Three days ago I wrote about our forthcoming writers group get together, and the topic we were to write to was ‘arson’. I mentioned that I’d had several fortunately indirect experiences of fires deliberately started – at two different schools I’d taught at (and no, it wasn’t me) and once when a favourite place was targeted by an arsonist now facing the rest of his life in prison.
My writing friends are so wonderfully imaginative, I knew I had to produce something, and gradually an idea crept into my mind. Sometimes, when I’m writing, it’s almost as if I’m teleported to some other dimension and for a few moments I’m actually in the story I’m about to write. It was a cold and rather miserable day, the sky was cloudy but it was that high, white cloud-cover which didn’t threaten rain or snow, but just hung above, cold and indifferent.
I – or the character that was me, was standing by a pair of large and imposing, but somewhat rusty iron gates, staring through at the burned ruin of a large old house. A security guard comes wandering over, no doubt bored rather than thinking the character was trying to get in. They have a desultory conversation:
“It was empty, thank the Lord,” the guard said – I think she meant God not the lord of the manor, for the blackened ruin we were looking at actually had, centuries ago, been a manor house, and the most recent and now deceased inhabitant had been a lord. He had also been my uncle.
“Does anyone know what happened?” I asked, because it would have seemed strange not to. “The last time I was here it was the village festival and they had a big marquee on the lawn over there – in front of the house.”
“In the summer was it?”
“Oh no, this was ages ago, when my family lived in the village. I’ve not been back here for donkeys’ years. I’m only here now for a friend’s wedding. I heard about the fire and I’m afraid I was nosy.”
I think she would have liked me to stay and chat, she was obviously feeling lonely, and might have enjoyed a little speculative gossip about the fire that had devastated the manor. However, I felt unexpectedly sad and upset, memories of the past nudging each other to get to the front of my mind.
“Sorry to abandon you, but I have to get back,” I said. “It looks like rain – I hope you have somewhere to keep dry!”
My character returns to the nearby village and the pub where she has a room, and where the day before the landlady had told her about the fire:
“Sad, that,” she’d said, indication a trophy of some sort, and inviting me to ask what was sad. “The fellow who’s won the pub bowls championship most, Mr Calder, he’s the one who died in that fire,” and in case I hadn’t heard of the local drama, she told me all about it.
The police wouldn’t say, but it had been on the local news and rumour had it, it wasn’t an accident, it was deliberate and Mr Calder who was just about a recluse, he’d gone dead, as she put it – arson.
How dreadful, how shocking, poor man! I replied and she pointed to an old framed print on the wall by the window.
“That’s his place, was a proper fancy old mansion but it’s all gone to just about rack and ruin.”
I gazed at the print, once so familiar – but what was familiar to me was the original painting, hanging in the “proper fancy old mansion” that the landlady was telling me about.
As I left my character in the pub, I realised, too late, that this was the start of a longer story a novel maybe, and as a short story it didn’t really work at all – definitely more questions than answers. It was too late to write something else, even if an arson idea had drifted into my head, so I had to take my not very satisfactory piece to the meeting and share with my friends.
We had a great session, and there were excellent stories shared, clever, intriguing, a touch of humour, a shiver at a clever ending, a complicated and unexpected murder… Gosh my friends are good! Each year we publish an anthology of the stories and pieces we’ve written month by month. I think I am going to have to write something else to submit – eight hundred words about someone looking through a gate at the burned ruin of their uncle’s house, isn’t really very interesting!!
Here is a link to Writers in Stone’s latest anthology, ‘Cheese’: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cheese-Anthology-Anthologies-Writers-Stone/dp/B0FHJYRB3D
Lois Elsden 