The Youngster: Behind the Book. Real Lives Re-imagined by Bibi Berki
Fryn Tennyson Jesse produced a prolific amount of written work in the first half of the 20th Century. As well as her journalism – she reported for The Times and The Daily Mail and was a war correspondent in 1914 – she wrote novels and plays and was an early chronicler of what we would now call true crime. She edited six volumes of the highly-regarded Notable British Trials series, which gave members of the public access to the detailed legal arguments in both historic and contemporary criminal hearings.
Tennyson Jesse is remembered now principally for her novel, A Pin to See the Peepshow. Although firmly a work of fiction, there’s no question that the book was inspired and informed by the Thompson-Bywaters affair – a court case which transfixed the nation in the early 1920s. Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters were convicted of the murder of Edith’s husband, Percy, and both hanged, despite Frederick’s assertion that he had acted alone and that Edith was entirely innocent. The case became a cause célèbre, the press and public appalled by the obvious prejudice of the trial judge who constantly referred to Edith as “the adulteress” and who almost certainly swayed the jury.
Edith’s florid love letters to Frederick were produced as evidence to suggest that she egged him on to kill her husband. It made her, in the judge’s opinion, an unquestionable accomplice to a pre-meditated act of violence. In fact, the best we can draw from her letters is that she was a fantasist, a passionate young woman thrilled to be in the clutches of a love affair.
It’s hard for us now to grasp just how entranced people were by this case, how hungry for press reports – not just on the trial but about the lives of the three attractive young people at the heart of such a tragic story. Edith – the so-called adulteress – won the public’s sympathy to such an extent, that as soon as she was sentenced to death, a petition sprang up to try to save her from the gallows. Fryn Tennyson Jesse read it all and felt it all. Twelve years later, her novel presented readers with a story that must have sounded very familiar, even if the book’s disclaimer emphasised that everyone between those covers was a work of fiction.
Julia Almond – the protagonist of A Pin to See the Peepshow – is indeed the novelist’s own work. Tennyson Jesse took the idea of a hapless dreamer and turned her into a pulsing, life-loving young woman who is audacious, flamboyant with her feelings, proud and self-confident. She wants to work, enjoys earning money and the independence that comes with it. Her marriage is a compromise, her love affair anything but. She is neither a heroine, nor a victim. Edith might have been the starting point, but the writer’s imagination has taken possession of her and modelled her afresh.
Was it an issue for the author that many of her readers would have been looking for Edith in Julia? Was that her intention anyway – exoneration for her subject? Or was she simply answering a creative urge to depict a fascinating though reimagined character? The writer, Sarah Waters, whose 2014 novel, The Paying Guests, was also partially inspired by the Thompson-Bywaters case, has described how she admired the “fidelity and the tremendous humanity” of Tennyson Jesse’s book and its “dogged commitment to its flawed, doomed heroine”. (The Guardian, August 23rd, 2014.) To her, it’s possible to come up with a fleshed-out literary creation which nonetheless remains faithful to a real person.
The Youngster
My novel, The Youngster, was also inspired by a real situation.
I saw it in a consumer rights programme on TV. I remember being stopped in my tracks by what was unfolding on the screen. There was a woman and she was talking about her mother, who was elderly and with vascular dementia. She lived alone in her cottage and had mentioned to her daughter that there was a younger man who kept passing by and chatting with her. The man’s visits became more frequent and soon the daughter lost all contact with her mother. The stranger had moved into the cottage and had secretly married the elderly mother, giving him full legal control of her home and her possessions. What struck me so forcefully was the daughter’s helplessness. A bond between a woman and her mother was violated and broken by an interloper.
That was all I needed. Counter-intuitive as it sounds, I did no research on the real lives of these people. I am full of admiration for the tireless work the daughter has since done in bringing to public attention the evils of so-called predatory marriages, but I had no intention of replicating her in fictional form. Instead, I reduced the scenario to the salient points: there’s a daughter, there’s a mother and there’s an intruder. The rest I created from scratch.
Do I feel a particular responsibility, having taken my inspiration from real and very painful set of circumstances? Oddly, I feel more uncomfortable writing this article than I did my book. Maybe because it feels like a revelation or confession whereas writing the book felt only like telling a story. So much fiction is taken from documented reality, whether on a grand scale – as in the tragic case of Edith Thompson – or more subtly and minutely, when writers recall events and incidents which resonate with them. Reality is already starting to mutate, even as facts are being reported. Revisiting them in fiction gives them another – perhaps even a useful – dimension.
The Photograph
A photograph of Edith and Percy Thompson and Frederick Bywaters – taken well before the murder – shows them sharing a garden seat (Frederick was lodging at the Thompson’s home at the time). Percy is lost in his newspaper, Frederick is languishing with a book, and Edith is sitting upright between them, staring dreamily into space, touching neither man, belonging somehow to both. Was this picture one of the catalysts to the writing of A Pin to See A Peepshow, I wonder? It’s such a portentous scene, feels almost staged, as though the photographer foresaw a troubled future for this household of three mis-matched young people. Knowing what happened next, makes it a deeply emotive visual document. There they are – three very real people, doomed and oblivious, never asking for fame or attention, expecting nothing but for the day to end and for another to begin – but already seeming like actors on a stage or characters in a book.
(c) Bibi Berki
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About The Youngster by Bibi Berki:
FROM THE LUCY CAVENDISH 2020 FICTION PRIZE SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF THE WATCH: NO ONE COMES BETWEEN THIS MOTHER AND DAUGHTER.
Georgie and her mother Cherry have had their ups and downs. But now they’re devoted to each other – and when Cherry learns that she’s in the early stages of dementia, Georgie is with her every step of the way…
…Until she can’t be. And that’s when he steps into her mother’s life. The one who’s been waiting, watching, whispering.
In turns deeply moving and deeply chilling, The Youngster is about one woman’s spiralling descent when her mother is taken away from her by a damaged younger man.
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