Charles Lambert is one of two authors to have featured stories in both of our first two anthologies. I asked him to tell us a little more about the second story, ‘Pretty Vacant’.

When I was in my twenties I spent five consecutive summers teaching English to teenagers on summer courses. The schools I worked for were expensive and this was reflected in the kind of kids they attracted, if that’s the word – few of them would have chosen to be there if they’d been given that choice. It’s hard to talk about the students without falling into facile racial stereotypes, but there was definitely an abundance of willingness to learn English among the German and Greek students, and a corresponding scarcity among those from Italy and Spain, who preferred to exchange their own languages at the cost of mine. The French tended to be, well, superbe, the Swiss slightly geeky, the Italians louder than all the others put together. Among the kids themselves, racial bonding was fierce. Nations would war against nations. During my first year, Greece and Italy were at each other’s throats from the first day. I remember one evening a Greek boy bursting into the staff room, where my colleagues and I were enjoying a joint after a visit to the pub, and wailing, ‘Someone has shit in my pantofolos’. It was hard not to laugh. The Greeks and Germans ate everything they were given, the Italians nothing but slices of factory-baked white bread, spending their money on Cadbury’s chocolate in the local shops. Still, apart from endemic shoplifting – a school trip rarely ended far from a police station – most of the children behaved themselves and may even have learnt some English. I know my badminton improved dramatically while I was there.

One year, though, was different. A girl arrived from Milan who was trouble from the start. She was gauntly beautiful, sullen in a sort of Kate Mossy way and utterly uncooperative. Her parents had provided her with more pocket money than I was earning that whole summer and then, as we found out later, disappeared to some exotic paradise. On the first school outing the girl wandered off and was eventually found in a pub; she vomited during the coach-ride home. On the second she was caught scoring coke in a café and had to be dragged out. There wouldn’t have been a third trip, but all the school’s efforts to track down a home she could be returned to came to nothing, and we spent the rest of the three weeks policing her as she became increasingly ratchety and wild-eyed. Months after the course had finished we were told by her family doctor that she had syphilis and had named half a dozen other students as contacts. It fell to the course director to write to their parents. Summer schools depend for much of their custom on parents’ networking and it took the school some years to recover from the blow to its reputation.

I wanted to use this experience more than twenty years later in the context of a novel I was writing about the effects the wave of terrorism that swept over Italy in the late 1970s had had on present-day Italy, with so many people now in power the children – and ideological product – of that wave. My protagonist was an English woman who’d taught in a summer school in England while living in Turin and would later meet up with a girl who’d fascinated her almost thirty years before. The first version of ‘Pretty Vacant’ came from this. But novels grow and change and it soon became apparent that Francesca had no real part to play in the world that was being made there. I came back some time later to the piece I’d written and, when I looked at what I had, I saw that Francesca’s story was less about politics in a localized sense and more about loneliness. I also saw that I cared about her and wanted that to be evident in what I wrote. The story – as it stands now – came from that.

— Charles Lambert

You can read ‘Pretty Vacant’ for yourself in our second anthology, All These Little Worlds (available here).

Here’s author Danny Rhodes talking about the inspiration behind ‘A Covering of Leaves’, which appeared in our first anthology, Various Authors.

I wrote ‘A Covering of Leaves’ after reading an interview (with Stephen King I think…) in which he explained how after 9-11 the New York authorities continually came across vehicles owned by people who had died in the attacks. These cars were found abandoned in parking lots and at kerb edges around the city and, I surmised, more often than not, in the car parks of subway stations in the suburbs. Thinking about this I started to imagine family members collecting these vehicles in the aftermath of a catastrophic event. But what of those vehicles owned by victims who did not have any family? How long would those cars sit gathering parking tickets and suffering the casual onslaught of seasonal weather?

The story idea came pretty quickly after that, suggesting as some have said before, that stories exist to be discovered by writers. Initially Webster’s journey took him into the home of the victim, where he discovered the loss she had already suffered, the remnants of a failed marriage etc. I chose to omit these scenes in later edits as I tried to get to the crux of the story.

The leaf fall soon took on metaphorical qualities, becoming a veil that Webster has to sweep away in order to discover the next part of his life journey, but it also served a narrative function, being the initial cause of the loss he endured.

I did not expect to be writing a story about a car that mourns its deceased owner and a man who is already mourning the loss of his wife but that’s the story that emerged. And I think ‘A Covering of Leaves’ is essentially about that, about mourning and managing in the aftermath of the death of a loved one, or not managing, in seeking some sort of path back to the place where there was happiness and togetherness, however unusual the route a person might take to reach that place.

— Danny Rhodes

James Benmore‘s story ‘Jaggers & Crown’, which features in our anthology All These Little Worlds, follows the careers of a fictional comedy duo from the days of music hall, through radio, to television. It’s an excellent story, with a strong voice, and I was curious about how James came to write it. He’s been kind enough to provide this guest post, explaining the background of the story.

The story`Jaggers & Crown’ was very much inspired by my interest in British comedy programmes from the fifties and sixties, particularly radio shows such as Hancock’s Half Hour, The Goon Show and Round the Horne. Round the Horne is an especially fascinating programme: it was daring, ahead of its time, and the sketches involving the late Kenneth Williams are so funny and shocking considering homosexuality was still illegal back when they were recoreded.

Williams played one half of Julian and Sandy, who were gay in both senses of the word, and whose dialogue dripped with clever innuendo. I’m told that back then, many listeners would not have understood all the double meanings. It then occurred to me that as time went on, in the seventies and eighties, that depictions of homosexuality became more sadder and sexless, such as Mr Humphrey in Are You Being Served, who lived with his mother and was the butt of many homophobic remarks, and that sparked my interest in writing a short fictional journey through this period.

If Sonny Jaggers is based on anyone, it’s probably Kenneth Williams who was gay, took his own life and whose posthumous diaries showed he suffered from acute depression and had a spiteful streak. I also drew on the life of Tony Hancock, another depressive, an alcoholic and someone who also killed himself, as well as Peter Sellers who reguarly visited clairvoyants and wanted to be taken seriously as an actor.

Crown is more of a short cockney Norman Wisdom type in terms of his performance type. A loveable fool. But his real character isn’t modelled on anyone famous. I was more interested in creating an unreliable narrator and a false friend. Someone who admires and loves Sonny but who doesn’t have the courage to be him. — James Benmore

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