Where the Heart is

In 2003 we uprooted our children and left England. Just for a year, four at the most, we said, as we packed our life into boxes, our children and cat into the car, and raced the setting sun as we drove west across the breadth of England, Wales, and onto the Ireland-bound ferry. We arrived at nightfall, a day before the removal van, and spent the first night camping in sleeping bags on the floor of the main bedroom; toilet roll, teabags, and cat food pretty much all we’d brought with us.

We arrived at the peak of the Celtic Tiger boom and fell into the trap of ‘buy quickly, for goodness sake; prices are still skyrocketing’. We did, but they weren’t. Not five minutes after we’d ploughed all savings and a massive new mortgage into a derelict farmhouse on 2.3 acres of wilderness, the bubble burst and Ireland was pitched into years of recession. Our house never recovered and almost twenty years on, we are still here, held captive in a half-finished house by negative equity so great we will never be able to start again.

Our children, babies back then, have grown and flown, back to the ‘home’ one barely knew at all and the other barely remembered. Nonetheless, they both went UK-bound for university, Scotland, though, not the England we had pulled them from – one is still at uni, the other, putting down roots back in England. Home. And my husband and I are still here in Ireland while across the water our parents get older, our children make new lives, our nieces and nephews grow into people we don’t recognise, and I become increasingly homesick.

But what’s the point of this potted history? What’s this got to do with writing?

I was asked recently how moving to Ireland influenced my writing. I can’t honestly tell if it made any difference to writing. I always wanted to write. Without the benefit of a Sliding Doors moment, I can’t know what would have been the different if I were in England, or here, or Elsewhere, but I guess what it has changed is the content of my writing. My debut novel, Dear Isobel (out March 15th), and my cosy mystery series (the first of which is out in October) are set very firmly in Ireland.

These stories not only take place in a small rural community, much like the one I live in, but the village is an integral part of the stories. In Dear Isobel, the main character’s affair would be less problematic if the two families were not living in the midst of a small, close-knit community where everyone knows everyone and their business. In the Jess O’Malley cosy mystery books, although the village is becoming increasingly dangerous as murder spills into its cottages, the village is almost a character in its own right.

What I think is more pertinent though, is the commentary the cosy mysteries give on village life here. The main character, Jess, is a ‘blow in’ to the community, like me. A ‘blow in’ is the term the locals use for someone who’s not from around here. That may mean someone who blew in from the next town, the next county, the other end of the country, or, as in my case, from England. I’m embarrassed and ashamed to state that, while we are blow ins, and while I know we are immigrants, our white faces and English-speaking tongues stop us being classed by the village as immigrants.

I’m quick to point out that I too am an immigrant here, but racism, sadly, is very much alive and well in many parts of rural Ireland so we usually slip under the radar of the abuse suffered by those with darker skin or non-English fluency in their language. Unfortunately, despite this unfairly privileged distinction of English-as-a-first-language, pale-skinned appearance, we still face degrees of ‘unwantedness’. Two summers ago, my husband was told by a neighbour that ‘no one round here cares about what we think, we don’t belong here, and where are we from anyway?’ in an incident that left me shaken and gave me the tiniest glimpse into what many live with every day.

This, I know, has crept into the commentary of my mystery books. Jess O’Malley sees Irish rural life through my eyes, and sometimes I suspect this comes across as judgemental and scathing at times, albeit among the love and gratitude she has for being a part of the village community. Jess, however, is welcomed by her village in a way I have rarely felt here. Jess O’Malley, like me, tries hard to be kind, friendly, and integrate herself into the community.

She helps her neighbours and they accept her as one of their own. Luckily for Jess, her father moved to the village before her, to pave her way. By the time Jess arrives, her father has already become a well-respected figure in the parish, and is loved by many. However, Jess’s father’s house (where Jess lives alone after her father’s death – not a spoiler, he’s dead before the stories begin!) is in a neat cul-de-sac of other retirees, many of whom I suspect are also ‘blow-ins’.

What I have overlooked or ignored in Jess’s cul-de-sac community is the tendency for small Irish villages to be largely populated by sprawling, connected families, where people live in new-built houses on family land, a field apart from their parents, siblings, cousins and grandparents. Most of our neighbours, are of course kind and friendly, and we do have good friends here. However, we are not part of the close-knit feeling of those surrounded by their families. We need them far more than they need us, for they all have each other.

These families are also rooted in farming, and the community is predominantly, and importantly, farm-based. Inevitably, due to lack of choice, the two or three largest families then marry each other, and the village population would be worthy of any fantasy epic revolving around important families battling for power, land, and fair young maidens. I exaggerate, of course, but not by much. In Dear Isobel, the main character is a blow in, like me, and her illicit lover a well-rooted native. This native/non-native status is particularly important after the affair, when the narrator is lonely and often alone, while for Charles, surrounded by family, life goes on much as it always did.

In the Jess O’Malley books, although Book 1, A Diet of Death, doesn’t include this wider family aspect of village life, I have begun to drip it into book 2 (out in 2023), and will probably make more of it in Book 3, which is only just begun. The true fun of writing my cosy mysteries loosely based on my own village community is in giving the villagers well-disguised roles in the books. Many of the characters are loosely based on the loveliest neighbours; the people I chat to while I’m out walking, the neighbours I pop in to for tea and chat. But more fun again, is that I also revel in killing off the ones who annoy me. In fact, one weed-killer happy, hedge-ripping, wildlife-destroying neighbour has now been killed off twice in two different incarnations (Book 2 and Book 3. I may turn him into yet another character to kill off in Book 4, if he fells another tree or makes another buzzard homeless.

Meanwhile, the standalone novel I am currently writing tugs harder on my pangs of homesickness. In this book, I return to the home of my childhood, in Norfolk, England. It’s another rural community, but in this book, the setting is a large, landed country estate. The more I write, the more I long for home, which to me, will always be Norfolk. Maybe the next Jess O’Malley book will ground me back into the home I live in for now, here in Ireland. Or maybe, just maybe, I will find a way to return to my roots, to go home.

—

Jinny Alexander’s first novel, Dear Isobel, is out on March 15th, 2022, Its main theme is heartbreak and recovery after the end of an affair, but it touches on loneliness, homesickness, and not ‘belonging’. 

Website: www.JinnyAlexander.com

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Dear Isobel

Women’s fiction book describing the fallout and recovery from an affair and its effect on both families.
Two marriages. A bucket full of dreams and a pile of broken hearts.

She’s not sharing her name. She’s been judged enough. She’s known as a wife, mother, friend, and to one person, a lover. In a tiny Irish village she runs a business with family friends. Except it doesn’t stay only business. In love with a man not her husband, she becomes the other woman, the marriage wrecker, the cheat and the betrayer. When the illicit relationship ends and is discovered, she’s stuck between the ruined affair and a crumbling marriage. Jobless and heartbroken she must discover what she can salvage. Will talking to Isobel help pick up the pieces or shatter their lives forever?

Amazon.co.uk: https://amzn.to/3rGTa6S

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing