Today I have the pleasure of welcoming Lindsey Barraclough to Book Chick City. Lindsey is a debut young adult author and her first novel, Long Lankin was released in April.
I really enjoyed Long Lankin and I’m sure you will too, so make sure you enter the giveaway at the bottom of Lindsey’s post – there are 5 copies up for grabs!
So without further ado, please give a warm welcome to Lyndsey…
The inspiration behind Long Lankin came from when I was a child living in rural Essex. I’ve always had an obsession with old English folk songs and ballads; most of these are about lusty young maidens stepping out on bright May Day mornings, but now and again, you come across something much darker and more disturbing. The ballad of Long Lankin was the creepiest of the lot. It was even weirder because the version that was written down in my book of folk songs had been sung by a Sister Emma in the south of England. Having been educated at a convent school (an experience that left an indelible impression upon me and has since become an integral part of the book), it was particularly shocking to think that a song about baby murder and ritual sacrifice should have been sung by a nun!
The song both disquieted and fascinated me, and it has haunted me ever since. I would find myself turning back to it again and again, intrigued by the strange tale and its creepy melody. Who is this creature who seems to be able to slip under doors and through gaps and unlocked windows? Who is the nurse, entrusted with the care of the infant heir of the household, who conspires with this ghastly being, to draw off the baby’s blood into a silver bowl? The tale had stealthily crept its way into some weird place in my head, and for some odd reason I can’t even explain to myself, many years after first discovering it, the song became the framework of my book.
In addition to the song, I also drew upon my own personal experiences of growing up in the 1950s. Long Lankin was set in this period for many reasons. I wanted to tell the tale through the voices of children so I felt it was important for those voices to be as authentic as possible, but one of the main reasons was that children, from a young age, were allowed to play out then with little or no adult supervision and it was obviously vital to the story that they could do this. The physical environment, the marshes and the woods in which I grew up, has changed dramatically over the years. Now it is an area of landfill sites and dual carriageways but at the time it was a wilderness, a place where Long Lankin could possibly exist.
I enjoyed an incredibly free and quite wild childhood by modern standards. It wasn’t really until 1965, when the awful horrors of the Moors Murders were splashed in lurid and terrible detail across the newspapers and television screens of the country, that the general psyche of the population underwent a permanent shift. Parents no longer felt they could safely allow children to spend hours and hours unwatched, away from the safety of their homes. Any evil person might come along and pluck them off the street just as Ian Brady and Myra Hindley had done to their young victims.
There were all kinds of other more domestic details about life in the 1950s that carry Long Lankin forward. Auntie Ida’s isolation is compounded by the fact that she is not on the telephone (in fact this is integral to the plot), but that was not unusual in those days. We were actually one of the first families in our village to be connected. The only problem with being the first to have a telephone was that I had nobody to talk to, because none of my friends had one yet!
With all this background in mind, perhaps it isn’t surprising that when the time was right, the tale just tumbled out all in a rush over three months. I then took my time rewriting and expanding it.
The internet is incredibly valuable, but nothing beats looking things up in a real book. One that was particularly helpful on the subject of witchcraft was a translation of the Malleus Maleficarum (The Witches’ Hammer) from 1484. Online, I also discovered the Confessions and Depositions of witches from early sixteenth century England right through to the intensive witch-hunting period of the seventeenth century, all rather tragic and awful given our present knowledge, but fascinating as well. I found researching priest holes extremely interesting too.
Eventually, all this came together to form the gruesome tale that is Long Lankin. I hope people enjoy reading it, and I also hope that there are passages that give them the same goose-pimply shivers that I felt when I was writing in a little room at the top of the house, mostly late at night when the children were asleep. I always dreaded the moment when I had to turn the desk lamp off and make my way across the room in the dark on my way to bed. Just like Cora when she’s creeping through Guerdon Hall at the dead of night, you never know what’s waiting for you around the corner…
GIVEAWAY!
Thanks to Random House Children’s Books and The Bodley Head I have FIVE (5) copies of ‘Long Lankin‘ by Lindsey Barraclough (which I reviewed here) to giveaway to five lucky winners!
This giveaway is for UK residents only (publisher’s request) and ends 25th May 2011.
All you have to do to enter is the following:
1. Fill out this form (be sure to read BCC’s giveaway policy)
2. One entry per person please – all duplicate entries will be disqualified
GOOD LUCK!
4 Comments
Thanks for hosting. Happy reading.
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I love stories told through voices of children.To kill a mocking bird being a fav.
the book sounds great.Looking forward to read this one.
Thanks for hosting
Regards
Alpa
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This one does sound good, the song sung by a nun is one of those stories you just wish you knew how it came about.
Will be putting Long Lankin on my wishlist definitely.
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I didn't know this came from an old folk song. I was brought up in Essex too and I wish I had got to know these old rhymes.
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