I’m back at the Gladstone Library with the Sisters in Crime. Any murder in this library would have to carried out with fast acting poison, something silent – or the librarian would be straight there to deal with the noise.
It started well, with eleven of us at dinner for Thursday night. I was in love with my room, too. Sadly, not the ‘Dennis the Menace’ room, but not far away; up on the top floor, directly under the roof. The window is set into sloping walls and looks out onto the church a hundred yards away. A church tower lit at the very top by night and chiming every hour and quarter is a spooky companion. Great for writing Gothic stories, especially when two major storms sweep in.
We had a long breakfast together on Friday. I was going to go out for a walk in the morning to get my brains properly aerated, but Storm Austen put a stop to that by sending strong winds and heavy, constant rain to this part of the world. We were protected from the worst of it, luckily, but the windows in the library were rattling on Friday morning. As two of our group discovered, part of the roof in the Theology Room leaked, dropping a gentle ‘snowfall’ of white plaster flakes on Pauline’s keyboard and a steady plop plop plop of water droplets onto the floor between her desk and Linda’s. Both desks were removed from service while the staff worked to protect the books.
I had that bad feeling on Friday morning. Any writer will recognise this; I had two hours set aside to write in a silent place. A socket to plug in the laptop. A desk at the right height to rest the laptop on. A comfortable chair. Sum total of the morning’s work? Just under 1,000 words.
I have done better since then. Made a good start on a Gothic short story for the OU Write Club’s anthology (no, not involving the church tower of All Saints, Hawarden) and found a great topic for the blog I write for a local business.
More importantly, one of the Sisters ran a workshop on Saturday aimed at sharpening up the first ten thousand words of a manuscript. It was full of useful information to give any manuscript the kind of opening pages that attract attention. The top prize for any opening line has to consider Dodie Smith’s ‘I Capture the Castle’; “I write these words sitting in the kitchen sink.” If I could write a line like that, I’d be content. As it was, we spent some time assessing our own first lines, and there were some beauties there. I have landed among talented people, and I need to give my face a slap to keep up.
Saturday was just as wet and almost as windy as Friday, with Storm Boelo coming in close behind. Sue Cook and her husband made a flying visit at lunchtime, but Gladstone’s had to gently refuse their request to visit the library itself. The library is not an ordinary library. Gladstone’s legacy created it as a scholarly, almost sacred place (until 2010 it was closed to all except those practising or studying for a religious qualification). As much as the librarians wanted to let the visitors come in and absorb the peace and silence of the place, they felt they couldn’t. Readers and residents only. Every space and desk was filled that day; no room for a couple of visitors, however respectful. I discovered that myself that afternoon. I took one tiny desk in the far corner, the last one left before I would have had to retreat to my room.
Not that writing in my room was any hardship. At 5pm every day the doors to the History Room are closed and every person is gently (and almost silently) persuaded to move into the ground floor of the Theology Room. With all twelve desks on the gallery and every desk in the History area occupied, there was clearly no room in the post-5pm Library for me. It’s residents only after 5pm, but with thirteen Sisters in Crime and a large group booked to perform a play in the lounge there were more residents than desks. I went up to my room and sat at the little desk under the window, listening to All Saints chiming every fifteen minutes and getting on with my writing in a silence almost as deep as the library could provide.
Yes, thirteen Sisters. One of our number was too ill to attend, leaving us with thirteen for dinner. When I went into my room after dark I saw the lit tower of All Saints Church framed in the window, with the darkened graveyard at its feet. Add the constant storms, and you can do nothing better than plot Gothic.
The two days whizzed by. I’d planned to write three chapters of my work in progress, but the research has come to a thudding stop. But still. I ended up with the makings of a decent short story and some good ideas for improving the start of my manuscript to work on back home. We said goodbye on Sunday and I offered a lift to Chester to one of the party – yes, I have three passenger seats, but two people’s luggage and seating places is all a Mini can cope with.
I think Gail might decline any future offers of a lift after her magical mystery tour of Chester, but hey, she caught her train on time. The remainder of Sunday was spent slugging through closed roads and heavy traffic to get home. Where despite every good intention, I wound up falling asleep early. Waking up on Monday keen to get writing again.
