Shadows of Time by Jackie Meekums-Hales

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Welcome to It's Raining Books. Were you a good reader and/or writer in school?

Yes, I was always good at reading and writing, though I don’t think I was conscious of it at the time. My mum was an avid reader, so she used to take us to the library every two weeks, as soon as we were old enough to read. Although we didn’t own many books, we always had two or three to read, and I loved reading. I would read under the bedclothes after lights out and hide away from a busy family, to lose myself in a book at any opportunity. Books we read in school made no allowances for a child’s vocabulary in those days, but I must have absorbed pronunciation and meaning, and I probably used context clueing without knowing it. Mum deliberately used to use words we might not know, so that we’d have to learn them and expand our vocabulary! At A Level, I studied English literature, so most of my writing was essays, rather than creative.

I didn’t have an opportunity to write at length at school, especially at primary school, but at the lower end of secondary school we regularly had “composition” for homework, and I always had a good mark. I was lucky enough not to have any problems with spelling or punctuation, and we used to have a weekly lesson on English grammar, so that was drummed into us. The only problem I ever had was being left-handed, because in primary school we had to write with a pen dipped in an ink well (I know, it sounds ancient!), and I used to smudge what I’d written. When I graduated to a fountain pen, it was better, and biros were a real bonus, even if they made my handwriting worse. There were no computers in my school days, so everything was written by hand, which made it far more laborious, but we used to be able to draft in pencil, revise and write up in ink, so we were encouraged to review what we’d written.

Have you taken any writing courses to help you prepare for a career in writing?

No. I could never aspire to a career in writing, when I was younger. Ironically, with a career as an English teacher, I had to teach creative writing for public exams, and I taught English Language at Advanced Level, which involved students producing some extended creative writing of various kinds. I attended a course for teaching that, but the criteria had a very different emphasis from those used in producing writing for publication, so they were no help when it came to honing my own novel. I learnt a lot during the editing process.

Have you started writing any books and then not finished them and if yes, is there a specific reason why you didn't finish?

Oh yes! A very long time ago, I began writing a novel based on my father’s childhood. It’s all hand-written in an old exercise book. I didn’t have much time to write in those days, and when he died I lost the impetus to finish it. I hadn’t identified the age group that would read it, and I didn’t think I’d got a clear target audience for it. I decided it wasn’t going to work, so it might be best as a short story. I used to write short stories for children, when my own son and grandchildren were growing up, and I started a novel about a boy meeting a wizard, long before “Harry Potter” existed! It’s still waiting to be finished, and I might go back to it one day, but I don’t think I can compete with J.K. Rowling.

Do you ever get writers block and if yes, what do you do to get back in sync?

I have had writer’s block, and if that happens, I stop trying to write until I’ve been for a long walk. While I’m walking, I try to sort out my ideas in my head and brainstorm where to go next. When you can’t distract yourself with anything else, it focuses the mind!

What first drew you to start writing Shadows of Time? Was there a specific moment that made you think up the subject?

When my younger sister and I were small, our dad used to tell us stories about his family, and I was fascinated. When information started to become available on the internet, I spent two years researching our family history, and the stories I found there made me want to bring characters to life. There were young men who went to war and didn’t come back, women who lost babies in infancy, emigration to New Zealand, Australia and Canada, and various other significant events. I ‘d been a keen watcher of some television programmes that reunited birth mothers with long-lost children, because I knew at least two people whose babies had been adopted when I was a child. I think it was probably my mother’s death that sparked the initial idea of “what if…?” and then I went to visit my daughter in Australia, where I saw the sculpture in Fremantle, dedicated to the Barnardo’s children who were shopped out there, some of them being my husband’s ancestors, and I sat on the seat dedicated to the “lost generation” of Aboriginal children that were taken from their mothers. The whole issue of women’s loss began to gel with my own experience of losing my daughter and grandchildren to the other side of the world. Maggie’s story began to embody that sense of bereavement, and I began to weave a family around her.

Do you consider Shadows of Time to have a specific lesson or moral for your readers?

I think one lesson is that we should never assume that someone else’s life is perfect, because we may not know what they carry as scars from a past that can’t be eradicated or denied.

Which actor/actresses would you like to see playing the lead characters if this book were made into a film?

What a tempting question!
Judi Dench as the older Maggie would be wonderful! Emma Watson as young Maggie.
Cathy – Kate Winslet
June – Olivia Colman
Robert – Colin Firth

Can you please tell us something about yourself that your readers would be surprised to learn?

I didn’t finish my first novel until I was 69, encouraged to finish it by my younger sister, who’d had her own debut novel published after retirement. I still hadn’t completely retired, and even now, at 71, I do some work as part of the governing body of the school where I taught for 26 years. What I didn’t know, to begin with, was that my sister’s publisher was also to be the one to accept my novel, so we are actually two sisters, both writing novels after academic careers, both published by Between the Lines Publishing. They had no idea, until after I’d signed my contract, because I submitted in my married name, so my sister’s was different.

Can you tell us about and share with us a photograph that tells a story?

The photograph is of The Orient Express. When I retired from teaching, at Christmas 2010, I was lucky enough to receive a cash sum as part of my pension arrangements. I decided to use some of it to fund a trip I had always dreamt of making. I’d read Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express”, and I’d seen wonderful pictures of both the trains and the service on board. I’d grown up a working-class girl, who could never have imagined being able to afford to ride the train, because it was the preserve of the upper classes, but it was just possible that my husband and I could give ourselves a special memory for retirement. I told my mum, who was, by then, 96 and very frail. She would have loved to travel, but she’d never had the chance. She was excited for us and said “Do it!”. So we booked our trip. What an experience! We sat on the Pullman from London to the coast, dining in seats like plush armchairs and waited on by deferential waiters in uniforms as crisp and white as the tablecloths. At Folkstone, we were met by a brass band, playing jazz while we boarded a coach to take us across the Channel to France. We eventually reached the famous wagon-lits, the trains with their rich wooden panels and Lalique glass. Between Calais and Venice, we were cosseted. We woke up to magnificent mountain views, and the excitement had us running from one window to another. We arrived in the wonderful chaos that is Venice station, and a water taxi took us to our hotel.

After five days of adventures on vaporetti, visiting sights like Murano and bridges like the famous Rialto, we flew back to England. We took to Mum the photos we’d taken and showed her the videos of mountains and sights like the fire boat on the Grand Canal. She loved it.

Two weeks later, Mum died, after a stroke. I am so glad we went to Venice when we did, and that we’d been able to share that with her. Had it not been for her determination that her children should have the education denied to her generation of women, it would never have happened.

In closing, do you have any questions that you would like to ask your readers?

I would like to ask the readers how they feel about flashbacks – fleshing out the story, or confusing? I belonged to a book club where opinion was divided, and one reader preferred the plot to go in a straight line.

Is there a topic concerning women that they feel no-one has dealt with? For example, my second novel is about a woman in her sixties, because not all readers are young.

Maggie’s daughter, Cathy, is a successful business woman in Australia. After the failure of a relationship and her mother’s death, she returns to England for the funeral, hoping to rekindle her childhood sense of carefree life in the Yorkshire countryside. She is confronted by revelations about Maggie’s tragic past, which has a legacy of loss overshadowing her family’s present and future. As Cathy and her sister June unravel the truth, her mother’s story unfolds in a flashback to 1945. Life for the young Maggie before they were born reflects the world of mid-century attitudes towards women who dared to have a baby out of wedlock. The illusion of the Maggie her daughters knew is dispelled.

Meanwhile, two young women explore family history, and fate takes a hand. Three families are linked through coincidences and circumstances they did not know they shared. Cathy must decide how far, and for what reasons, she allows herself to live in the shadows of the past.

Read an Excerpt

As she looked out across the water at the familiar silhouette of the city, she realised that what mattered was the past she carried within her, a past that time could not change. Her mother had kept her sadness and her loss to herself, but, like so many of her generation, she had gone to her grave with that trauma unresolved and the sorrow never wiped away.

That evening, on her laptop, Cathy listened to the testimonies of the children who were part of the “stolen generation”. There was a lot wrong with the world, but thank goodness it had changed. Their experiences seared her heart. "Half-caste" children had been forcibly removed in an attempt to dilute their brown skin in the future. How could that have been seen as right? How could it have been right to take away a baby born of love to a woman who had already lost the man who fathered it? She felt the weight of being a woman in a world where women had, for so long, been victims of hypocrisy and twisted morality. Somewhere in her head, those Aboriginal women and her own mother blended into one huge, tangled barb of loss. She would understand, next May, her country's "Sorry Day." She only wished there could be another, across the world, for all those women who wept for the children taken from them.

About the Author:

Jackie is a member of the Society of Authors, whose debut novel Shadows of Time was the fulfilment of an ambition nurtured during her working life as a teacher, inspired by her research into her own and others’ family histories. She has been writing as a hobby since childhood, contributing to poetry anthologies since her undergraduate days and being a Poetry Guild national semi-finalist in the 1990s. She has also written short stories for friends, family and students. Since retiring, she has contributed to Poetry Archive Now (2020), with 20-20 Vision, uploaded to YouTube, and has had poetry and flash fiction published online by Flash Fiction North. One of her flash fictions is to appear in an anthology, having been selected from entries during the Morecambe Festival 2021. She had a creative memoir, Shelf Life, published by Dear Damsels in 2019, a precursor to collaborating with her sister on a creative non-fiction memoir Remnants of War, published in 2021. She writes a blog about her walks and thoughts in the Yorkshire and Somerset countryside.

Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/jackieihales
Blog: https://jottingjax.wordpress.com/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/128512053-jacqueline-hales
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