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’.

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).
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