As I've grumbled before, I think that where in a writer's life fiction comes from is in many ways beside the point. And yet it seems to be the backbone of much of what people - readers, journalists, editors considering whether your deep-sea-diving chick lit is saleable - ask about your work. I do understand the curiosity, and as long as it doesn't shade into thinking that 'I lived through it' means your work is more valuable than 'I made it up', it's fine. But when I came across an obituary, the other day, I couldn't help having an autobiographical twinge.
I think I must have been about eight, and we were in Oxford, going to have tea with my mother's godmother: one of those things that as a child you just get taken along to, and have to mind your manners and say what you like doing best at school. I knew Anne Ridler was a poet - which didn't mean a lot to me then - because we got the most beautiful Christmas card every year, with one of her poems printed on the front. But I didn't know that her husband Vivian Ridler was a printer. I don't know if he was retired by then, but in fact he was or had been for many years Printer to the University of Oxford, with a huge works for printing everything from textbooks by the hundred thousand to the Queen's Coronation Bible. But in the shed at the bottom of the garden at home he had a little press, run by electricity, as I remember, but basically no different from the kind of press which has been printing everybody's books since the late eighteenth century. I can still see it, lolloping away, pressing inky black words onto page after page of thick creamy paper, the iron geometry of the press in motion as beautiful and compelling as that of the Flying Scotsman.
Now I know that they called it the Perpetua Press, and that Anne had been T S Eliot's secretary at Faber & Faber (she left to marry Vivian; the next secretary became the second Mrs Eliot), and I still love her work. I'm sad to think that my mother will no longer get those beautiful Christmas cards, which were, of course, printed by Vivian in the shed at the bottom of the garden. And now I know that this tea-time, childhood memory hung around ever more, somewhere in the back of my head. What wasn't yet called A Secret Alchemy always had books and storytelling at its thematic core, with a walk-on part for Caxton (who was later left on the cutting room floor). And I wanted a family business on which to centre Una's modern story, as the family business of ruling the kingdom is the centre of Elizabeth and Anthony's story. From somewhere deep in the thirty-year old mud of memory, rose this small event of my childhood. I did do more research - saw another press working, read and explored. But it all started with Vivian Ridler.
