Real writers write fiction and/or poetry. I once wrote a short poem when I was about twelve, but then I read it again in the morning – and I realised I’m no John Keats. Make no mistake, I love poetry, but that doesn’t make me a poet. Now, however, things are about to change. I’ve written a work of fiction, The Lifers’ Club and when/if it’s published, I already have plans for another. So will I shortly become a fully-fledged writer, rather than a mere landscape and archaeology author? Will I be able to go to Hay and hold my head high in the Green Room? Will I? Please say Yes someone.

And the answer to that question is indeed Yes, but first I must acquire some writerly accessories, and the first of these has to be a shed. Now I’ve published a view of my shed on the Unbound website and frankly it’s a disorganised tip and barely worthy of being called a hut. A bloody awful mess. Truly authorial. Nothing even remotely writerly about it. The likes of Philip Pullman or Roald Dahl wouldn’t be seen dead in such a place (sorry! Not in very good taste, but what the Hell…). Frankly it was deeply embarrassing and I’m very surprised I had the temerity to put it on the website at all (but Twink insisted, the bitch).

The Authors hut

Then yesterday I finished reorganising, or should that be plain, organising it. And it has been truly transformed.  I think everyone’ll have to agree it now looks highly writerly. And just in time for Hay! WHOOPEE! I can imagine setting my laptop on that potting table and dashing off a few Alan Cadbury short stories for the Literary Review, or Granta, or both.

The Writer’s shed

Now to have a writerly shed is one thing: I’ve also got to acquire some lovably eccentric traits for my future biographer, or, better, biographers to discuss at interminable length when I’m dead (maybe I’ll ask my cousin Charles Moore to do me ‘an official’ one, as he did such a good job for [or should that be ‘on’] Mrs. Thatcher). I’ve even asked Twink and she had nothing remotely sensible to suggest, but dropped a bone on my shoes – some sort of hint, I suppose. I then put the problem to Maisie who looked at me as if I was mad. ‘You could always say you loved zip-wires’, was all she could suggest, but I suspect she hadn’t really thought about it at all. Maybe I could claim I liked to sweeten my tea with WD-40 or RoundUp, but they don’t ring true, either. So if anyone has a bright suggestion to make, could they please either Tweet me (@PryorFrancis) or approach me in person or at the Unbound session at Hay-on-Wye? Now that I’m almost a writer, I’d dearly like to be remembered as ‘that lovable eccentric’. Or would I? Should I? God knows. Best ask Twink, as Maisie left the room about ten minutes ago.

Ever since I came out of the closet and confessed to the world that I’d written a crime novel, people have been asking me about my hero, Alan Cadbury. So far I’ve managed to find just one photo of him and I once caught a glimpse of his passport which stated he’d been born in January 1971. Maybe one day I’ll find out if he was born in hospital (probably I suspect, the Pilgrim, in Boston) or on the farm in the Lincolnshire Fens. But although I don’t want to give away too much about him at this stage (because I want you to subscribe to the book, if you haven’t done so already), I can confess that he has very eclectic musical tastes – far more so than his more celebrated, albeit fictional, colleague in crime, Inspector Rebus. Alan, like me, is a huge fan of 0.5 M.0.5 B., but I rather suspect he’s been into them for very much longer than my mere two months.

So just to give you a flavour of Chatteris, Alan and The Lifers’ Club, I thought I’d reproduce the two passages that mention the small Fenland market town, which today is in north Cambridgeshire, but is built almost entirely out of the grey/yellowish brick that’s so characteristic of (old) Huntingdonshire. Why oh why did they have to mess around with long-cherished identities, back in 1974? And ‘Humberside??!!’  I ask you! But I rant, nay, digress. Chatteris is just too far north of Cambridge for most commuters, so has retained its Fenland atmosphere. It’s also by-passed on two sides, so isn’t too congested, nor, I fear, too prosperous, either. The cliché is to describe such small towns as ‘sleepy’, but there are too many agricultural workers and a sharp easterly wind for that. It’s also famous for its fish-and-chips. Need I say more? So here are those extracts, which I’ve slightly doctored so as not to spoil the plot, if and when the book does appear. In the first, Alan describes where he’s currently living:

‘You’ve moved from Leicester?’ [Jake asked Alan].

‘Oh yes, seven years ago. After we’d finished the Flax Hole dig. I landed a big site near Peterborough and moved back to the Fens.’

‘Moved back? So you come from around here?’

‘Yes, I was brought up on a small farm near Crowland…’

‘And now?’

‘Now I’m at Tubney.’ Jake was none the wiser. ‘It’s a little village about ten miles away. Near Chatteris. I’m in a grim bungalow. Everything stinks of diesel…

‘Everything? Even the bathroom…’

‘Yes, even the phone. The place used to be owned by scrappies…’

Ali smiled ruefully.

‘Say no more. Sounds like you’d be better off in here…’

‘Except the village pub’s next door.’

Jake’s smile was neither hostile nor friendly.

‘Oh yes?’

‘The Hat and Feathers. I drink there most nights. Keeps me sane.’

‘So you’re OK, then.’

Somewhere outside a loud bell sounded and people started to leave through a door on the other side of the room. Jake glanced up at the clock on the wall, then said with some disdain:

‘I’d better be off. Feeding time at the zoo.’

The second extract is even shorter. It describes a pub about five miles from Tubney (so not the Hat and Feathers). It’s quite short, but then I don’t ‘do’ long moody descriptions. If you can’t say it briefly, then don’t say it at all. So here it is, all three paragraphs of it, again doctored in key places:

Alan hadn’t wanted to meet Lane at the college after the interview. He didn’t know why. It just felt wrong. There were too many eyes in that place, and if Jake managed to detect even the slightest hint that he was seeing the Law, then the whole project would be dead in the water. So he suggested the Old Slodger.

Traditionally, ‘slodgers’ were fenmen of the south Fens; ‘yellowbellies’ were their Lincolnshire equivalents. This pub was a small independent house with close links to a micro-brewery in Chatteris. Alan knew the beer was always good, the food plentiful and fresh, although a bit robust for London tastes, and the company relaxed. He liked it.

He walked into the bar. A couple of the locals said hello, but then they left him alone. That was another thing he liked about the Slodger: Fen people never crowd you. He ordered a beer and a round of sandwiches, then sat down, taking a copy of the local paper from a rack by the fire. He was starting to warm up and relax. After a quarter of an hour, half a pint and a doorstep sandwich, DI Lane entered.

Now I must go out and spray off some persistent creeping thistles. Next stop: Hay-on-Wye!

In a normal year I plan to have my potatoes and broad beans planted by the end of March, if at all possible. Sometimes this might mean that the early potatoes go in, in the last week of the month, to be followed by the second earlies and early main-crop a week later (often over the Easter weekend). But there’s absolutely no point in planting potatoes if the ground’s too cold and (in this year) wet: they’d simply rot in the ground. So this year I planted them very late indeed – fully a month later than I would in a good year – on May 3^rd. The weather was reasonable and I managed to plant all of them, in five rows: one of first earlies, nearly two of second earlies and three of early main-crop. As I think I explained in earlier Grow Your Own posts, I don’t plant full main-crop spuds, as they mature late in the year and tend to get attacked by slugs in our heavy fen soil. I also refuse absolutely to use slug pellets as these kill toads and hedgehogs, both of which are currently very much in danger.

The secret of growing good spuds is to buy the seed early (I do this in early January) and then leave them on a sunny, frost-free windowsill to let the young shoots (or chits) form.

Potatoes chits after 4 months

Here you can see what to aim for: short, stout shoots, and ideally quite tight and dark; avoid fleshy ones. Then, and very carefully, I place them in the soil, in narrow grooves, or drills, about three to four inches deep and about a foot apart, or a bit more for main-crop varieties. Then cover them with a bank of soil scraped up from either side of your drill, with a pull-hoe or stiff rake (use the back). You’ll probably find that birds, and passing cats, dogs and hares will damage your neat ridges and if that happens ridge them up a few weeks later, ideally just before rain (which will tend to ‘glue’ the loose earth in place).

Seed potatoes in their drill

I usually tap the top of the banks covering the spuds flat, as this allows rain to penetrate better in this dry part of Britain.

You want to get your broad beans planted quite early in the spring to avoid problems in the summer caused by blackfly (like greenfly, they’re sap-sucking aphids), which runner beans are very prone to. So I’m a bit anxious that mine went in so late this year, but having said that, it’s currently far too cold and windy for aphids. So fingers crossed.

Soak your broad beans for at least 2 hours before planting, then I like to add a table-spoonful of ordinary paraffin to the wet beans, immediately before I plant them. This may sound mad, but I was told to do it by an old boy after I’d related how I’d lost 30% of my crop to mice. And I’ve never lost a plant since. Having said that, it’s the sort of thing the bureaucrats in the EC hygiene Gestapo are bound to object to. So don’t mention it to a soul.

Broad beans in their drill

Spread the broad beans evenly across a wide drill and cover with a couple of inches of soil – and make sure they’re all fully buried, or the birds will get them. Then you must keep them watered for at least two weeks. The same goes for your green peas, which I also like to get planted late in March, in normal years. They must be kept wet too (for what it’s worth, I also add a splash of paraffin to them, before planting).

I’ve just been out and taken pics of the beans and the spuds and I have to say I’m delighted by the results so far: germination seems to have been 100% successful. Isn’t growing your own a pleasure? I almost prefer it to writing…

Potatoes after three weeks

Broad beans after three weeks

‘Yes, but did you have any contact with your readers?’ I hear a strangled cry from the cheaper seats.

In theory at least, I did, at book-signings in independent booksellers up and down the country, not to mention big events, like Hay-on-Wye, and more recently the excellent festival at Bath. But having said that, I was the one who stood at the front of the room and held forth. The audience listened, respectfully. Essentially I was declaiming; it certainly wasn’t a two-way process. After the talk, I may even have muttered a few well chosen platitudes as I graciously condescended to inscribe their books with my signature… But was it involvement in any meaningful sense of the word? Sadly, I now realise it wasn’t.

The more I have become involved with crowd-funding, the more I realise it’s actually about people. My readers – and what they want. It’s just like the DigVentures excavations. Those digs only work because of the people who take part. Yes, they pay, but they choose to pay. And they buy-in to the whole experience and contribute hugely to the project. And they give of themselves because nobody is ripping them off.  Look, would you expect to be admitted to the English National Opera at Covent Garden, for free, so why should a top-flight excavation be any different? And besides, there will always be ways to go on excavations for free, as a student or young person – just as my books will always be available (and even those published through Unbound) free, at libraries and over the internet.

So maybe in the future writers will have to quit their (award-winning in my case) desks and spend far more time with their readers, either on Twitter, or other social media, or face-to-face at inter-active sessions (rather than ‘lectures’) at places like Hay or Bath. Who knows, maybe purpose-built writers’ pubs and taverns will be built where the interested public could get to meet their favourite (or most loathed) authors? U.S. bookshops are already heading in that direction. No, I honestly don’t think that we’ve even begun to think about the implications that internet-based movements, like crowd-funding, might have on our lives in the future – or indeed on the evolution of urban landscapes.

One final thought: if you’re the sort of lazy, indolent half-wit who is always sponging off your friends and never contributes anything worthwhile to society, then you’re probably reading the correct blog for you. In The Long Run will be right up your street.  But put yourself in my position: how can I possibly fund my detective/thriller if half the crowd who are supposed to be funding it are sitting at home, stuffing their faces with canapés and Champagne while listening to Paul Jones and the Blues Band CDs (I’ll be at one of their concerts on Thursday (May 16^th), in the South Holland Centre, Spalding)? I mean how can I possibly succeed in this venture, let along achieve my next goal (60% funding), if everyone continues to sit on their back-sides with chequebooks and cards wedged firmly in their ever-tighter trouser pockets?? So to these people I say: break the habit of a lifetime and subscribe. It’ll change your life, forever. And who knows, we may even get to meet…

When we arrived it was overcast and windy, but slowly the sun won out and the weather improved. We got out of our mini-bus and slowly climbed the hill up to the great flagpole, flying the Stars and Stripes. It still felt strange to look up at what is essentially a foreign flag. Then we all turned round and there was a spontaneous silence as we were confronted by thousands of white crosses, below which was the grave of a dead person. Each cross carried the person’s name, rank and date of death and I couldn’t help but notice how many airmen died on certain dates in 1942 and ’43 – presumably on those vast thousand bomber daytime raids. And of course heaven alone knows how many crosses they left in their wake in Germany.

Beyond the crosses the land sloped down to the flat fields of the Fens, which spread for about forty miles, across to the Wash and the North Sea. It’s a landscape I know intimately and love dearly, but yesterday afternoon those crosses transcended everything – and, don’t worry, I’m not about to spout stuff about ‘the price of freedom’, or other clichés, but they brought home to me what it means to be human. You can’t avoid inconsistency and lack of logic. Mankind’s world is an irrational place. War is Hell and war is wrong, but sometimes you have to fight to prevent insanity taking over. That’s why those brave men and women died and the evil they fought was clear to all.

But the times we now live in have changed: threats and evils abound, but they are all different and require different answers and different solutions. Grand-sounding concepts like the War on Terror are totally misguided and will achieve nothing, other than to drive desperate people to greater levels of craziness and extremism. When I looked at those crosses I realised that the lessons of history are all-important. Nothing, but nothing, matters more. And if we close our eyes to them, we will be creating vast fields of crosses that would extend to the horizon, and beyond.

So why am I suddenly waxing philosophical when I ought to be writing about Alan Cadbury or the planting-out of my potatoes – or indeed some new archaeological revelation? It’s because I spent yesterday travelling in the Fens, on lonely Fen roads with vast stretches of empty fen dykes and horizon-to-horizon Fenland skies with clouds and sharp showers, swooping birds and towering pylons; even the many wind farms on the horizon looked exciting. It’s a solitary landscape, if ever there was one, and I find it’s good for the soul. Landscapes can do this for me: they provide a counter-balance to introspection; they lift and focus, yet they don’t shift your thoughts from where they want to go. I can’t find it within me to think of landscapes as sources of history and the understanding of ordinary people’s lives alone; these are mere academic justifications.

No, there’s far more to landscapes than rational thoughts: I find them more involved – wrapped-up, even – with my own life and ambitions. It’s strange, but I don’t find I’m travelling through a landscape, so much as with one; to me, they’re companionable and almost intimate – and very supportive in one’s darker moments. That’s why I find solitude in such surroundings feeds compassion and sympathy; it doesn’t instil jingoistic pride in Britain, or disdain for foreigners; if anything it fuels compassion. And for what it’s worth, solitude can be enjoyed with someone else, provided he or she is aware. That, surely, is the key to a long-lasting relationship: the ability to allow one’s partner time and space for solitude. And it’s becoming so difficult in this age of incessant Tweets and texts and emails – most of which are merely about the process of staying alive – of earning a living. Solitude, on the other hand, takes you way beyond all of that. But to where? I wish I could tell you, but it’s something you must discover, for yourself.

It’s like everything is going mad: the lawn is growing at a crazy rate. I refuse to cut it twice a week on principle (why use the fuel), but as a result even my powerful (17 hp) mower is having trouble coping. Two weeks ago, there wasn’t an asparagus spear in sight, but now my two beds resemble crowds of tiny commuters rushing to catch a train. And as for the broccoli… Again, two weeks ago we were having to ration what we ate, but now we’ve been stuffing ourselves with both purple and white, and even so, 90% of the new shoots are going to flower – and be wasted. Normally we would eat the lot. Even the chickens have gone mad, with all three hens laying an egg a day. And the swallows are building nests in the front porch of the house and in the barn, flying in and out with beakfuls of mud and straw. And there are dozens of newts frolicking in the pond.

I know what’s coming next: we’ll be praying for rain…

Purple (foreground) and white broccoli in over-abundance.

A routine harvest

Asparagus – in profusion

Throughout the mid-1990s, my time was totally taken up with the writing-up of two major excavations, first the Neolithic causewayed enclosure at Etton and then Flag Fen itself, which was eventually published in 2001. As soon as I had finished writing the massive Flag Fen volume for English Heritage, the timber circle at Holme-next-the-Sea turned up and this became the focus for a book about the Bronze Age that I had in fact already started. By this time I was in the process of acquiring a Literary Agent, the excellent Bill Hamilton of the old-established firm A.M. Heath and Co. Bill still handles my writing with quiet tact and diplomacy. It was Bill who oversaw my Seahenge book and arranged for it to be published by HarperCollins, for whom I then wrote the four-volume Britain series.

But back in 1997 I had begun to keep an e-diary, which eventually transformed itself into this blog. One day I’ll post a series of its entries (which I quoted in the Seahenge book, incidentally). That diary, and latterly this blog, helped me stay in practice as a writer and made it very much easier to start work on my detective story, The Lifers’ Club, which took me over two years to write and went through no less than twelve separate drafts, before Bill was at all satisfied with the end result. So don’t let anyone tell you that writing fiction is somehow easier than the supposedly factual stuff.

I’m sometimes asked about the people who appear in the book: ‘Is old Mike in it?’ My normal reply is a bit ambiguous: ‘yes, bits of him are…’ Then, depending on age and gender there’s a brief exchange, rich in innuendo,  about which particular bits. In actual fact, of course, whole people never appear, because as soon as they start to act independently, they do so in their own, particular way. To use a cliché, the character takes over; but the trouble is, this isn’t always consistent. Indeed, I had minor characters change their names, age and sex before I learnt the discipline of keeping a detailed cast list, complete with potted biographies.

Everyone who has read early drafts of the book has assumed that my lead character, Alan Cadbury, is based on myself, but some thirty years younger (for what it’s worth, he was born on January 2^nd, 1971). He may have been, when I first had the idea, but he’s changed a great deal over the past two years. In fact I don’t carry a very clear picture of him in my head. In that respect he’s rather like my friends in real life, many of whom I’ve known since student days. Do I think of them as they are today, as husbands or wives, fathers, even grand-fathers, and mothers, or as boozy students sozzled on beer, or dope, and lying spark-out on the banks of the River Cam one sultry June afternoon in 1967? Or maybe a cross between all of them (God help us)? In other words, the pictures in my mind reflect the context of the thought, or the memory. And Alan Cadbury was in many places on many occasions and he certainly wasn’t always consistent. In that respect, he has more in common with Rebus than with Sherlock Holmes.

And that’s why I’ve tried to avoid detailed descriptions of him. Readers will discover bits (that word again!) and pieces about him as they read: for example, he has a beard; but then he might decide to shave it off. Who knows? I certainly don’t.

So is that what people mean when they say that characters ‘come alive’? I’ve always found that when I see a film about a book I’ve loved, that the main characters get replaced by the actors’ faces – and then rapidly replace my own pictures, and then equally rapidly die-out altogether. That’s why I won’t re-view pictures like Tom Jones, having re-read Henry Fielding’s magnificent original novel. I don’t know how I’d react if somebody wanted to make a film of The Lifers’ Club. In that highly unlikely event, I think I’d have to be prepared to lose my awkward, obsessive friend, because that’s what he has become, and instead picture the film’s leading actor.

Anyhow, we’re approaching 50% funding and I’m back at my desk. I’m also making very good progress with my non-fiction book for Penguin, which incidentally, has gained a great deal from the writing of The Lifers’ Club. Strangely Alan Cadbury stalks its pages behind the scenes, a ghostly mysterious presence. And if anyone tries to tell you that fiction and non-fiction can be easily separated, they are talking out of the back of their necks. Personally, I can’t tell them apart – and that’s something I offer future academic critics of my factual work on a plate, free of charge.

Well, I know what I ought to be getting on with: the stuff that’s now piled high in several toppling heaps of paper on and around my desk, which naughtily I removed for that picture in the Unbound blog, and which gained me the much-coveted (!?) DESK OF THE WEEK Award. So was that fraudulent? Did I do a Lance Armstrong? Can I live with my conscience? Only time will tell.

My friends, lords and masters at Unbound have Tweeted that I need help to get back to my desk. Is this a hint, or a veiled command? I think we – I think I – should be told. But I feel bad that I haven’t informed Alan Cadbury that I’ve written a book about one of his exploits. The trouble is, I know he’s digging somewhere, but have no idea where. He can be very secretive when he wants. Anyhow, with the help of Twitter (which I know for a fact he follows), I’ll try to track him down over the next few days.

If the sheer mass of stuff were not daunting enough, the garden and its flowers are also demanding attention. Last week I planted my potatoes and yesterday my broad beans (and I’ll feature both of these in a Grow Your Own post shortly). I think it’s probably a bit late to cut hazel pea sticks, so I re-used the ones I set last year (and blogged about) and they weren’t too brittle and should be OK. Unlike many vegetables, peas and beans don’t mind being set in the same ground for two years running – although it’s not something I’d make a habit of.

A thick patch of Cowslips in the orchard

White Snakeshead Fritillaries and Cowslips in the meadow

The warm weather that began a week ago has suddenly accelerated everything out in the flower garden. Cowslips and Fritillaries have never looked better and the latter have benefitted from the almost complete lack of pheasants, who love to peck off their flower buds. This year none of the local commercial shoots released any hatched semi-tame birds – thank Heavens! It’s such a strange year: the latest snowdrops are still just visible as are a few crocuses, yet the main daffodils are still in flower and the primroses in the wood are finished. Every year produces surprises and in 2013 in our garden it’s the anemones (especially varieties of A. blanda) and the Celandines, of which the variety known as Brazen Hussy (Ranunculus ficaria), with early bronze-coloured foliage, was particularly fine. And as for the Summer Snowflakes (Leucojum aestivum, var. ‘Gravetye Giant’), I don’t think I have ever seen them as good. And of course all of these plants love wet conditions, and boy, have they had them!

My favourite Celandine: ‘Brazen Hussy’ being particularly brazen

Summer Snowflakes along a low wall

Close-up of the bell-like flowers of Summer Snowflakes

And now I must plant the second batch of green peas and mow the grass which is almost a foot high in places. Then I’ll move some more snowdrops and Hostas, before it’s too late. Oh, Sod my f***ing desk!