readers to know I scare myself as much as my scenes have apparently kept their bedroom lights on. This said, in the cause of veracity, I’ll creep down an alley or along the Thames towpath, stand alone in a secluded patch of heathland where murder happened. I’ll feel the feeling then give it to a character.
I visit and revisit locations. I teach on the Creative Writing MA at West Dean House and, over many years, have ventured along the flagged passages in the basement, as Martha does in The Companion. As with Sheffield Park House, basements are where decorative wallpaper and gilded columns give way to dusty pipework, exposed brick and a strange, suspended silence.
Dedman’s Heath (Chailey Common in real life)
Some location visits prompt new scenes. Peering through fencing at the fishery on which I based Freddy Power’s family factory estate (Death of a Mermaid, The Companion), and since gutted by fire, I catch ghost smells of charred timber and melted rubber. I hear the wounded cries of seagulls wheeling overhead. This went into The Companion.
Close to the harbour is a sandy beach to rival the Med, property of Trans Marche, the French ferry company, and out of bounds for safety reasons. Galvanised fencing of spiked semi-circles and tall spears fierce against blue sky ward off bathers. Signs declare danger of drowning. Freddy must breach this and clamber onto the harbour wall. Exactly where could she become impaled or plummet into the surf below? I scribble down the detail.
Returning to Sheffield Park House after finishing The Companion, I was surprised to find that, unlike Blacklock Hall, there are no steps to the front door. The fountain is there and, as in the novel, it doesn’t work. No King Tut the peacock. I leaned on the gate in the yew hedge ‘recalling’ the night of the storm.
In that moment, in my location, the story felt more real than the afternoon.
Lesley Thomson
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I was born in Sussex and holidayed there every year until I was sixteen. Unfortunately my granny didn’t have car so my knowledge of the area is limited to Worthing and Lancing.