As part of our Burnley’s Favourite Books project, we invited local writers to create a piece inspired by a book they love. Each response is a reflection on the stories that stay with us.
Favourite Book: Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
Submitted by: Jenny Palmer
Why this book?
Jean Rhys is my favourite writer of all time. I was immediately drawn to her modernist style of writing and wanted to emulate it. Her book ‘Good Morning, Midnight,’ published in 1939, was the book that first inspired me to write. The blurb on the front cover reads ‘Haunted by memories, hoping for love –Sasha returns to Paris in the twenties.’ It portrays the life of a woman living on the edges of society and conveys her feelings and thoughts about life with an economy of style, which has me, at times, wanting to cry and, at other times, to laugh out loud.
Second-wave feminists often criticized Jean Rhys for being too depressing, maintaining that her female characters were often downtrodden and seemed defeated by life. My feeling was that they were conflating the author with her characters. She was not writing autobiography, although there may have been elements of her life in the books. Jean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1894 and came to England when she was sixteen, where she had to fend for herself in hopeless jobs. She started writing after her three marriages broke down. In the early books, she wrote about women as underdogs, women who suffered and struggled against misogyny.
Jean disappeared from the public eye for many years but was rediscovered after a BBC 3 adaptation of ‘Good Morning, Midnight,’ and in 1966, she published Wide Sargasso Sea, a feminist prequel to Jane Eyre. I am grateful to Jean Rhys for helping me find my writing voice. To my mind, she was decades ahead of her time.
Keep Breathing
It was a miserable day, dark, and damp. There’d been no sun in weeks, just perpetual rain. Now snow had been forecast, and I wanted to make sure I had enough food in. After I’d been to Tesco’s, I set off for the market to get some bird food. You can always be sure they have some there and it’s cheaper. I couldn’t leave the birds without food, especially if there was going to be snow.
The market was deserted. Most of the traders had given up on the day as a bad job and were packing up. I reached the pet food stall just in time and bought my usual supply of sunflower kernels and peanuts. I was in no rush to get home as I wouldn’t be able to get out again for a few days if it snowed. The pavements would be slippery, and I didn’t want to fall.
Week’s is a down-to-earth sort of place with plastic seating and Formica-covered tables but it’s cosy and the people are friendly; unlike some other places I could name. It gets pretty packed at lunchtime, when people come in for pork pie and mushy peas or jacket potato and cheese, but you can always get a table in the afternoon.
The windows were all steamed up on the inside from the lunchtime crowd, so I couldn’t see in. The place was virtually empty, apart from a few regulars. It’s self-service, so I headed straight to the counter. I already knew what I was going to have – a slice of raspberry and apple pie with cream and a large cup of tea. It would remind me of my mother who was renowned for her fruit pies. I carried my tray over to one of the four-seater tables where I could spread out.
I skimmed through the paper, skipping the articles which didn’t have any news, at least not news you didn’t already know from TV and radio. There was an article about SAD, which I decided to give a miss. I didn’t need to be reminded how the rain can make you feel depressed. Instead, I found myself reading one about the ageing process. A new piece of research on neural networks had just come out. It claimed that the human brain had five stages, as opposed to the seven ages of man, and that these were marked by distinct turning points.
Childhood lasted from 0-9, adolescence from 9-32, when the brain’s capacity reached its peak. The brain remained stable until 66, after which it went steadily downhill. The final marker was 83, after which dementia and high blood pressure were likely to set in and God knows what else. Did it help to know when your brain was likely to deteriorate? I couldn’t decide. I switched to doing the crossword.
Someone had started vacuuming and a member of staff was beginning to clear the tables. They were in no hurry to chuck us out. There was still half an hour to go before closing time.
‘What are you going to do for your eightieth?’ the woman clearing the tables asked the customer sitting by the window.
‘Nae, bloomin’ Nelly,’ she answered. ‘I’ve got two years to go before that. Keep on breathing, I expect.’
I liked the sound of this woman’s voice. It reminded me of people I used to know as a child. People who talked with a Lancashire accent. I empathised with her. But who wanted their age to be banded around for all and sundry to hear? Whenever I told people my age, which wasn’t that often, they would gasp and say things like ‘Well, you don’t look it,’ to which I’d respond with one of my stock phrases like ‘Well I certainly feel like it,’ or ‘Age is just a number.’ And leave it at that. But what did age have to do with anything? I’d always felt the same inside.
‘You should be proud to have reached your age,’ the younger woman went on, continuing to draw attention to it. ‘It’s an achievement, that’s what it is.’
I glanced around. We were the last two in there. I could have chipped in with some sort of casual remark. I could have revealed my age, in sympathy with the woman who was under the spotlight. I could have told her there was no need to worry until you were 83, so the article said. But I didn’t think it would bring much comfort. I’d finished the crossword. It was time to go.
‘Cheerio,’ I said as I left, in as upbeat a tone as I could muster. ‘Keep breathing!’
