Pauline Gedge
Pauline Gedge changed my life. Literally, changed my life. It all started when I read her first book Child of the Morning, in the late 1970's. I was the manager of a chain bookstore and had always had a passing interest in ancient Egypt. When I saw the gorgeous cover of Child of the Morning (The Dial Press) painted by the great Leo and Diane Dillon, I was intrigued.
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| Hatshepsut |
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| Jon in Egypt |
Pauline, tell me where you live and why you love it so much.
Since the 1970's I've lived in a very small village in north-central Alberta, Canada where the only noise comes from the trains that rocket past. The one significant event each year is the Sports Weekend. Baseball teams descend from other villages together with chuck wagons, horses, and often tourists who spend their summers driving or towing their RV's from one fete to another. I close my door until the last straggler has moved on and peace descends again.
I think there are two kinds of writers; those who thrive on the stimulus of social interactions and those, like me, who need solitude and silence in which to create. My village gives me a day to day quiet, predictable and precious.
Of course there are drawbacks. My entertainment is limited to my TV and CD player. I eat modestly from the small grocery store across the alley. The local branch of my bank is open 3 days a week, and my doctor's office is almost 2 hours' drive away. But I wake to a blessed absence of anything but the magpies fighting under my trees and perhaps the sound of a woodpecker echoing from far away.
The village itself used to be uniquely beautiful but since I first came here with my two sons, there have been changes that have reduced it to the anonymity of every other village along the major highway. Still, there is a timelessness in the air here that imparts a kindness to the process of ageing.
Where were you living when you were 7 years old? Are they fond memories?
When I was 7 years old I was living in a 500-year-old condemned cottage in the Chiltern Hill in England.
My father was a Theology student at an Oxford college. He eventually became ordained as a priest in the Church of England, but while he studied he lived in residence during the week and was only able to come home on weekends. During that time he worked for one of the local farmers for enough money to buy 2 shotgun shells for his gun. He hunted for rabbits, and that's what we ate, together with vegetables from the garden he and my mother tended. We were desperately poor, but my two sisters and I had a wonderful forest in which to play and we spent most of our time running free and wild in the trees that abutted the cottage.
I had to climb a steep hill to catch the bus to my school. My sisters were still too young for school. We were not aware of our poverty. We made our own toys out of twigs and pebbles. I told my sisters stories. I believe those few years marked me for life with a need for the natural world, and woke in me the creative urge I inherited from my father's genes.
Eventually my father obtained a scholarship. We moved to a village close by and our situation improved. My father graduated. His first priestly position was as a curate to an Oxford church.
At 11 I began to attend an Oxford girls school and we lived in a semi-detached in an Oxford suburb, but I have never shed the magic of those early experiences. I look back on them with gratitude.
Is there a book that changed the way you look at life?
I've been in love with the written word since before I could actually read. My mother told me that when I was a toddler, I went into my father's study (she and him were living in Adelaide, Australia at the time) and pulled off the shelves as many of his books as I could reach. I made a pile of them, then crawled up the pile and sat triumphantly on the top. Apparently I did this more than once. I like to think my actions were a kind of crazy prophesy, but perhaps I just liked the way the books looked and smelt.
I was never happier than when I was reading. In Oxford C.S. Lewis lived very close to our street, and sometimes I would see him walking past our gate on his way to catch a bus. By then I had read all of the Narnian books and owned them.
My father took them to Lewis's house to be autographed and I went later to pick them up. Unfortunately he wasn't at home but his wife Joy was. I remember her very clearly, a tall thin woman leaning on a cane. One of my Narnian books was not signed. I had lent it sometime before to a girl in my church, but when I asked for it back she said she didn't have it, had never had it, etc. etc. I still remember her name and when it comes to mind I mutter sinful curses!
Tolkien was still lecturing in Oxford at the time his amazing Lord of the Rings was published. I had read and liked The Hobbit. My father bought the trilogy and read it to us girls every evening by the fire.
I sat and let the words pour over me and drowsed to his voice and the warmth of the flames. A great memory.
In my teens I found science fiction and gobbled it up. Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clark, Ursula Le Guin, but my favorite was Ray Bradbury, I think because his work was lyrical as well as 'soft' science. I was thrilled and terrified to meet him some years ago when he came to Edmonton to see a play based on his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. He signed my battered copy, much loved copy of Dandelion Wine.
Bradbury was a practicing Christian and I've often found in my reading that authors with strong religious convictions bring a depth of perception regarding the human condition that's lacking in even the most compelling literature.
I read de Beauvoir's The Second Sex when I was 16 and was profoundly influenced by it. At the same age I discovered the French author Collette-only in translation unfortunately.
I like biography, particularly those of writers, and I've always read everything I could regarding the early exploration of Arabia. Wilfrid Thesiger comes to mind.
He's on my shelves. I still read the Narnia books and Tolkien's trilogy every year as a sort of purge for my imagination.
What's the funniest or most embarrassing stories your family tells about you?
I am a klutz and embarrass myself all too easily. At the dinner Alberta Culture gave for me when I won the 'New Novelist' competition, I rose to make my speech, notes clutched in my sweaty hand, and my long necklace swung free to curl into the sauce left on my plate. I had to wipe it off so that it wouldn't swing back and soil my dress. I don't know what stories of my ineptitude my sons would tell. They are too loyal to remind me of the number of times I have fallen into the road because I've tripped over the curb, or shut a car door on my leg because I've forgotten to pull it in!
Is there a song, person, or group that you listen to when you are feeling a bit down?
I've suffered from depression on and off all my life, with the worst bouts coming after I've typed 'The End' to each of my novels. My doctor would then put me on a 3 month course of anti-depressants after which I'd be fine. However, after I'd finished the last volume of my final trilogy, The King's Man, the depression didn't go away and I've been on anti-depressants ever since.
Music helps a little, particularly rock music from the 70's or Arab dance music. For every novel there would be music playing as I worked-the same music every day-almost like the opening of a gate that enabled the first words of that day to begin to flow. For Eagle and Raven, I played an album by Shaun Cassidy. For Lord of the Two Lands it was 'Time' by ELO. Incidentally, I learned that experiments regarding the effect of music on the creative process had been done, and oddly enough the Rolling Stones came out on top. I was a fan anyway so I tried using them every time I became stuck for a word or a phrase. The result was always an immediate success! Something to do with a correlation between alpha waves in the brain and the beat of the music. Go figure!
I like Arab music because of my many years in belly dance and I sometimes put it on while doing chores.
I found that classical music requires concentration on the music itself so is not useful for work. I do like to make music myself though. I play both soprano and alto recorders, and when my younger son visits he accompanies me on the piano.
How are you different now than you were in your 20's?
I don't think I'm very different now than I was in my 20's. I'm still the spoiled child expecting gifts from Almighty God, and looking back over my life I see that in many ways He has indeed given me everything my heart could desire. I'm less tolerant of ignorance and stupidity than I was, but perhaps more understanding of the weaknesses and vices in others that I see in myself.
I had very little self control in my 20's and I found self discipline very difficult, but I tried harder then to obtain it because I had two little boys to love and raise. Creative writing was a harsh master, forcing me to remember every time I sat down to work that our lives depended on the amount of discipline I could summon against my natural laziness. I panicked more often in my 20's. I've always been somewhat neurotic but at least I've learned to recognize most of my fears and anxieties as largely groundless and I can calm them. Now in my 70's I let myself go with what ever each day brings.
Is there a question no one has ever asked you that you wish they would? Something, perhaps that people would be surprised to know about you?
I don't remember ever being asked whether or not I'm a religious person. That's odd to me because the ancient Egyptians lived with a polyglot of gods and religious beliefs. In order to write about their lives I had to understand their religious philosophies and incorporate them deeply and naturally into day to day actions and motives of my characters. I think that an irreligious person would have great difficulty putting herself/himself into the minds of such ancients without a personal knowledge of the spiritual- to find a common ground.
Perhaps it's considered bad manners to ask anyone about their spiritual beliefs. I don't know.
And finally, the Time travel question:
If you could go back in time
to any period from before recorded history to yesterday
be safe from harm, be rich, poor, or in-between, if appropriate to your choice,
actually experience experience what it was like to live in that time, anywhere at all, meet anyone, if you desire, speak with them, listen to them, be with them,
When would you go?
Where would you go?
Who would you want to meet?
And most importantly, why do you think you chose the time?
The years I spent in England as a child were incredibly formative. My father's job gave him access into the homes of every stratum of society. Sometimes he took me with him on his pastoral visits, and I remember sitting in both modest kitchens on council estates and the grand reception rooms of manor houses. I developed a love of everything to do with the Tudor period of English history; at first the obvious sensual pleasure provided by the architecture, furniture, clothing and art. But later, studying the renaissance in the arts that took place, particularly under Elizabeth, I dreamed of finding myself discussing poetry with Francis Bacon
in front of a roaring fire with a goblet of wine, or listening to Walter Raleigh as he talks about shipbuilding.
One would imagine, after I became entangled in Egyptian history and began to write about it, that I'd want to meet Hatshepsut or Kamose, experience life along the Nile, but I never have. Even a trip into the future holds no fascination for me. I'm entirely content to exist in this age, at this time, enjoying the many luxuries this century affords me-central heating in particular!
I'm a child of my generation. Trying to connect with anyone from the past would, I believe, be a difficult linguistic, philosophical, and moral task. Human nature remains the same, of course, but the structure of society is always fluid, always changing.
Thank you, Pauline, for kindness through all the years we've known each other, and for bringing so many incredible books to the world.
And for changing my life.
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