A Real Character: Me

After my last blog post exploring whether we consciously manufacture personalities for social media like Twitter, I was interested to read Isabel Costello’s piece about creating characters for fiction. She then (very bravely) set out to bring herself to life on the page by writing about various aspects of her own character and experiences. Susan Elliot Wright followed suit, and #realcharacter was born.

Here is my rendition of myself. If you’d like to take part in #realcharacter, just blog about yourself as we have, then tweet a link, using the #realcharacter hashtag. You’ll be found and retweeted.

Genes/inheritance



Recommended reading for onlies

I’m an only child, born to parents who had experienced the agony of a stillbirth son a few years earlier. So feel free to throw all those usual adjectives – spoilt, over-protected, selfish – at me. I’m old enough now to acknowledge the (relative) truth of them, although this upbringing also means I’m a loyal friend, honest to a fault, and can spell really well.

My Mum’s family were well-off Dorset farmers whom she defied to marry a young army chef from Walsall. They relented the day before the wedding, and Dad was accepted, with reservations, into the fold. The upside was he could fuel his car from the farm's petrol pump. But in return he was expected to help out occasionally with the harvest and other tasks. I remember him coming home later than expected one evening from visiting an aged uncle. He was a little pale and dishevelled: he’d had to assist in a calf’s breech birth.

I have 21 cousins on my Dorset side, all but two female. Our last get-together was when our grandmother reached 90; the Reads are a gratifyingly long-lived bunch. This was some years ago, but it was obvious we had all inherited the pear-shape gene.

Environment

I escaped from the country as soon as I could, moving to London at 18 to work in Harrods and live in a hostel run by The Girls’ Friendly Society (yes, really). Back then London was fun, as long you had a job to pay for going out. I loved the theatre, the cinema, the shopping. In my twenties I was, I admit it, a Yuppie who (whisper it) did pretty well under Mrs Thatcher, buying and selling several flats for profit. But at 30, given the chance to move to Nottinghamshire with my job at Boots, I ended up living in a tiny village. My rural roots were dragging me back. Which is probably why I now live in the Scottish Borders, sharing my life with 19 chickens, 3 dogs and a geriatric cat. I’m also on my second husband, and as he’s Scottish we won’t be moving south any time soon.

Habits

As a typical only child I’m rubbish at team games and until a few years ago never found physical exercise at all tempting, except for walking and then only with a dog. But at 50 I joined a gym and discovered weight-training. I go two or three times a week, and although I’m not muscled up a la Madonna, my core fitness has improved to the extent that I now feel worse if I don’t work out. I can’t see the point of cigarettes, excessive alcohol or drugs, and have a pretty low tolerance of those who do. However, I love chocolate, smoked salmon and the occasional glass of champagne.



Monument Valley, Arizona



Despite hating to fly (it’s that rare combination of scary and boring) I love visiting America, especially the wide-open bits like Montana and Arizona. I also adore travelling by train and hope to take my husband to Paris one day.

Do I need to say that my favourite habit is reading?

Personality

Despite, or perhaps because of, my father suffering from depression all his adult life, I am infuriatingly cheerful most of the time. I enjoy my life and appreciate how lucky I am to be able to write every day. I’ve also realised I am an autodidact: I revel in teaching myself new things. Hence starting a degree course at Edinburgh when I was 40 and now completing it via the Open University. And of course writing is one long lesson . . .

I consider myself sociable but am sometimes intimidated by large groups of people and prefer to chat one-to-one. At a recent dinner party I was told by someone I had only just met that I am ‘aggressively nice’. She meant it as a compliment, so I have taken it as such.

Being childless, I am probably living proof of the alleged need we all have to ‘mother’ something. At one point I had 6 cats, now I indulge myself with chickens.

Skills (or otherwise)

Aside from the word-manipulation abilities I possess, I don’t shine at much, especially not physical skills. However, when my husband started working for himself as a stonemason, before he could afford an employee I used to restore the outside walls of houses with him. I was hardly gazelle-like climbing up the scaffold, but once there I showed a talent for chipping out the old mortar and repointing the joints. We both look back fondly on those days.



One of the walls I worked on, waiting to be repointed



And one more thing . . .

About ten years ago I met someone who had a profound influence on my ambition to be a professional writer. Her name was Sylvian Hamilton and she had three books, the Chronicles of the Bone Pedlar, published when she was in her 60s. She lived in a tiny cottage not far from here, with her husband and two Siamese cats.

We met when my husband did some work for her and mentioned I wanted to be a writer. ‘She must come for tea,’ Sylvian said, and I subsequently spent many happy visits talking about books and writing. She taught me that you can write at any age, and that dreams can come true even to those of us who lead humdrum lives in rural Scotland. Sadly, Sylvian died from breast cancer in 2005. She didn’t want a funeral so I planted a tree on our front lawn in her memory. She was in my life for far too short a time, but she inspired me so much I’ll always be grateful to her.

Cowgirl Blues

Donna Howell Sickles



I wrote last week about my passion for the American Old West, and explored a little how this may have come about. Strangely, it wasn’t until I started gathering my thoughts for that blog entry that I even realised it was a passion. Rather like I can’t remember when I made the transitions from trying out to liking and then to loving crime fiction. And chocolate.

However, I must admit the images of the Old West which attract me are sanitised, prettified even. Life on the range was probably less sitting round a campfire eating beans and more this:

Charles M Russell

And apart from gorgeous frocks like the ones twirled to great effect in Oklahoma! (and hats for Sunday best), I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have enjoyed the hard life of frontier women either. Interestingly, although American women as a whole weren’t given the vote until 1920, those in most Western states had the right to vote before 1915. But this early emancipation doesn’t make women as prominent in Western culture as their men folk.

Consider the Western film. I watched a lot of these last year as part of my Open University ‘History of Cinema and Television’ course. You can count the number of named female characters (not unspeaking, simpering showgirls) in most of them on the fingers of one hand. Which is not entirely explained by a scarcity of women in the Old West, although a line from Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948) suggests this may have been a source of discontent among the cowboy population:

“There are only two things more beautiful than a gun: a Swiss watch or a woman from anywhere.”

Pictured below are my two favourite female characters in Westerns. You'll be familiar with one of them but probably not the other. They are Doris Day in the title role of Calamity Jane. 

Doris Day



 

Barbara Stanwyck

And Barbara Stanwyck as tough rancher Jessica Drummond in Forty Guns.  

Day and the character she played were wimps by Stanwyck's standards. While Calamity Jane sang and cracked whips, Jessica Drummond ruled part of Arizona with her posse of hired guns. When the plot called for Jessica to be dragged along a street by a horse, Stanwyck's stunt double refused, saying the stunt was too dangerous. So Stanwyck did it herself. She was 49 at the time. 



I also mentioned in last week’s post my visit to Denver’s Museum of Western Art, which introduced me to the work of Charles M Russell, Frederic Remington and many others. Unfortunately it’s now closed to the public, although I believe the collection, privately owned by a millionaire, is still in the building. Thank goodness that, courtesy of eBay, I've been able to obtain a catalogue of the collection. It’s a sumptuously illustrated book, but out of 129 colour plates only two are by women artists. (Then again, how many female Impressionists can you name?) However, it's one of those two works which sticks in my memory. This is it.

Cow's Skull on Red, Georgia O'Keeffe

O’Keeffe is probably best known for her paintings of animal skulls she found while exploring New Mexico. According to the Dept of American Studies at the University of Virginia these:

“ . . . can be seen to represent the death and destruction of the American landscape or they can be viewed as celebratory works that pay tribute to the animals that first inhabited the Western landscape.”

She used flowers (often artificial) to adorn some of these works, giving them literal titles such as Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses and Ram’s Skull with Hollyhock. It’s hard to imagine a Western artist more removed from Charlie Russell’s depiction of cowboys and native American life (although the Denver collection also includes a Jackson Pollock). And O'Keeffe's work is also worlds away from that of Donna Howell Sickles, an example of whose cheerful modern cowgirl paintings adorns the top of this blog post.

I’ve visited Denver, Montana and Arizona, but there’s one experience I’ve yet to enjoy: going to a rodeo (only to watch, silly!). We’ve all seen footage of a man riding a bucking horse (or sometimes a bull), one arm held in the air, trying to stay on. According to Wikipedia, rodeo is actually banned in the UK. I didn’t know that, nor did I realise that women also take part, until our Montana trip when we got chatting to a waitress whose best friend was a rodeo champion.

Thanks to Jacquie Rogers’ Romancing the West blog, I now know a lot more about women in rodeos. Back in the 1920s, cowgirls took part as much as cowboys. They didn’t just compete at bronco and bull riding, but also demonstrated their strength and fearlessness by performing tricks, like crawling under a galloping horse’s belly and changing horses while moving.

However, for various reasons, not least because men controlled the sport (sound familiar?), female participation in rodeos degenerated into ‘glamour’ roles in the mid-20^th century. These days, women’s rodeo is on the increase again, with the Professional Women’s Rodeo Association putting on events and having over 2000 members.

I’ll end this post with a pithy saying from the National Cowgirl Museum website:

“The only thing pink about growing up cowgirl is a sunset”