Crime thriller set in AMSTERDAM
Talking Location With author Kerry Hadley-Pryce – The Black Country
15th February 2023
#TalkingLocationWith…. Kerry Hadley-Pryce, author of God’s Country, The Black Country
God’s Country is my third ‘Black Country novel’. It is the story of Guy Flood, who returns to his childhood home for the funeral of his identical twin brother. It’s set in my hometown in a region of the UK Midlands called the Black Country. But, the Black Country itself is a conundrum. Some people think it’s part of Birmingham. It isn’t. There’s no Black Country Metropolitan Borough Council, or Republic of The Black Country. Try Googling ‘map of the Black Country’ and see what you get. Confused, is what you get. It’s neither North nor South, city or countryside. It is a place without borders. And, see, that’s the point: an important aspect of the Black Country is that it is borderless, unmappable, maybe a little bit weird, a little bit exclusive. People argue about where, or what, it is, and that is part of its unique identity.
According to some academics (Anderson, 1983) ‘The Black Country is an “imagined community” existing in the minds of its residents’, and according to others, ‘The Black Country is wherever its dialect is spoken’.
Environmental psychologists talk about how place is vital in the formation of personal identity. Black Country identity is inextricably connected to its industrial history, but also to the landscape itself; and landscapes change. In identity terms, there’s a lot to be said about being ‘unmappable’.
I’m often asked, what’s so special about the Black Country? What distinguishes it from anywhere else? I did a talk once, up in Dewsbury, and talking to the organiser, he said, ‘Oh, well, The Black Country and Dewsbury are the same.’ They’re not. The very fact that the Black Country is considered ‘imagined’, or that no-one really knows where it is, is a starting point. Like other areas or regions, or places, you might say it is yet another victim of the effects of rapidly declining manufacturing industries. As industries have closed down or have relocated, they’ve left behind abandoned buildings in a patchy backdrop. But although industrial architecture isn’t particularly valued, in general terms, the Black Country’s past has influenced every aspect of its urban fabric from the design of streets and buildings to the railway and canal systems, to the type of brick, to the paths we have to tread and to the air we breathe here. The stories, memories and experiences of people who lived and worked in this landscape, and whose lives are still bound up with the workings of the area provide a very specific invisible evolving landscape of human experience.
Whatever anyone says, the Black Country is a significant and, really, unacknowledged presence, right on our second city’s doorstep – or rather, the second city is right on its doorstep. It is, or has, little corners that have been forgotten – in the ‘80s there was a word for them: SLOAPS (Spaces Left Over After Planning). By focusing on this notably unmappable place, any creativity, writing or otherwise from there, takes the idea of ‘place’ at its word, off the beaten track.
As a writer, it’s true, I’ve wondered what it is about walking through this borderless, uncanny, weird area that I find so inspirational, and why it is that the sensation of the place itself leaches into my writing. In God’s Country, my protagonist, Guy Flood, walks the same paths as I do, sensing afresh his Black Country life, and the secrets he left behind. We both experience the urban architecture of industrial ruins, that seem to melt into the canals: often wild, unkempt and uncared for, with towpaths that present as awkward, dangerous terrain. But there is a gorgeousness about them and their capacity to provide an uneasy collaboration of threat and beauty. It’s here where I feel I walk with Guy Flood, out from the town, along a single track, that, when it rains, is virtually impassable. It leads to overgrown areas, tangled with brambles and laced with fungi, further on, someone’s horses graze in two fields and the canal suddenly widens, poaching the grass verges. Birdsong is louder there, and there’s a heron, a hawk, woodpeckers. Stourbridge town’s ring road is about two miles – less, probably – away, but you can’t hear the road. You – we: Guy Flood and I, are at the edgeland of the edgeland, uncelebrated and little acknowledged. In the 1800s, Elihu Burrit described it as ‘black by day and red by night’. Today some people give it a name, this place: ‘God’s Country’. For Guy Flood, that’s all you need to know.
Kerry Hadley-Pryce
God’s Country is published by Salt Publishing 15th February, 2023
Catch Kerry on Twitter @kerry2001
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I have just finished reading this amazing work of literary and societal fiction, however, I know it will be several hours before I can even begin to process what I have just experienced, let alone commit my thoughts to paper!
Outstanding, is all I can say for now! 🙂