The making of an elephant…

10/02/2021

When I attend reading/book group discussions of my work, I’m often being asked where the ideas come from for the novels I write. With that in mind, I thought I’d lay out, in this first blog, how The Memory of an Elephant got started, hoping you’ll see there’s no ‘magic’ to it, just a little imagination, an inquiring mind… and twelve years in which to mull things over!

Back in the winter of 2008, we were visiting my extended family in Conway, South Wales. The gatehouse they lived in was a snug place to be and, with the weather being against us for a good part of our stay, we ate a fair amount, drank a fair amount, and chatted even more; never a bad way to pass the hours with family and friends. Both my sister-and-brother-in-law are highly articulate people, having both competed (and won) several times at the Eisteddfod in the literary sections. Considering they’re both English, that’s some achievement and I’m often left in awe, both with their knowledge of, seemingly, everything and with the self-effacing, genuine way they impart it. It was while we were sitting, one afternoon, over home-baked Welsh cakes and tea, that my sister-in-law told us all of a recent journey she’d made to London to visit her family (those were the days, eh?) and said that, on this journey by train, she’d come across a money roll someone in the carriage had obviously dropped… sound familiar yet?

She, of course, immediately enquired whether anyone in the carriage had dropped any money and eventually, after making sure that this was, indeed, the right person claiming it, she returned it. She also told us that one passenger had said to her as they got off, “Blimey. You gave it back! Why?” My sister-in-law said something like, “Because it was the right thing to do”, and left it at that. What she told us, however, was that the man who owned the roll of notes ‘looked a bit of bruiser’, and, being a writer, her imagination went into overdrive and she played with the thought that she’d given the money (a substantial sum btw) back to a man who’d gained it through ‘illicit means’. We commented on the event and my sister-in-law said, ‘Peter, you ought to use it for one of your novels.’ I smiled, thanked her and said, ‘Yeah, maybe… Don’t know quite what I’d do with it, fascinating as it is and ripe with possibilities, but… yeah, maybe…’ But, as all who find writing or reading fiction a never-ending source of stimulation will know, we’re like sponges, and I stashed the anecdote into my mental loft.

Cut to the chase, over the next year I sketched out a story around the line, ‘how we treat animals’, and it was about a year after that, so 2010, when I’d been struggling with formulating a catalyst for the novel, that I dragged out the tale of the found money, fashioning it into my narrative. Fast-forward twelve years and the book you have so kindly bought results from that shared story of my sister-in-laws’, told to us one rainy, Welsh afternoon in front of a roaring fire over tea and buns… Funny old game, innit?