Guest Post - Reflecting the Times by Cath Barton

Lockdown isn't the best time to launch a new book – as I know from my own experience earlier this year – so now is the time for everyone to give a shout out to all those brilliant novels and short story collections which may slip under the lockdown radar and not receive the recognition they deserve. Indie publishers and their authors need all the help they can get at the best of times, so this year has been particularly challenging.

With that in mind, today's guest post is by the talented Cath Barton, whose own book, In the Sweep of the Bay, is published on 23rd November by Louise Walters Books. Cath discusses the changing role of women and relationships in the latter half of the 20th century and how those changes are reflected in her novella. I loved this book – you can read my review below. It has the depth and scope of a much longer novel, and is so beautifully written. Highly recommended!

 

From the blurb:
This warm-hearted tale explores marriage, love, and longing, set against the backdrop of Morecambe Bay, the Lakeland Fells, and the faded splendour of the Midland Hotel.

My review: 

"A moving and honest portrait of a marriage, set against the backdrop of the wide sweep of Morecambe Bay. Cath Barton expertly captures the vagaries of the human condition in this insightful tale of love, loyalty and longing, of lost opportunities, of a relationship worn down at the heel by everyday life. Beautifully written, gentle and thoughtful, this slender novella is a must-read."

 

Reflecting the Times
Cath Barton

My new novella, In the Sweep of the Bay, is the story of a long marriage. Ted and Rene meet in a dance hall. It’s the early 1950s. Not, at least amongst the working classes which these two come from, a time of arranged marriages, but the coming together of couples was not dissimilar: ‘Rene was to Ted, from that very first dance, inevitable.’ Later in life, when Rene looks back, she says ‘It wasn’t meant to be for life, only that dance. But one thing led to another, like it does.’
    Ted and Rene diligently follow the roles which society in Britain expected of them at the time: he the breadwinner, she a housewife.
    I feel that in many real-life marriages both men’s and women’s lives were constrained during that period by social norms, but women’s much the more so. In writing about Ted and Rene’s life together, I have tried to convey the mix of their feelings, feelings which they largely kept to themselves. Not that they don’t genuinely care for one another. But for both of them there is a sense of frustration, not that either of them would have used the word, maybe not even to themselves. Rene says later: ‘I suppose if we’d talked more. But what with the cooking, the cleaning, the washing and then the two children, so four of us to keep in clean outer and underwear, how could there have been time for talking?’
    By the time their daughters Peg and Dot are ready to leave home, in the 1970s, things are different for women; opportunities have opened up. Dot gets a place at university, which is a bone of contention between her parents, as her father had hopes of her going into the family firm. But life is more complicated. I’m not going to give away everything that happens in the story – suffice it to say that Dot finds herself married young, as her mother was, and her life does not go in the direction she had expected. But she is not discontented, and nor is her sister Peg, who makes different choices about men.
    Madge, Ted’s assistant at the factory, doesn’t marry. Like all the women in the book, she has her own hopes and dreams. By the 1990s women’s expectations have moved on again: now Dot’s daughter Cecily is in charge at the family firm, and she has a husband who’s a member of a book group, something that would probably have completely mystified Ted.  Actually, her grandfather’s Aunt Lavinia was head of the firm in the 1950s, so, as in real life, nothing is simple in the shifting power balance between men and women.

I didn’t plan to write a book about how things changed for women over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. But when you write about people and their relationships, which is what I am most interested in exploring in my fiction, you must reflect the times in which they live. And how the changes in individuals’ lives relate to changes in the wider society.  I’ve always tended to say I didn’t like historical fiction but now I find that is exactly what I’ve written, so I’ve amended my view! It is, though, the history of the times I’ve lived through myself which continues to be my primary fascination.


In the Sweep of the Bay is published by Louise Walters Books in paperback and ebook on 23rd November 2020 and pre-publication copies can be purchased direct from the publisher here
 

 

Cath Barton is an English writer who lives in Wales. She won the New Welsh Writing AmeriCymru Prize for the Novella 2017 for The Plankton Collector, now published by New Welsh Review. She particularly enjoys writing in the short form, be it novella, short story or flash. She has completed a collection of short stories inspired by the work of the Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch. Some of these have been published in The Lonely Crowd, Strix and the Leicester Writes Short Story Prize Anthology 2019. Most recently she has had stories selected for publication in Fictive Dream, the first Cranked Anvil Short Story Anthology, and the forthcoming season of Open Book Unbound.