The Sitter: How my fascination with the repositories of history – the stories we pass down, the objects we keep, the houses we live in and the landscape we inhabit – inspired my debut novel.
The Sitter came to me as I passed through a village called Melton Constable, near where I live in North Norfolk. I sensed I was passing through somewhere very unusual. The houses were made of brick rather than Norfolk flint, huge derelict warehouses loomed behind them and there was a palpable sense of loss in the air.
I stopped the car and walked around, passing tiny terraced houses, through overgrown allotments, by boarded up Victorian railway workshops and into the graveyard of a brightly painted church made of corrugated iron that I later learned was called The Tin Church. As I drove away, I realised that the hedge boundary in the distance had once been a railway line. This was the beginning of what turned out to be a long journey of research for The Sitter.
I was greatly helped by a woman called Phyllis Youngman who, though elderly and chair-bound, had a wealth of knowledge. When the railway closed in 1959, she gathered in photographs, diaries and accounts of the lives people whose lives had been ruled by the comings and goings of the trains, working as engineers, clerks, draughtsmen, coal shifters, fitters, trimmers and upholsterers. One evening she invited their descendants to come and share their stories with me. I realised how unique the place had been, how precious their memories were and that they deserved to be recorded.
I was inspired and began developing my own story – one that follows the life a young baker’s boy called Jack Stamp who develops a crush on Rosie, a beautiful newcomer to the village with a mysterious past. Houses are great keepers of memories. Jack describes Melton Constable (re-imagined by me as Swanton Stoke). “On this side of the village we have to make do with lamps and water from the pump at the end of the road. We are called The Privates because the houses weren’t built by the Railway Company but by the landlords who rent them to us. Billy lives on the other side of the main road in a house built by the Railway Company, with water and gas laid on, so he doesn’t have to fetch water. The Railway company takes their rent off the men’s wages.”
The Victorian Industrial Age
The derelict warehouses perfectly evoke the Victorian industrial age. Jack pokes his head round the corner of The Works. “The gas lamps light up the polished bodies of the carriages, and the workmen’s silhouettes cast huge shadows against the sheds. The place is peopled by so many giants it is difficult for me to sort human from shadow…A filthy stinking job. The lads are busy with wads of cotton waste. They guard them fiercely and hide them from each other as there aren’t enough to go round. Waste to them is like gold dust. A funny sort of gold dust is all I can say.”
I wanted Jack to keep a small diary, which would take my readers straight into his life, allowing us to go with him to slide on the ice, turn out to feed stranded passengers in torrential rains, run wild through the alleys, fishermen’s cottages and ramparts of the nearby seaside town Highcliffe, and watch the lifeboatmen launch into the storm, “swivelling their oars like tiny spoons in a simmering broth”. The diary form also allows us to hear Jack’s inner voice, his doubts about God, his inability to mourn for Queen Victoria with her “upside-down face”. It feeds him nuggets of information about events in history, famous battles, blue butterflies, how wind is made.
Rosie’s story is also told in the first person, so we access her impressions of Swanton Stoke as she compares it with the London she left behind, swirling with new ideas about fashion, art and science. She visits the new department stores and escalators, learns about the Aesthetic Movement, sketches new species arriving at London Zoo and is astonished by Darwin’s theory of evolution. I wanted my readers to be inside her head as her relationship with a famous cartoonist develops and the modelling she does for him becomes ever more risqué.
When eventually she finds evidence of his passion for pornography in photographic glass plates hidden at the top of the house, we are with her. “There is no-one to hear my cry as the plates fall to the floor. One schoolgirl after another goes down. I cut my hands on the shards of glass as I don’t fully understand what I’m doing. I see glass on the floor but it is far away from me. Everything is in chaos. My heart thumps and my face is wet. So many of them. There are so very many of them.”
Streets, houses, paintings, letters, clothes, menus, shopping lists, recipe books and even pieces of newspaper hanging in an outdoor toilet, all have the capacity to reveal so much about the way people lived. I use all of these in The Sitter but my favourite is probably a black-and-white dress made by Rosie, copied from the painting Ball On Shipboard by James Tissot, which Jack Stamp keeps in a basket under his bed to remember her by. When he first saw it, he thought it was a basket of eels. Now, as a grown man, when he lifts the lid it leaps out of its own accord like the pelt of a zebra.
He keeps another memento which Rosie gave him, a fly trapped in amber, which I use as symbol for things past which still carry meaning for us today. “Mother leaves rag rugs, Father leaves his book of recipes, the men leave clean carriages and trains that run on time, Flinty Daredevil leaves his boat, I leave my diaries,” writes Jack. “We all make leavings for people to find one day in the future.”
(c) Caroline McGhie
Caroline McGhie is a multi-award-winning journalist who has written for The Sunday Times, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Sunday Telegraph, and was part of the launch team for The Independent on Sunday. She has written columns for The Financial Times, The Standard and Country Living. She has lived in North Norfolk for over thirty years. The Sitter is her first work of fiction.
About The Sitter by Caroline McGhie:
Adolescent baker’s boy Jack catches sight of a beautiful woman alighting from a train at dusk. His remote Norfolk village is built around a railway maintenance hub known as The Works which is ruled by ritual, hierarchy and God.
Newcomer Rosie is escaping a secret past involving a well-known London cartoonist who is a proponent of early photographic pornography.
A beguiling tale of love and learning unfolds against the backdrop of the hardships faced by the railwaymen and fishermen of the time.
Poignant and moving, this literary novel weaves the key themes of women’s rights, childhood memories, sexual freedom, religion, art and pornography around it’s compelling cast of characters. Based on extensive research in and around Melton Constable and Cromer, The Sitter exudes the charms of Victorian Norfolk and a nostalgia for the steam railways.
An historical novel of richness and depth, The Sitter is a remarkable, engaging and deeply atmospheric debut.
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