Jane ‘s brand new is out now!
The idea for The Start of the Story came about when I found myself in a ferocious debate over the origins of ghost stories. Was the white lady who was supposed to walk around a large manor house really the departed spirit of a daughter of the house who (‘it is said’) threw herself from an upstairs window because she had fallen in love with a stable boy and her father refused to let her marry him? Why were there no records of this? Given that high-born girls knew that their father would choose their marriage partner and had probably had him lined up from birth? Were nuns really being walled up wholesale for falling for monks, rather than just quietly allowed to leave the abbey for a secular life with a lot less bother and expenditure of bricks?
Or was it a cautionary tale? ‘Don’t fall in love with an unsuitable man or you’ll end up like her.’ From there on it was a short hop to tales of Jenny Green-Teeth, the hag who haunted deep water, ready to pull unwary children under the surface and eat them, and, indeed to other folk tales. Ghost stories and folk tales seemed to me to be less about actual events and more about allusions–hints and warnings. Don’t go up on the moor after dark or the fairies may grab you; a story to keep children from wandering. If you put a bowl of milk out for the fairies, they will clean the kitchen; or a hungry young farm worker might just sweep the floor at midnight when nobody is about if he can get to drink a bowl of cream and blame the fairies.
Humans have always created narratives to explain events. We’re good at it. Tales of thunder gods and nature spirits, legends and fables, it’s how we made sense of the world before science. Sometimes it’s easier to make up a story than to face the unpalatable facts – girls didn’t hang themselves because they were pregnant, they did it because they were trapped in a way of life they knew they could never escape. In The Start of the Story, the fairies are held captive under the Fairy Stone and to lift it is to release the fairies into the world. Or is there another reason for the folk tale, another reason not to lift the stone…?