Photo by Random Letters.

Perhaps because I was born in the middle of the night I never have really associated the hours of darkness with wasting my time in sleep – more with being up and about and ready, I sometimes think much more ready than I manage to be in the day. Insomnia started early for me, but it wasn’t about not sleeping, it was about being full of other things, being too delighted to let go and drop away. I’m told that when I was little I would go to bed quite obediently, but then for a while I would sing – small person in under blankets and singing, happy to elongate the day and perhaps fond of music, I suppose, I’m not sure. I had no work to engage me, no social calendar, no pressing concerns, I only wanted to be me, with my own restless skin, just following along behind my thinking.

This was around the time when I can recall my parents tucking me in and then edging out of my room with, ‘I’ll just leave the door open a bit, so it won’t be dark.’ This meant that I suffered from night light envy. Other kids had night lights thatSheets are impervious to monsters, everybody knows that. glowed fondly, or revolved endearing pictures round their bedroom walls, that played tunes, even. I had the door open a bit – which, very obviously, was going to let the monsters in – and also provide just enough illumination for me to be stricken by the sight of them as they pounced. I’ve slept with my head underneath the covers ever since. Sheets are impervious to monsters, everybody knows that.

By the time I went to school, my twin causes of sleeplessness: over-excitement and monsters: were already well-established. I was a pupil in the same institution for thirteen years – primary, junior, secondary – and until I became an occasionally carefree senior my education seemed based around a core curriculum of shouting. The primary school shouting was especially intense. To be sure, I was usually much too spineless and translucent to be shouted at myself, but there were always the wholesale excoriations of our class as a nest of imbeciles and ne’er-do-wells to be endured and I never did know when some unforeseen regulation might not be personally transgressed, or my inability to handle sums or swimming or shoelaces might become finally intolerable. Sunday nights – already full of the chill and flinching that were a natural part of Monday morning – became ill-fitting and pushed me into a habit of wakefulness. When I finally did drift off, I would dream of uncompleted homework and werewolves and shame.

But the stronger push was always from varieties of elation. I could read before I went to school and – as soon as narratives didn’t simply involve the variously hapless animals of Blackberry Farm – I would be found and held by book after book. I wouldn’t be able to stop reading – all comfortable and uninterrupted and what could be wrong about staying in this or that beautiful world until threeWhen I finally did drift off, I would dream of uncompleted homework and werewolves and shame. in the morning? I knew that I’d wake up tired, I knew that I’d feel queasy if I had to run about in gym or if – since my school was obsessed with the moral and physical benefits of Scottish country dancing – I were required to disport myself through a gauntlet of dashing white sergeants and reels – and shouting – but I’d also worked out that the world was full of books, that centuries and continents of books were heaped around me – enticing and funny and scary and hypnotizing and overwhelming books and how could I possibly read them all – never mind the new books mushrooming up on every side – if I didn’t keep putting in the hours?

And more overwhelming still was the unmistakeable drive towards writing. It wasn’t at all that I believed I could do better than any of the authors by whom I was surrounded, it was only that writing my own words was the most overwhelming experience of all. Given the horrible standard of my early scribbling – ramblings through a pseudo-Celtic mythical kingdom, mildly satirical songs for the school magazine, years of utterly inexcusable poetry – I can be entirely certain that no one else would have been overwhelmed by anything other than nausea in its clumsy, purple, self-important presence. But it made me elated and, after dinner and schoolwork and dog-walking and the rest, even if I’d put the light out and laid myself down for definite rest, little ideas and scraps and nonsenses would tickle in and start to shake me. They would make the nights too bright to resist. I remember once, long after school and university, being in possession of my first laptop – I’d pottered out to the kitchen and left it by itself in a darkening room and when I walked back in with a coffee, it was there and shining – this word-holding thing just quietly glowing like a window into somewhere else and better and more wonderful and I remember thinking, ‘Yes, that’s how a good page would look if you could really see it, that’s how it always did look in my head.’ It’s a light that I hope will always wake me.

But, of course, not being a creature of moderation, as soon as I was able to earn my living by writing and nothing but, I and my ergonomically disastrous laptops – I burned through one every couple of years – would work too hard and too long and too late into the lovely and undisturbed nights – finally being paid to do what grown-ups had told me not to. So I got ill. My spine – like every other human’s – is still mainly designed for activity, hunter-gathering, swinging in trees. It grew tired of unnatural compressions,There was no light left in the darkness, only the thought that going to bed exhausted me, that this was my life now, that kissing hurt. poor posture, self-employed stress and carrying the staring weight of the brain to which I had retreated. I developed a herniated disk. Six months of misdiagnosis and increasingly desperate alternative therapies only harmed me further. Finally, an unwise business trip to London meant I folded up in my publisher’s offices and was shipped to an A&E – as it happened, on my birthday. After an afternoon of ‘If you’ll just hold still . . . oh, and happy birthday . . . press the button if you feel claustrophobic . . . and I see from the form it’s your birthday’ I was X-rayed and MRI-ed and diagnosed with both the dodgy disk and muscle wasting. I emerged with one week’s pain relief, a neck collar and the temporary ability to flag down cabs no matter what.

Immobility and muscle-wasting and pain, pain and immobility and more muscle-wasting – I spent a decade in that loop. Waiting lists, physio, a diminishing income. The first time my range of movement was assessed I wanted to cry – I could barely lift my arms. I was wearing slip-on shoes, buying my groceries one tin at a time. And there was no sleep. I would pass the nights watching Sci-Fi and stand-up comedy. There was no light left in the darkness, only the thought that going to bed exhausted me, that this was my life now, that kissing hurt. And I was angry – I’d given my life to a vocation and been rewarded with this – a pain which made even typing almost intolerable.

And I hope I will never forget that slowly, slowly friends and strangers suggested remedies and tiny advances were made and that gently the pain of unaccustomed exercise could replace the pain of being me and the fear of getting worse again, being knockedIt now seems traditional that I’ll finish my novels in an all-out dash, running just ahead of them and hoping I won’t fall. back into more days of lying down. I was offered places to stay and recuperate, advice, concern – the world was bleak but also generous. And I did recover. A few years ago I could be in New York and arrange to meet a friend across on the other side of Central Park and I could amble over in twenty minutes and then have to waste time in coffee shops. I’d planned that my journey would take an hour – when I’d last been there, it had.

Naturally, I promised myself that I would be sensible thereafter and never overdo things again. I would take breaks and holidays. I bought a special chair to support me, I practised Tai Chi almost every day, I took vitamins and went for long walks, lots of long, long walks. I tried to remember to be grateful for mobility, for the mercy and simplicity of comfort, and to make up for being antisocial and bad-tempered on so many, many occasions when the pain was too bad and too boring to mention.

But I’m me – I love what I do, I love to sit up late in my wonderful chair and drink too much caffeine and make something mildly dramatic out of endless typing – the all-night sessions, the two- and three-day sessions, only interrupted by baths and black and white movies. It now seems traditional that I’ll finish my novels in an all-out dash, running just ahead of them and hoping I won’t fall. I spent last year bundled up in a New England barn conversion, supplied with Diet Coke and Jimi Hendrix, grinding the hours away between summer storms that whitened the whole sky, that flashed me into somewhere else, drenched me in warm rain when I stood out on the deck. I write, God help me, very much according to the model set out by Honore de Balzac – a man who habitually woke at midnight, who lived through love letters rather than love, who killed himself with black coffee and overwork.

Which means that, as I write this, I am recovering – I hope – from months of viral labyrinthitis. It’s a condition which produces a kind of profound seasickness and anxiety, which leaves you clinging Everyone has their 3 a.m. tribunal of mistakes made and damages received and threats that are more or less credible, but all insist on being heard.to your spinning and ducking bed while savage possibilities rage over you, every thought you shouldn’t have: loss and permanent ill-health and hurts to those you love. For the last few months sleep has been either unobtainable, or a long, hot succession of nightmares, often with the illusion of having woken, but being paralyzed while yet more fears unfold. And it’s my own fault, entirely. In the last ten years I’ve taken precisely two holidays – during one of which I had to work. I should know better. I should do better. I have to do better.

I write at night, because it’s the proper time for dreaming – emails and essays during the day, journalism, correspondence, payment of bills – but I wait for the sun to weaken and set before I can find, as old William says, that ‘. . . imagination bodies forth the shapes of things unknown and gives to them a local habitation and a name.’ Unfortunate when the shapes are monsters, their names familiar – ‘What if I don’t get better? What if I fall even further behind? What if the work is failing and I can’t see it? What if he doesn’t love me in any way? What if my life won’t work? What if he’s gone for good? What if, as usual, the little joys are wasted and go wrong?’ Everyone has their 3 a.m. tribunal of mistakes made and damages received and threats that are more or less credible, but all insist on being heard. It’s perhaps why, when we care for each other, we so often ask, ‘How did you sleep?’ We know what a terrible place the edge of sleep can be. It is perhaps one of the quieter reasons for making love, or rather for being each other’s companions in our beds – we try to be present when the people we need most have to drop into the other little death and we like to feel them there for us when we surface badly, when we are afraid and pulling the sheet up over our faces will make no difference, will not save us.

And we wish each other ‘Sweet dreams.’ Of course we do. And, sometimes stupidly and sometimes sensibly, I will spend my professional life and night after night attempting to build dreams for other people and for myself, trying to sing and elongate the day. Trying to make the words that shine, the way so many other people’s words have always done for me. ■

This was an original commission for BBC Radio 3’s The Essay, which will be broadcast on 5th October at 11pm as part of a series on sleeplessness.

The Granta fortnightly Podcast: A.L. Kennedy, twice selected as one of Granta’s Best Young Novelists, talks to Editor John Freeman about her latest novel (The Blue Book), her favourite magic tricks and travelling by boat.

The Granta Podcast Episode 20 by Ted Hodgkinson

When it’s finished, all finally over with, people will ask you things like, ‘Do you miss it?’ or ‘Spare time on your hands, want to come out to the pictures?’ or, naturally and most frequently, ‘Got the next one all planned, then?’ And, if you had the energy, you might want to scream or at least disagree with vehemence, but you don’t because you have just finished your novel and have no energy for anything. You wait, in fact, and wonder when the first sign of a down-time infection will appear, because you know from experience that you couldn’t fight off a day-old puppy, never mind even the mildest disease. As inevitably as people succumb to flu during the Christmas holidays, so writers relax after the last rewrite of the ultimate tweak, beyond the final long and despairing consideration and then fall into a pit of respiratory infections, or lupus, or leprosy, or plague.

This time, I contracted labyrinthitis, a charmingly-named and utterly uncharming virus which I haven’t shaken yet. And I am aware, believe me, that the last thing you should do to anyone with labyrinthitis is shake them.

And you don’t miss it. You really don’t. Yes, the final stretch of a first draft’s completion is perhaps writing at its most comfortable – your book is helping, all the decisions you have engineered to get here have made an ever increasing number of other decisions inevitable, you know the characters, It was a strange and humid and almost hallucinatory time. Scarlet damsel flies would pause and then lift.you are chasing along after them and their plot as if the only reason they could seem so clear must be that they will vanish overnight, so you have to catch them now, now, now. But beyond that comes the rewriting, the periods of bottomless self-loathing, the insoluble paragraphs, the grind of making a private joy into something palatable for others.

If you’re in any way like me, it all means that for months your friends have not seen you, or if you’ve been there, you haven’t really been there. If there is anyone you love, you are aware that they have known you only in bursts between something intense which has little to do with them, beyond the fact that you are grateful for their interest and support, that you appreciate anyone who would understand how much you can disappear and yet how much you need to feel that someone is holding your hand and cheering you on and thinks you are better than you are. You need that, but it’s more than you should ask.

I would visit my mother, or my godchildren, and be delighted to see them and then horribly, quickly become anxious either to take long walks in order to think about the novel, or to go away into a corner and work on it, take out the data stick and the back-up data stick and the back-up back-up data stick and get more of it down. It sits in your dreams and eats them.

This time I had a very tight deadline for the book and asked a very kind lady, Shelby White, who can only be described as a patron, to let me stay once more in her cabin in the woods in New York State. So for months I went slowly and necessarily crazy in a wooden house surrounded by – and increasingly perforated by – hordes of woodpeckers. I would sleep late, have lunch, go for a thoughtful walk to the reservoir through a glorious Indian summer, then go back and start writing. A break when I would be brought my dinner and then a bottle of Diet Coke (heaven forgive me) Tai Chi while playing Jimi Hendrix, some voice exercises to get me feeling able to express what was needed and the long, real run into pages until the small hours. It was a strange and humid and almost hallucinatory time. Scarlet damsel flies would pause and then lift. There would be great continental storms, skies as light as morning but white and the wood tiles rattling overhead with torn leaves and water. I knew I had been undisturbed for a little too long when I found myself outside on my deck, Jimi loud inside and the lightning roaring overhead while I danced naked in the dark and hot and heavy rain. Whatever it takes to get the job done.

I had to break off from my seclusion and Shelby’s gentle hospitality to travel across the US by train (I no longer fly) and so completed my first draft in car 2730 of the Empire Builder – American trains are uncared-for but they all have sturdy names – en route to Portland, Oregon. And the occupants of car 2730 were pleased for me and hugged me and made much of me and I was glad, having spent the whole night awake and typing, typing as Washington gave way to Idaho and then . . . done – nothing left but the dark and Oregon and a rattled, light-headed dawn spent threading along beside the grey mist and early fishermen of the Columbia River Gorge. It felt heroic. It always does. And I went to sleep in a friend’s house that night, still rocking and having sent a text to let my supporter know the good news. I was woken by the return text in the morning and knew then that someone was happy for me who understood.

I fought through the first rewrite on the ship going home across the Atlantic – I was tempted to let the pages blow overboard and start again, so horrible did everything seem. But they have very stern laws about littering at sea.

And now, of course, there is the plunge into all of the care that the author must take once the book has left them. It is no longer a problem, the newer tests and more frightening ideas have arrived. The horrors of past doubts and effort have receded and only the exhilaration of that downhill rush over the final chapters remains. It could almost seem possible that I might actually ever write another.I was tempted to let the pages blow overboard and start again...But they have very stern laws about littering at sea. But the old book isn’t done with me yet – almost no one else has read it and it has to be supported and pushed on its way, launched like a very sinkable little ship. Suddenly, I’ve hit the time for interviews (anxiety-provoking) and for photographs (more anxiety provoking) and I have readings to give and an autumn of promotion to undertake when I am still ill and still adjusting, still taking time to move from being private, from channelling too much of myself into a small fictional space. I am unused to normal expressions of emotion, to interactions, to the rhythms of people I didn’t make up earlier. It is strange. Very.

I never know how to genuinely talk about what I do when I write, because when I write I am so far from myself. I never like to lie. This makes discussing matters with journalists unwieldy to say the least. Plus, I never feel that I have the right to sell anything I have produced – it seems a terrible imposition. Still, I’ve been paid, the last book did well, won prizes: so there are expectations. If I were healthier, I might feel the professional pressures more, I am certainly aware that in a time of recession, I have an uncertain job, a position which only rests on the quality and visibility of the last book. I have to try my best, dress nicely, stand up without throwing up, be grateful that anyone is paying any attention when so many books aren’t reviewed at all, when my mailbox receives three or four unsolicited novels every week, asking for a quote, for a favourable review or mention, for any kind of help. The envelopes all smell a little of despair.

And when the day’s required event is over, I get back home and I sit and I catch my breath and I know that while I’m writing I feel I could handle all of life, as much of it as I could get – the complexity, the unpredictability, the press of people – I feel that I only need time, for the book to be over so that I can be free. But I’m wrong. I don’t deal well with life, or people. I appreciate them, but they baffle and overwhelm me and scare and delight me perhaps more than they would those who are more in the world. It can’t be helped. Which is part of the attraction of starting on another book. ■

Photo by Campbell Mitchell.

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Granta 115: The F Word

This is the second part A.L. Kennedy’s touching portrait of time spent in her grandmother’s cabinet-making workshop as a child (part one was published yesterday).

The young A.L. Kennedy has been taken along to the workshop in the early morning, only to discover that she does not have her grandmother’s hand for French polishing. Looking back on the woman’s life, she also reflects on a possible reason for the the ‘strange, harsh, passionate way’ she had of loving her husband.

And what was her craft? French polishing. And all the allied arts and tricks and mysteries of staining, varnishing, colouring, spraying and lacquering, of hiding faults, revealing beauties, of renewing and creating surfaces. And she was good – she was the real thing – although initially more by accident than choice. Her mother had put her into service and – always awkward, independent – she’d walked out at lunchtime on her first day – her employers had given her potatoes to peel for their lunch and some others for herself – the others being, as she said, not fit for pigs and so she had told them at the time and had then been punished with an apprenticeship to a French polisher – a strange job, a man’s job, one which condemned its practitioners to early deaths – so many toxic fumes and substances, the risk of fire. And – in the days before health and safety, before cheap and effective compressors and guns – French polishers had to take mouthfuls of meths, of thinners, and spray them out through their teeth, this leading to almost inevitable professional intoxication and addiction. But my grandmother survived, she learned, she excelled. She even took on custom jobs – all of the handrails in a Welsh University once – an awful lot of effort but satisfying – or the teak on a fancy boat, or some celebrity who wanted her speakers to match her piano – high-gloss black lacquer over shoddy chipboard and veneer, something both difficult and offensive about the request, and still she fulfilled it, she pulled it off. But what she loved, of course, was proper wood and proper finishes – they were her obsession. She would stalk round other people’s homes, running her big, hard, leathery hands over their sideboards and tables and cupboards, loudly finding fault. The world was full of second-rate rubbish, of bad fakery, of good wood spoiled, of messing.

But not in her workshop – in her own corner within the wider workshop, never there – not in her special room with its broad tables carefully covered in clean sheets from the Financial Times, with the spray guns hung up in good order and the extractor hood ready, caked in years of accumulated vapours that had formed a crust like yellowish, poisonous snow. And here too were her bottles and bottles of special, secret mixtures, polishes and stains, with their sour clever breath and her immaculate cloths and wadding that she would make up into pads for laying on the French polish in delicate coat after coat, smoothing down a suspension of beetles’ wings, insanely temperamental, wonderfully lovely, the heart of her craft.

And on the walls about her, were colour charts of brown and brown and brown, whole panels set out in neat squares of what I could only see as exactly the same shade of brown, but for her they were different, for her they were unmistakeably only themselves and only a wazzick wouldn’t see it. And there were wazzicks on all sides. Like the men who tried to bring in pieces for her that hadn’t been sanded to a frictionless glide. They might set down, say, a table and before they could escape – grown men scurrying like kids – she’d have swiped down one of her paws across its top and let out something between a groan and a scream and then would come the tirade, the blistering, diminishing abuse of all they were and ever could be and, no don’t take it away, she would do it herself and – sure enough – she would take up the glass paper and smooth and smooth until all was well. And this was my grandmother, this man-destroying tyrant, this magnificent perfectionist with untireable arms and unfathomable ways of seeing.

On that initial day – after crunchy bacon sandwiches from the far-away, communal canteen – she had begun to introduce me to her skills: to show me her patience, her delicacy, her confidence. I had only met the woman who couldn’t leave a wrapped present alone, who always had to peek. She was the one who couldn’t sew or knit or even really make a sandwich because of her big, rough hands – my grandfather, a steelworker, cooked and cleaned and petted, his was the gentle touch. And she would panic if he was late home from work by more than a few minutes, would fret over his health, over everyone’s health, would worry herself to prostration over vastly unlikely possibilities. But here she would pour herself into the art, work until she was at least leaning up against perfection. Her hands became clever, deft, would lay down the finest veils of varnish, irreproachably even. And she’d never taken an apprentice, because no one was good enough – not for her recipes, for her discipline, for the glory of what she could do.

But I was her only granddaughter and I truly did love wood and I was taking an interest and while she worked our awkwardness and jangled nerves and silences fell away as she explained things and yet … I was hopeless. Let loose on off-cuts with the spray gun I produced only ugly runs and trails and gummy horror. I was unable to learn. I liked to sand – surely it wouldn’t take a genius to sand – but I couldn’t feel the subtle lines of things – how sharp corners must stay sharp, how horizontals must stay absolute, constant – and, in any case, I got too tired too quickly. And my French polishing … even with the easiest mixture I could feel its hackles rising under my pad, outraged as I slathered it on all wrong – and I would smooth it back with meths, almost wash it away with meths, and try another pass and then all would become just as sticky and dreadful as before and on it would go, never improving – but somehow she didn’t shout at me, didn’t rant, only smiled, because yes it was so very difficult and she would make up another pad and we would try again …

In the end I was consigned to making up the cardboard lattices they sometimes used to pack round items for shipping, or to whittling away at off-cuts. I was company for her – I was the reason that for the whole of that summer no one in the workshop could ever ever swear – on pain of her displeasure – but I was no apprentice.

And I was already heading somewhere else – off into books and writing – towards a different craft, one that my grandparents held in a kind of superstitious respect. They suspected it would lead to dark moods and complications and long walks in bad weather – which it did – and eye-strain and spectacles – which it didn’t. Eventually, my grandmother told me that she wouldn’t be telling me her special recipe for polish, because it could only have been for me if I was serious about the work. But she did give me a bottle of her mixture – a dark brown mystery, unstoppered it smelt enjoyably bitter and alert and I did use it, did painstakingly polish a pair of old wooden shuttles – relics of my hometown’s industrial past – and in the end they didn’t look too bad.

And in the end she was proud of what I did – she lived long enough to see that start of my being published, to talk about it endlessly to relatives and strangers. And she could read the story I wrote about her and the potatoes and losing one job and finding another and then my grandfather could show it to people at her funeral, still helpless with her loss, pressing the magazine into the vicar’s hands because this would be the kind of thing a vicar would understand and was proof of her, was something still there.

No one explained to me until she was long gone that her first husband, the one I never met, had died soon after their wedding. One day so much in love that they were each other, had the same haircut, wore suits cut from the same cloth and then a corpse beside her, waking to a corpse and what we would now call a nervous breakdown – they’d have to sit her on a chair in the street if the house was empty, so horrified was she by being alone. And a new husband, younger, an athlete, a man who would and did outlive her, but always the dreams of her first love, of Jack Peace, not Joe Price. And always she would tell my grandfather in the morning – I dreamed of Jack – and he would bear it. And the tantrums and the screaming and the rages that blew up from nowhere and then evaporated – he bore it all, while she doted on him in her strange, harsh, passionate way. They were together more than forty years.

I’m the same build as my grandmother, I look much the same as she did at my age. Another unwomanly, angular perfectionist. And maybe she helped to make me self-employed, to keep my own hours and to always own my workplace – not just before everyone else came in. And my house is full of wood, of finishes and waxes and grains. Only one thing in the place is French polished – a table. I did it myself. And thought of her shaking her head at me all the while.

Read part one of this piece, published on Wednesday 25 August.

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Twice-Best Young British novelist A.L. Kennedy remembers days spent in her grandmother’s cabinet-making workshop, in the first part of a longer piece. Read part two here.

It’s four in the morning. Later, when I’m an adult, I will meet four in the morning quite often but, for now, it’s new. Horrible and new. It hurts – all over.

My grandparents have, of course, already been awake for at least an hour. They are washed and dressed, my grandmother is eating tea and toasted rounds of milk loaf – a type of bread I only ever see when I am in their house – and my grandfather, having woken me – time to get up – how can it possibly be time to get up? I’ve only just lain down and surely this kind of thing can actually be fatal? – my grandfather is in the kitchen, soft-footed in his slippers, and gathering more tea and more kept-warm-and-already-buttered-and-therefore-soft-and-salt-and-uniquely-my-grandfather’s-kind-of-toast for me. My body accepts both as additional affronts to its systems.

The pair of them look at me while I eat, grinning, and in general not very secretly pleased I have finally joined them in their world of stealing a march on everyone, of afternoon naps and early to bed and then up and ready and off to work before the day can catch them. I try to appear nonchalant and I am, sort of, in a way, enjoying this – I love the smell of my grandfather’s work jacket and his overalls – dark, sharp scents of metals and grease and Swarfega – they are part of the huge, dependable, secretive, funny, gentlemanly, tender and strangely graceful thing which is my grandfather. But today – and every other weekday for the whole of the holidays – I will be working with my grandmother, I will be getting to know my grandmother – my prickly, changeable, wiry grandmother – an occasionally foul-tempered and violent pacifist, an old-style red-flag socialist married to a one-nation Tory, a woman with the loudest laugh in any theatre, a woman who hated crudity but loved a naughty joke and who refused to receive communion for years because she believed she was too full of sin to deserve it. Eventually the vicar had to go round and explain … My grandmother was a whole crowd of tricky people to spend time with.

She gave me a peppermint on the bus – no journey of any kind being survivable without sandwiches, or at least a boiled sweet and I was, meanwhile, amazed that there even was a bus and that it was almost full of other people in overalls and anoraks and safety boots and caps, people prepared and equipped to do things – only child of a teacher and a university professor, of two people who had educated themselves away from all of this, I didn’t know about going to work in the dark. I was thirteen, my parents were newly divorced, and I now lived in a different place, a small flat in my hometown on the north-east coast of Scotland. Things were altered but also the same – from the top of our street, I could still see the river with fields beyond – but this, this was Staffordshire, the Black Country – and not just for flying visits at Easter with relatives coming round – this was weeks and weeks of staying with my grandparents, of starting to meet where they lived, where they came from – this was steel mills and forges and car building and fish and chips and potato scollops on a Friday and keeping money in tins under the bed and fabricating and turning and extrusion-moulding and clay pits and subsiding, long-forgotten mines and riveting and welding and canals, this was a heritage of manufacturing that had turned a whole county the colour of coal dust, of soot, of the dirt of making things that Britain needed, that its empire had needed – guns and locks and manacles for the slave trade. Even its air tasted metallic, questionable. It could seem a dark place of injuries and cripplings, of harms. And people still told the story of Queen Victoria passing through in her royal train and just closing her blinds on the Black Country, ignoring it until it went away. They still bore a grudge on behalf of a hard and proud, ingenious and partly crazy place – where chimneys were chimbleys and your throat was your thrapple and if you were a fool you weren’t, you were a wazzick. And heaven help you if my grandmother thought you were a wazzick – because the very least she’d do would be to tell you.

It was all, of course, doomed – although I didn’t know about that either. Staffordshire’s industries were ailing even then and it was getting scared, small-minded, fretting over immigration, while the next generations – wherever they came from – lost their accents, spoke all-purpose homogenised Brummy. The words that my grandmother used become peculiar, before being turned out to silence.

But that first morning the quiet, tired-looking people doggedly boarded and left our bus and the rain fell and we drove away from streets and houses, through into haphazard, modern industrial estates and then further, back into somewhere impossible, somewhere in the past. When we climbed down and started to walk there was Staffordshire Blue brick shining all around us, a vaguely iridescent purple on the walls and even underfoot, worn into smooth hollows, and my grandmother led the way through a complex of Victorian alleys and courtyards and small-windowed structures and past hand-painted signs that might have referred to businesses long gone and finally we halted at the nondescript door of a shabby, low building to which she had the key.

She let us in – proprietorial and swift – anxiously disabled the alarm – it always did make her anxious – and then she turned on the lights and there it was – the cabinet maker’s workshop – at our disposal. Stacked wood and racked wood and ageing wood and new wood and old wood, wood organised and categorized in ways I couldn’t comprehend and wounded furniture held in clamps and half-finished new items of various designs and monumental, crouching machines, their bits and blades sleeping, but all of them clearly quite capable of lopping or slicing or gouging or massively sawing a person in two – the detail of their edges, in fact, more plainly worrying when at rest – and above all else there was naturally, overpoweringly, wonderfully, the smell of wood – the dusty-sweet, comforting and homely smell of wood – a solid atmosphere of so much wood, of so many types, that each step inside it would be slightly different – would bring the cheap whip and spring of young pine, or the dry and intelligent complications of restored mahogany, the sharp density of beech, the melancholy heat in oak, and the further tastes and traces of grains and curves and knots and flaws, of flexibilities and qualities and names I didn’t know – it was magnificent. And my grandmother understood it – she was both its mistress and its master. Inside the workshop she became stiller, taller, more assured, a woman it was impossible not to admire.

Not that she was literally still – not at all – she arrived so ludicrously early, because before she could start working, there was work to do – because what is a cabinet maker’s full of? besides wood and the scents of wood? – mess. And what could my grandmother not abide? Mess. And indeed – messing. And, now that you mention it, not that you ever should, people who messed. And on every surface of the workshop, even on the walls and in the air, there was mess - the mess of fine sawdust and medium sawdust and heavy sawdust and wood shavings large and small and straight and curly and wood chips and wood off-cuts and wood splinters and none of it could be borne and so in we set, the two of us, with brooms and shovels and cloths and we cleaned the workshop and I knew, without being told, that I was an incompetent sweeper, that I raised too much dust while trying to remove it, that swoops of exhaustion were making me clumsy, that I was too nervous and tentative when I tried to clean the dozing machines and that I was – by the end of it all – too much of a mess myself. Whatever I did, I ended up wearing it. An artisan, a professional, like my grandmother, knows how to be in dirty places without losing her dignity, knows how to be a credit to her craft.

Part two is also now online.

Images courtesy of A.L. Kennedy

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