A fascination with names

I’ve always had a fascination with names, maybe it’s because my first and last names aren’t particularly common. I’ve come across other people with the name Lois – but only in passing, no-one I knew even as a casual acquaintance – I think there was a girl called Lois in a school I went to, no Loises in schools I taught at. My daughter’s best friend has it as a middle name, and a casual acquaintance has a granddaughter with it. It’s a name from the Bible, Timothy’s grandmother was Lois, and I’ve heard of a few famous people with that name – but the only one I can think of is the American actress, Lois Smith… and I’ve just found out that Sarah Vaughan was actually a Lois. There are a couple of fictional Lois’s, Lois Griffin and of course Lois Lane. I was given the name from my great-grandma, Lois Penny, who had five children with a Jewish man named Louis Walford. They didn’t marry, but after his death she took his name. Her granddaughter, my aunty also had it as a middle name.

As for Elsden (Elsden, not Elsdon) there are quite a few about, but again, I’ve never met any who are not related to us. It apparently has Scandinavian origins, and I do have a great chunk of Scandi DNA, and there are various suggestions of the origins, probably some person’s name with something like Els at the beginning, and another part of the name attaching them to a place. It is however, not derived from Elsdon in Northumberland – we are Norfolk/fens/East Anglian.

So two unusual names which is maybe why so many of my characters have unusual names, although I have to say I don’t sit down and think ‘oh, what weird name can I give the person I’m writing about?’ I’ve been re-reading my novel ‘The Stalking of Rosa Czekov’. Rosa – a fairly ordinary name – is married to Luka Czekov, and although I don’t mention it, I assumed his ancestry was Polish. The names just arrived in my head – as did other characters, Brian ‘Rudi’ Makepeace and his wife Estelle, the criminal Chambers family who all have Biblical names, Ira, Japhet, Enoch, Keziah – and more. However, there are ordinary names too, Mel, Geraldine and John, for example. The main character is Tyche, and who knows where that name came from, it just arrived with her when she came to the little seaside town of Easthope.

Over the last few years I have been writing about the Radwinter family, and I know exactly where and when the idea for my story came from. I was out with my cousin, driving through Essex when we passed a signpost pointing down a side road, ‘To Radwinter’ – and I exclaimed “What a great name for a character in a book!” I just so happened to have something brewing, a story about three brothers, Paul, Mark and John… the inevitable happened, and they became four, Marcus, Paul, John and Thomas Radwinter.  I cannot find any actual person with the surname of Radwinter recorded anywhere, not births, marriages or deaths, which is perfect! Of course none of their names are unusual!