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'Don't Pass Me By' - An Interview With Julie McGowan'
Julie McGowan is a Welsh writer, living in Usk, south Wales. Her first novel, ''The Mountains Between'' was a regional best-seller on its first release and is now in its third edition, having received much acclaim in Wales (including promotion on BBC Wales radio). ''Don''t Pass Me By'' is also set in S. Wales. It was released a month ago and is already achieving great sales and reviews.'' Buy ''Don''t Pass Me By'' here
Read Julie''s guest article here:- What''s In A Name?
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AmeriCymru: Hi Julie and many thanks for agreeing to be interviewed. You were born in Blaenavon and lived there for 12 years. Can you describe the town for our American readers? What effect did your upbringing have on your writing?
Julie: Thank you very much for interviewing me.
Blaenavon is a small town in the Eastern Valley of S. Wales, sprawled across the lower slopes of the Blorenge mountain which separates it from the market town of Abergavenny, gateway to the Black mountains and the Brecon Beacons. Facing the town rises the Coity mountain, where major coal mining took place. Blaenavon grew substantially in the industrial revolution, when coal began to be mined there and an iron foundry was developed. It is of sufficient historical importance that it is now a world heritage site, although the iron and coal are long finished. However, the mine – Big Pit – is now a national museum.
Row upon row of terraced houses were built during the industrial time when the town prospered, to house the miners and their families, and most of those terraces are still lived in today, although they have been modernised. I grew up in one such house, but at that time we had no central heating – just coal fires in the downstairs rooms – and no running hot water. There was a cold water tap in the kitchen, no bathroom (we bathed in a tin bath in the kitchen, which was filled with water heated by a small electric boiler) and there was one toilet outside in the yard. But there was no sense of deprivation because everyone else lived in similar houses – we were all in the same boat.
Like all valley towns, as Blaenavon grew it spawned a public house on every corner, and a nonconformist chapel on the opposite corner, and the residents were ardent chapelgoers, although these have dwindled in recent times and several of the chapels demolished. But during my childhood social activities at chapel formed a large part of one’s life as everything we did happened in Blaenavon. Very few families had cars, and if they did, the car was used by the father for work – the mother stayed at home to care for the children, and few women could drive. Social activities also took place in the Workman’s Hall – a wonderful Victorian building built from the penny subscriptions of the miners, which housed a library and a cinema for everyone, and billiard rooms used only by the men and from which children would be chased away.
The Workman’s Hall Blaenavon
So it was a very close-knit community, and, as families rarely moved away, one had relatives in every street – and even those adults who were neighbours rather than actual family were referred to as ‘auntie’ and ‘uncle’.
The cliché ‘we were poor but we were happy’ really applied during my childhood there – particularly as we weren’t aware of our level of poverty because it was all we knew. Winters were cold and harsh, with biting winds coming off the mountains, often bringing snow with them, but summers, even though not particularly hot, were times of freedom, when we would go out to play all day, roaming throughout the town and the mountainside, secure in the knowledge that we knew everyone and everywhere was safe, and with very little traffic around to worry about. We would only come home when we were hungry or when our inbuilt clocks told us it was nearly a mealtime.
Blaenavon is still a close-knit community of people who have lived there all their lives, brought their children up who have also stayed and married within the town, and so on. But it has suffered in recent decades from the loss of the mines and a big downturn economically that even the world heritage status has failed to alleviate.
Thus, my upbringing gave me a huge sense of the importance of family and community, and a need to belong. The feeling that Wales is home never left me because we always came back. Although we moved to England for my father’s work, every holiday we ‘went home’ to visit the vast network of family and friends, and, after 20 years back in Wales, I still get a thrill when driving through the spectacular countryside and the little streets and lanes of my childhood, that I am ‘home’ again.
The chapel side of my upbringing also gave me a sense of duty (without meaning to sound pious) and a continuing faith, and, being part of a community where it was important to stop and chat to your neighbours and friends whenever you met them, I have an abiding interest in the lives of others!!
AmeriCymru: When did you first become aware that you wanted to write?
Julie: I had always loved English literature lessons at school, and went through the common habit of writing poetry (seen by no-one) to describe my teenage angst. However, the desire to write properly came about when we were living at a private school where my husband was headmaster. As the headmaster’s wife in such a school it was always one’s fate to be roped into something that no-one else wanted to do. I had been a keen participant of amateur dramatics since a child, so when there was no-one to run the school annual drama performance, that task fell to me. I then discovered that it was nearly impossible to find a script that had sufficient parts for all the children I needed to get on stage. So, in my rather typical ‘gung-ho’ fashion, I decided to write one, and that was my first foray into writing. Not only was it well-received, but I found myself enjoying it enormously and decided that I would embark on writing as a part-time career. I felt that I had at least one novel in me, but, given the work ethic that a Welsh chapel upbringing had impressed upon me, I couldn’t justify writing as an indulgence if it wasn’t going to pay. So I started writing commercial short stories, and only when they were being bought and published did I feel that I could also give novel-writing a go.
AmeriCymru: Your first novel The Mountains Between enjoyed considerable success. Care to describe it for our readers?
Julie: ‘The Mountains Between’ is set in my favourite part of the world – Blaenavon and Abergavenny – between the years of 1929 and 1949 and follows the fortunes of Jennie, youngest daughter of a prosperous farming family who live just outside Abergavenny, and of Harry, youngest son of a family living just the other side of the Blorenge mountain in Blaenavon; a very different existence marked by poverty and unemployment.
Jennie is just 8 years old, living a difficult, though comfortable life, under the critical eye of her harsh, autocratic mother, Katharine. At the start of the book Katharine has just told Jennie that she was never wanted. This rejection haunts Jennie throughout her childhood and, ten years later, spins her into a hasty marriage as World War 2 breaks out. The malign influence of Katharine continues to spoil her life and ultimately she has to make the decision to take charge of her life if she is ever to overcome her sense of unworthiness.
Harry, meanwhile, although poor, is surrounded by people he loves and who love him. At the start of the book he is 15, desperate to be a man and go down the pit, but ends up working in the local co-operative store. He is also desperate to find a girlfriend, and the first section of the book follows his fortunes in this department. But life grows harsher still as the Depression hits the community hard, and by the outbreak of the Second World War Harry is already a young man who has known much sadness and heartbreak.
Do Jennie and Harry ever meet? Do they each find someone to love? You have to read the book to find out!
‘The Mountains Between’ came about after I started recording the memoirs of my parents and realised that not only did they give a fantastic insight into life in the early part of the 20th century, but also that they had had such different upbringings that it was a wonder they ever got together – and so the idea for a novel was sparked. All of the places and big events that happen in the book are real, only the story is fictionalised.
AmeriCymru: Your second novel is set in Cornwall. What can you tell us about Just One More Summer ?
However, the premise of the book is that Allie, at nearly 30, is recovering from a broken marriage and decides to spend the summer in Cornwall, the place of long-remembered childhood happiness, in order to lick her wounds. She herself is the product of a broken marriage and had vowed that when her turn came she would have a long and happy partnership, so she was devastated when her husband left her. In Cornwall she strikes up a friendship with an unlikely group of young people who appear to be led by an ageing hippy-type of woman, Marsha. Allie discovers that the other members of the group have all been ‘rescued’ at one time or another by Marsha, who helps Allie to find her own hidden strength. But as Allie finds herself falling for one of the young men, Adam, she also discovers that Marsha has secrets of her own, that Allie’s idyllic memories of childhood are flawed, and that back in London family issues have become ever more complicated. And at this point her husband, Will, decides that he wants to give their marriage a second chance.
Again, to find out what happens to Allie, you will have to read the book!
AmeriCymru: Your third novel Don''t Pass Me By is about a group of children evacuated to rural Wales from wartime London. Care to tell us more?
Julie: When I was researching World War 2 for my first book, I read a lot of accounts from people who were evacuated during the Blitz to South Wales. It struck me that these days we tend to look back on this mass evacuation of children with nostalgic rose-coloured glasses, but, in reality, whilst some children were very well cared-for, others had a really bad time with their ‘foster’ parents. At the same time I was writing features for magazines about how we agonise these days when our children leave home to go to college; will they be safe, will they be happy, will they manage? And these are 18-year-olds! Yet, in the Blitz, these small children of 5 years upwards were sent across the country to goodness-knew-where to live with complete strangers.
So I increasingly felt I wanted to write a book which reflected some of the things that evacuee children encountered.
‘Don’t Pass Me By’ has three main characters:
Lydia is a young woman who is desperate to escape from her violent husband, and joins an evacuee train with her young baby in order to get away. Once in the tiny village of Penfawr, near Swansea, the billeting officer has no idea what to do with her, as she’s not on his list, so she is foisted onto the unwelcoming local doctor, to act as his housekeeper.
Arthur is a young lad from the East End who just wants to go back to the life he led with his mother – who leads a rackety sort of existence, the immorality of which Arthur is only vaguely aware of. He loses contact with his mother during his time in Penfawr and subsequently causes a lot of headaches for the kind family who have taken him in.
Amy is also from the East End, a timid child who is scared of the dark. She is placed with the bitter, God-fearing widow, Mrs Preece, and her strange son, Edwin. Amy suffers terribly during her time in this household and doesn’t know who to turn to.
The stories of these 3 characters intertwine throughout the book and, ultimately, none of them can help themselves without helping each other.
AmeriCymru: You have also been involved with local theatre in your home town of Usk. Is theatrical writing something that you might explore in the future?
Julie: I run the local theatrical group with my husband, and write all the scripts for our shows and our annual pantomime – a strange, very British concept – and sell these scripts via my website.( www.juliemcgowan.com ) I really enjoy this work, especially as most of it is humorous, so is very different from much of my other writing, but I don’t have a burning ambition to write for the theatre in any other way. I think my scriptwriting is too light-hearted for modern theatre which seems to need a lot of depth and angst and to be more obscure.
AmeriCymru: What are you reading currently? Any recommendations?
Julie: I’ve just finished reading ‘All Change’, the 5th and final volume of the Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard. The books are a wonderful evocation of English upper middle class life and I’ve enjoyed them enormously. Each volume can stand alone, but I would recommend that anyone who is interested should really start with volume one ‘The Light Years’ and work their way through the whole series.
I’ve also just read ‘The Testament of Mary’ by Colm Toibin, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It’s Mary’s account of what happened at the crucifixion – beautifully written, but I’m going to read it again as I’ve been discussing it with a friend and we’ve come away from it with completely different views!
One of my favourites from last year was ‘Me Before You’ by Jojo Moyes – a brilliant book which took me by surprise with its depth and emotion when I thought it was going to be quite light and frothy.
AmeriCymru: What''s next for Julie McGowan? Are you working on another book at the moment?
Julie: Yes, I am working on another book, but it’s slow going when I have to currently spend a lot of time promoting ‘Don’t Pass Me By’! The working title of this next one is ‘Yes I’m gonna be a star’ and it’s the story of a teenage girl in 1971, who decides that she wants to be a famous singer, and goes off to London to do just that. She succeeds, but there are dreadful costs to pay along the way.
AmeriCymru: Any final message for the readers and members of AmeriCymru?
Julie: I am very grateful for the opportunity to promote my books with you. I sincerely hope that ‘The Mountains Between’ and ‘Don’t Pass Me By’ fill readers with nostalgia and love for ‘the old country’ and that they enjoy reading them as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them. I would love some reviews (good or bad, but hopefully good!) on Amazon, Goodreads, and any other book-based sites, and welcome emails from readers ( juliemcgowanusk@live.co.uk ) And finally, congratulations to all at AmeriCymru for the work you do in promoting all things Welsh – if any of your members are ever in this part of S. Wales I would happily give them a guided tour of my little part of it.
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