An Inconvenient Truth by Lorna Elcock, Author of The Windhover

‘And do you like books?’ the elderly, rich benefactor Elsa Buchanan asks the Cameron

children, early in my novel The Windhover.

‘Mother reads to us,’ says Ewan, aged six. ‘Books and books.’

It comes up a good deal in the novel: children, reading. Six-year-old Ewan appraises his mother’s stack beside her bed: he finds there ‘not good books but thick, dull ones and also a Bible, which you oughtn’t to think thick or dull and were to remember the better stories from, like Zacchaeus who hid in the tree.’ Later, there is the political difficulty about which of his big sisters, Moira or Alison, must do the job of reading him his bedtime story.

Poor Moira struggles with homework while also caring for her younger siblings, ‘a tower of books beside her and not a single one of them written for children.’ There are wildlife guides whose bookplates Ewan copies, learning how to draw; there is Mother’s diary, from which the children beg her to read, ‘all sitting with her on the bed, everyone’s feet under the covers’.

It won’t do my authorial mystique much good to tell you that putting all this reading into The Windhover was not in any way intentional and I only discovered it afterwards. But that’s how it was; I had no idea while writing. And when I finally noticed, it came as a complete surprise.

Perhaps, though, it shouldn’t have done. A writer is a reader first, after all, and books, their existence, have been a major part of my life. We were, you see, a reading family. In my father’s study, a little pine-lined space below the bathroom, the dark, old books were kept. These had quixotic titles and I am not altogether sure, now, that anybody had ever read them. In the double-fronted bookcase in the living room, my mother’s Ordnance Survey maps were stored; there, too, her guidebooks on mountains and on wildflowers, and the Scottish Renaissance fiction which my parents, I liked to imagine, had discovered that they loved together. On my brothers’ bookshelves were The Hardy Boys, Tony Robinson’s retellings of the Greek myths, Beano annuals. My own shelves – they had to buy me a bigger set, we made a special trip to Glasgow to get them – were stuffed with novels. From Shadow the Sheepdog and Lucy and the Merman through to The Silver Crown, Elidor and Sophie’s World.

In our house, books did work. They were used, and ignored, and scorned, and kept.

Argued over, ripped and otherwise defaced – the brother nearest in age to me, when we were perhaps six and seven respectively, writing, in ink, across the pages of my beloved children’s nature guide the awful slur, I HATE LORNA – BY MUM. Regardless, they were ever-present, and always loved. So I suppose it is quite natural that this outlook should trickle through into the children in The Windhover, whose lives – so much more turbulent than mine – still somehow contain the richness and stability which books of all kinds brought to us.

When I first discovered this phenomenon – my reading life having transposed itself into my novel without, apparently, the intervention of my brain – I felt quite alright about it. Who could object to reading’s being a recurring trope, enriching the sense of who these

characters are? Who could argue with an author showing reading as a source of happiness, security, good?

But soon I became aware of a small problem, which has rather loomed since.

The trouble is, the trickle-through is not confined to reading. A life contains a suite of

fundamental compass points, and unfortunately I have now detected that an objectionable number of mine have made it accidentally to the page.

As well as reading, I seem to have given to these children, variously, and non-exhaustively: my love of nature, my ideas about art, the daily resentments many women

feel about their caregiving and domestic responsibilities, the casual cruelties which siblings inflict upon each other even into adulthood, even into their forties when – by now! – you’d think I surely would know better (but I don’t). In their mother, I have given them the kindness and pleasure which my own parents worked so hard to give to us; in their father, I have loaded onto them the worst parts of myself, the sensitivity which often leads to anger, the tendency towards impulsiveness, to doubling down, whenever under threat.

I didn’t mean to do it. My novel is fiction, entirely made up. I have always been so

sure of that. I would never have set out to lay myself – or any of my life – so bare upon the page. And yet, there it is. In The Windhover, it has all come out in the wash.

Which has brought me to an uncomfortable and amazing revelation: If you’ve read this book and you meet me, you’ll know me. Warts and all. I’ve put my whole damned self right through the story like the letters on a stick of rock.

What a disaster. How awful.

How liberating.

How completely and utterly magical.

Wow. Aren’t books great?