Review & Q&A: Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves by Rachel Malik

MISS BOSTON & MISS HARGREAVES

by RACHEL MALIK 

When Rene Hargreaves is billeted to Starlight Farm as a Land Girl, far from the city where she grew up, she finds farmer Elsie Boston and her country ways strange at first. Yet over the days and months Rene and Elsie come to understand and depend on each other. Soon they can no longer imagine a life apart.

But a visitor from Rene's past threatens the life they have built together, a life that has always kept others at a careful distance. Soon they are involved in a war of their own that endangers everything and will finally expose them to the nation's press and the full force of the law.

Full of elegant prose, Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves is very readable, charming and engaging. It has echoes of a Kate Summerscale book, although the author is very clear that this is a fictionalised account of what might have happened to these women who did exist in real life, rather than an historical truth. The author strikes a great balance between retelling the lives of the two main characters (one of which was Malik's grandmother) and the historical events in which they become involved as well as weaving an entrancing tale of companionship and friendship. 

I enjoyed Malik's ability to capture the relationship between the two women with such understated language. It must be a challenge to write about your family history but Malik successfully weaves what she has learned about her grandmother into a piece of fascinating fiction. Her ability to evoke the era in which the novel is set is effortless and perfectly done. She firmly roots the reader within the time and place of the story with language, dialogue, description and detail that creates an atmosphere capturing the period. This secure placing within the historical setting then ensures the full significance of the events which unfold are felt by the reader. 

Malik's prose is considered, thoughtful, atmospheric and graceful. The characters are well crafted, easy to picture, easy to invest in and to care about. The interjection of phrases unique to the wartime is well done, as is the way Malik is able to convey class and social standing with one or two key details. There is also a lingering sense of tragedy and being haunted by the past which adds a sense of melancholy but never becomes too much or too distracting. 

The last third of the book focuses on a court case and there is a definite change of pace and style for this section of the book. I had been meandering along the pages and suddenly I was racing through, my attention awakened fully by the increase in dialogue, pace, revelations and drama. I was engrossed by the shock, scandal and cruelty that befell these endearing, harmless, well meaning and private people. The final section of the book is more powerful because of the time Malik has spent from the beginning of the novel developing this tender depiction of the relationship between the characters. 

This is a very well crafted, well executed and polished novel. It is beautifully controlled and accomplished; it is engaging, entrancing, tender and well worth a read. I thought the evocation of characters, time and place was exceptionally well presented and I found that I ended up caring about the characters much more than I realised!

Q & A WITH RACHEL MALIK

I'm so delighted to welcome Rachel to my blog today and so excited to have the chance to ask her some questions about her book! 

How did you discover this story and what challenges did you face both from writing about your family and writing an historical fiction?

I’ve know the ‘bones’ of the story for a long time. My mum told me that her mother (Rene Hargreaves) had left her when she was a little girl and never returned. She also told me that Rene had got caught up in a murder trial many years later when she was living in Cornwall - she didn’t know much more than that. Because I never met Rene (my grandmother) or knew the real people who appear, and because the events happened quite a long time ago (1940s to 1960s), it didn’t feel as if I was writing about family. The exception was my mum who appears briefly as a child and that was difficult.  When I’m writing, I tend to ‘see’ scenes first which helped and once you get started, the story and characters have their own logic. Historical fiction is tricky too, particularly when you’re writing about a period when so much changes. I wanted readers to enter that world and appreciate its difference from today but not drag them down with detail that might get in the way of their relationship with Rene and Elsie.

How did your family react to this novel? Did you share it with them / let them read it first?

Luckily I don’t have much family in the relevant sense, otherwise I might have felt more inhibited about the writing. My mum read the final copy-edited version and then again when the ARC arrived. I think she really likes it. She certainly said she did. And she really enjoyed the book launch! 

The various locations in the story are very well depicted and feel incredibly authentic and convincing. Did you travel to the places you write about to ensure that your portrayal was so realistic?

Thank you. I visited many of the places while I was writing and I’d been to some of them before. I went on a great trip to see the White Horse of Uffington with my son. He was quite young then and needed some bribing with snacks to do the whole walk but it was amazing. And despite the brightness and clearness of the day, it was still very eerie.  I didn’t visit the Lambourn valley where Elsie’s farm, Starlight, until I was editing the novel but I’d read about it and looked at old films and photographs. I made a few changes but it was very like how I’d imagined it somehow.

How much research did you do for this novel? Did you enjoy the research and if so, which was the best bit  - or the worst!

I did a lot of research which I really enjoy.  I read the trial documents at the National Archives at Kew and found some records about Rene’s time as a Land Girl. The Museum of English Rural Life in Reading has some wonderful material about farming in the 1930s and 40s. I also looked at a lot of local newspapers: details of local events, cinema and other ads, not just the news stories – it all adds to the texture. One of the great things about the internet is that you can access so much material directly and free, particularly images and films. It’s very easy to get distracted.  I started watching a film called Turn the Key Softly from 1953 because I’d read it began with some shots of Holloway prison and the road – it had a very young Joan Collins in it - and of course I watched it all. That happened a lot.

Your background is academia. What challenges did you find writing fiction? What made you decide to write a fictional story of your grandmother’s story rather than a non-fiction account?

Obviously it’s very different writing fiction but I think my job as an academic was very helpful. First, because I was used to doing research but also because I did a lot of writing in my job: lectures, outlines, chapters, articles, reports. It makes writing very naturally a part of your working life (it doesn’t necessarily make the writing any good!). I did consider a non-fiction account at first but I’d always wanted to write fiction and because there were so few facts to go on it just seemed to develop that way.

I enjoyed the quotes at the start of each chapter. Why did you decide to include these and how did you go about deciding which to use?

I like coming across them in books I read. Sometimes they’re little clues about an event or a character. In the chapter called ‘Elsie Unked’, I included all the definitions of unked below. The locals call Elsie ‘unked’ meaning that she’s strange but as the definition shows it can also mean: eerie, possibly supernatural, unkind, lonely, isolated, against the grain. I wanted readers to wonder as they read, which of these things is Elsie? Some of the bits of poetry just came to me as I was writing (I teach quite a lot of poetry) and seemed to attach themselves to particular chapters. I used some of them to give a broader context to the events in the narrative.

Which authors have influenced your writing?

Impossible question!  I think I’d like to rephrase this as authors who I hope have influenced my writing.  I love writing that is both pared down and poetic and the sound of words is very important to me too. I read a lot of women writers from the 1920s to the early sixties while I was writing: Jean Rhys, Winifred Holtby, Stella Gibbons, Rose Macaulay. I hope I’ve metabolised a little of their work. I’m very attracted to writing that makes the everyday compelling. I very much like contemporary Irish writing: Colm Toibin and John McGahern in particular.

Can you tell me a little bit about the story behind the names of the characters Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves and why you chose them?

Rene (Irene) Hargreaves and Elsie Boston were the actual names of my grandmother and the woman she lived with. I thought about changing their names to something fictional a number of times but after a while they ‘set’ and became impossible to change. The ‘misses’ were important too.  The people I met in Cornwall who knew them referred to Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves – it was their way of measuring a past time and that they didn’t know them very well. Rene and Elsie aren’t cosily knowable characters, they keep their distance, and I wanted the title to reflect this.

Are you working on anything at the moment? What’s next – more fiction or something different again?

I’m working on another novel. I’m a bit superstitious about saying much about what I’m working on but it’s set in the 1920s and 1930s in Northern Italy…

Thank you so much Rachel for stopping by and taking the time to answer my questions in such detail! I really enjoyed hearing more about the story and your writing process. I'm really looking forward to your next book! 

'A surprisingly touching account of hidden lives forced out of the shadows'  Sunday Times

'So lovely, gentle yet enthralling' Claire Fuller

 Rachel Malik was born in London in 1965 of mixed English and Pakistani parentage. She studied English at Cambridge and Linguistics at Strathclyde. For many years, Rachel taught English Literature at Middlesex University. Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves is her first novel.

If you would like to hear more about Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves and Rachel, you can see her at my panel event in Harpenden in April. Tickets available by clicking on the link below!

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/history-spy-fiction-tickets-42608067878

Don't forget to follow the stops on the rest of the Blog Tour! And thank you so much to Rachel and her publishers for a copy of the novel and an opportunity to be part of the Blog Tour.