1.) What was your first job? Did you like or dislike it? Why?
My first job was as an occasional Saturday girl, at
Etams, in Orpington, Kent, where my Aunty Joy was the manageress. I liked having a bit of extra money,
but I can’t say I liked the job. I was still at school, so I must have been
just sixteen, and I was deeply shy.
When new customers came into the shop I recall becoming rigid with fear
and embarrassment, knowing that I should walk up to them and ask “May I help
you?” while all I wanted to do was run away. And I’d not done the job frequently enough to have become
used to it, when my aunt got a promotion to the Bromley branch of Etams. Christmas
was approaching and she asked if I’d like to work in the school holidays, for the
week leading up to the big day. My
desire for the money overcame my aversion to the job.
I was very susceptible to cystitis in my early teenage
years, and anyone who’s had it will know that if you’re suffering with this
condition, the very worst thing you can do is stand around. I’d woken on the
very first morning of my holiday job with the unmistakable symptoms. I duly
presented myself at the shop but I felt worse and worse during the
morning. By lunchtime I admitted
to Aunty Joy that I wasn’t well. She
wasn’t pleased but I think she believed me. I looked flushed apparently and
probably had a temperature. She sent me home.... but not before I’d used my Etam’s discount to buy
myself a Christmas present - a new dressing gown! I didn’t go back.
2.) Do you have a pet peeve? If so what is it?
One of the things I hate about the world we now live
in is litter. I cannot get my head
around why some people think it’s all right to take a mattress or an old fridge
out into the countryside and dump it.
Are they blind or completely insensitive to the way they’re despoiling
the landscape?
But I suppose they think “out of sight out of mind.”
If they don’t live there, they don’t care. Their unwanted ‘stuff’ becomes someone else’s problem. I don’t approve of this attitude but I
suppose there is a kind of logic to it.
I know I’m very privileged to live in a beautiful part
of the country, and that life for the majority is ever more urban. But this
doesn’t explain why people are so
slovenly in the towns where they live and work? Why do they open their car
windows and throw bottles, cans, and cigarette packets out into the street? Why
do they empty their car ash trays onto the ground in car parks? Why do they drop the paper and
packaging from their fast food purchases on the pavement?
Wherever people live, isn’t it more pleasant to live
in surroundings that don’t have plastic bags caught in the branches of roadside
trees, where there isn’t filth and detritus scattered across pavements, and
clogging the gutters?
3.) Would you describe your style as shabby chic, timeless elegance,
eclectic, country or ____?
I don’t buy fashion magazines and don’t pay a lot of
attention to what the well dressed woman is wearing. And certainly not the well dressed woman of my
age! Most of the time, I have to
admit, I’m just shabby - there’s not much chic going on. I don’t go shopping
for clothes frequently, but when I do I love a bargain. I will never buy something just because
it’s cheap, however. I have to be able to envisage what it will go with. The colour is all important. You may not think it to look at me, but
I will agonise over what goes with what, and will never wear two items of
clothing together (even at home in shabby mode) that, in my view, clash.
But one thing is constant. I am usually in trousers.
For many years I have been afflicted by the conviction that as soon as I put on
a frock I look like Edna Everedge; and that I look like a Christmas tree as
soon as I wear any jewellery other than earrings. This doesn’t mean I never
wear dresses and necklaces, but it’s very infrequent. If I’m going out to a
daytime event - lunch, or seeing friends - I suppose you’d describe my style as
country - if by country you mean jeans or chinos, Tee shirts, shirts, cardigans
etc. But going out in the evening my style is more eclectic. So when preparing
for a ‘do’, I love teaming items from my wardrobe that individually might be
old, cheap, or a lucky find from a ‘hippy’ shop, and creating ‘an outfit’.
4.) Tell me about your book { FLY OR FALL } and where you got your inspiration for it?
When I first
started writing FLY OR FALL it was not as a result of a single, lightning bolt
of inspiration. I did then what I’d done before and what I’ve done since, I
began to think about my own life and of some incident or experience I could use
as a jumping off point. The only event
I came up with was moving house, which we’d done a few years previously. I’d moved house quite willingly - in
fact it had been at my instigation - but for whatever reason I came up with the
idea of a woman who is somehow forced into moving against her will, and I began
to reflect on the possible ‘hows’ and ‘whys’.
Eleanor - known as
Nell - thinks of herself as a wimp.
Even though her life has not been easy, she clings to the safety of the
familiar. Married young and dependent on her teacher husband’s wage, Nell has
stayed at home, in Battersea, with her children and her increasingly invalid
mother. Following the death of her
mother the family’s fortunes suddenly change. Trevor, is wildly enthusiastic about their ‘move up in the
world’; he plans to give up teaching and move house away from London. Nell, however, is gripped by a nebulous
fear of some unknown disaster waiting to trip them all up, but her husband,
steamrollers her objections.
Now in her early
thirties, and living in an unfamiliar landscape away from old friends, Nell
feels cast adrift. She is
increasingly aware that Trevor is no longer the man she married, and their
young teenage twins, Jonathan and Juliet, are grumpy and difficult. The women
she meets, Felicity and Katherine, seem shallow and promiscuous. The new house
is unwelcoming and needs modernisation; she’s thrust into a continuing chaos of
rubble and renovation. Patrick,
one of the men working for the building firm, is infamous as a local Lothario,
but he doesn’t make a pass at her. At first she’s grateful - she’s not that kind of woman - but her feelings
towards him grow increasingly confused and ambivalent.
When Nell takes a bar job at the local sports
club, she is exposed to an overheated atmosphere of flirtation and gossip.
Influenced by her new friends and the world in which she now moves, she begins
to blossom and to take pleasure in the possibilities which seem to be opening
up for her. She meets and forms a deeper friendship with the quirky, new-age
Elizabeth, a very different character to her other friends. As Nell begins to enjoy herself and to
become enthusiastic about her life, it seems her husband is on a downward
trajectory, on the opposite end of a cosmic seesaw. When she is pursued by a beautiful and enigmatic young man,
called Angel, she is tempted into behaviour she would never previously have
imagined herself capable. The earthquake, felt as a tremor of apprehension at
the start of the story, rumbles through her life and the lives of those around
her. When the dust settles nothing
is as she previously understood it.
FLY OR FALL
follows the dismantling of all of Nell’s certainties, her preconceptions and
her moral code. Unwelcome truths about her friends, her husband, her teenage
children and even herself are revealed.
Relationships are not what they seem. The hostility between brothers is
exposed and finally explained. And the love that blossoms unexpectedly from the
wreckage of her life is doomed, as she acknowledges the hair’s breadth between
wishful thinking, self-deception and lies. By the conclusion of FLY OR FALL everything has altered for
Nell, the woman who doesn’t like change. But she has rebuilt herself as a different
person, a braver person, and she has embarked with optimism on a totally
transformed life, a life that offers the chance of love.
5.) How much of your book is
realistic
I’d not got very
far with FLY OR FALL when my life was thrown into chaos by two events which
mirrored plot points in my developing story. My mother died and my husband was head-hunted. We moved to a
part of the country neither of us knew, or had any connection to. At this point I decided to put the book
away for a while. In fact, it
stayed on the shelf for many years, years in which I tucked away a lot of real
life experience that later emerged in the book.
6.) Who is your role model? Why?
I’ve wracked my brains over this question. There are many individuals I admire,
but I wouldn’t call them role models.
So I’m going to plump for my mother. As I said earlier, she died too young, and I’ve missed her
very deeply ever since.
I’m lucky to have my parents’ letters, those written
to one another through the war years, which shines a light on their early
relationship. My mother was from a very respectable but, working-class, family.
My father’s background was middle-class, but his arty, musical and theatrical
parents had fallen on hard times. He patently saw himself as a bit of an
intellectual, a Professor Higgins to his own Eliza Doolittle. At the time my
mother accepted his own estimation of himself and, in her letters, seems almost
overawed and grateful to be the beneficiary of his pearls of wisdom.
The woman I knew was very bright - probably brighter
than her husband - feisty, independent, strong and well read. My dad was a graphic designer but she
was an artist in her own right - an oil painter. She was interested in
left-wing politics, was an early adopter of environmental concerns and of the
ideals that inspired women’s lib. Most of all, she wouldn’t take any old
nonsense from my dad.
7.)
What are your ambitions for your writing career?
Money, fame and celebrity would all be welcome,
although the older I get, the less I hanker after the last two. In fact, money
isn’t all that important either.
Enough to get by is all I need.
The only thing money provides is the evidence that you’ve sold a lot of
books, and that is my primary ambition. I want people to read my books and to
tell me they enjoyed them.
Although I wouldn’t say no to a six figure advance and a film deal!
8.) Share one fact about yourself that
would surprise people.
My life is an open book and
not very surprising. OK, there is
one story which I don’t think I’ve told in public. I was about 18 or 19 when I met
a bloke at a party who took a fancy to me. His name.... well, perhaps I won’t tell you his name, but he
claimed to work as a publicist in the music business. I had largely overcome my aversion to shop work by this time
and, following two years at art college, was working at Peter Robinsons (a ‘ladies’
department store in the Strand, which no longer exists but which spawned Top
Shop). He called me at work one day and I asked me to visit him at his flat,
that evening. Although I wasn’t very experienced in those days, I thought the very least a man could do was give me a bit more notice, and take me out. But he claimed to be banned from
driving, which might well have been true, although I suspect the real reason
was that I wasn’t glamorous enough to be seen in public with him. I wasn’t a model or a pop singer or a
starlet.
I made excuses on that
occasion, but he was persistent and kept phoning me. Eventually we made a date.
His flat was in Ovington Gardens, a road off Knightsbridge, just along from Harrods, so I guess he was (or
might have been) what he said he was*. The flat was fairly bohemian, as far as I recall, but it had
an elaborate quadraphonic sound system which he was patently proud of. I think he fed me and played me music,
and then it was time to get down to the real business of the evening.
As I said, I wasn’t very
experienced, but I did like kissing.
So there was a bit of that, and then things began to get a bit more heavy
and serious. But I wasn’t keen on
things getting more heavy and serious ... and I bit his tongue.
I have never known a mood to
change so rapidly. I think I
really hurt him. He was upset and
angry, and I very quickly left the flat. And that was the last I saw of
him. I am quite convinced he had
every intention of tumbling me into bed, and possibly keeping me as a spare
‘not to seen with’ girlfriend. But my biting his tongue put paid to that
plan. And, as it happened, he’d
have had a hard job getting me into bed unless he wanted to force the issue. I
was very choosy and for all his connections to a world I longed to be
associated with, I just didn’t fancy him enough. He had ginger hair!
*NB. I have just googled this man and,
apart from him now being dead (I’m obviously sorry to hear this) his Wikipedia
entry says he was “ the most successful and sought after rock publicist in
London” (60s/70s). Would my life have been different if I hadn’t bitten his
tongue?
Blurb for Fly or Fall...
Will the allure of the unknown ever overcome the fear of stepping away from solid ground?
Wife and mother, Nell, fears change, but it is forced upon her by her manipulative husband, Trevor. Finding herself in a new world of flirtation and casual infidelity, her principles are undermined and she’s tempted. Should she emulate the behaviour of her new friends or stick with the safe and familiar?
But everything Nell has accepted at face value has a dark side. Everyone - even her nearest and dearest - has been lying. She’s even deceived herself. The presentiment of disaster, first felt as a tremor at the start of the story, rumbles into a full blown earthquake. When the dust settles, nothing is as it previously seemed. And when an unlikely love blossoms from the wreckage of her life, she fears it is doomed.
The future, for the woman who feared change, is irrevocably altered. But has she been broken, or has she transformed herself?
My Links
To connect to me:
http://twitter.com/gilliallan (@gilliallan)
https://www.facebook.com/GilliAllan.AUTHOR
Books:
TORN MyBook.to/gilliallansTORN (universal) or
FLY OR FALL- myBook.to/GilliAllan (universal)
Biography
Gilli Allan started to write in childhood,
a hobby only abandoned when real life supplanted the fiction. Gilli didn’t go
to Oxford or Cambridge but, after just enough exam passes to squeak in, she
attended Croydon Art College.
She didn’t work on any of the broadsheets,
in publishing or television. Instead she was a shop assistant, a beauty
consultant and a barmaid before landing her dream job as an illustrator in
advertising. It was only when she was at home with her young son that Gilli began
writing seriously. Her first two novels
were quickly published, but when her publisher ceased to trade, Gilli went
independent.
Over the years, Gilli has been a school governor, a contributor to local
newspapers, and a driving force behind the community shop in her Gloucestershire
village. Still a keen artist, she designs
Christmas cards and has begun book illustration. Gilli is particularly
delighted to have recently gained a new mainstream publisher - Accent Press. FLY
OR FALL is the second book to be published in the three book deal.
Thanks for having me Rachel. It was fun. gx
ReplyDeleteInteresting interview and I love the tongue biting incident! Angela Britnell
ReplyDeleteThanks Angela. Glad you were able to get the gist. At the time of the incident I felt a bit guilty, but didn't tell anyone as I felt it made me seem gauche and naive. Since then I half forgot about it until this man appeared as a 'talking head' on a programme about the music business, back in the nineties. "I went out with him" I exclaimed. My husband was not particularly impressed. He'd have been even less impressed if I'd told the whole story. We didn't 'go out', we stayed in. And as for the rest.........
ReplyDelete