A writer mate, Joel Hames, messaged me this morning to tell me that Peter Sutcliffe was dead. My first response was visceral: a rolling in my stomach, the merest tingling of my scalp. My second response was to think of my novel, MOTHER, and realise that this was the reason Joel was messaging me.
My third thought was of Covid-19 and the big questions circulating writers right now concerning whether or not to include the global pandemic in our stories. My answer has been that, yes, of course you can write a story in which the pandemic is present – that’s what writers do: use material from the world as a magpie builds its nest. But my personal opinion is that, unless the novel is set during the woolly and rather naive build-up or the never-quite-fully recovered after, the presence of such a devastating historical event is problematic because this piece of history is simply too strong to remain thematic or confined to details such as mask wearing, take away coffees and the touching of elbows in parks. If I were to set a story in the eye of this particular storm, I know that it is simply too big, too traumatic and too powerful not to become integral to plot and the characters who inhabit that plot – and I know this because of Peter Sutcliffe and my second novel MOTHER.
In MOTHER, the already troubled protagonist, Christopher, finds out on the day he leaves for University that he was adopted when he discovers a note in an old suitcase in the loft. I set the novel in the late seventies because I was working around the needs of the plot and had to tread the line between when it would be conceivable, in terms of social mores and the psychology of the time, for the parents to feel the need to keep this knowledge from their adopted child, and when adoption laws would allow Christopher to trace his birth parents through social services. Adoption laws changed in 1975. I spoke to a senior social worker who was involved in that area who told me that the law would have taken a year or two to trickle through enough to become a realistic option for people like Christopher. I settled, then, on the late seventies. I sent Christopher to University in Leeds because I myself went there and had a good knowledge of the geography – a knowledge that I would refine on a walking tour of the city during the writing of the novel, resulting in the discovery of a highly useful ginnel, but I digress.
So there I am, an idea taking shape, the opening moments of research – a let’s have a google around, get the ball rolling moment - let’s see what was going on in the late seventies in Leeds… I find myself staring at the iconic mugshot of Peter Sutcliffe and feel the heat creep up my face as I think: of course.
As for many of us, that particular photograph is burned into the retina of my mind’s eye, a part of my childhood when the adult world and all that belonged to it was as fuzzy as that image. But it stuck, as did the vague sense of dread, overheard words held no louder than a whisper in my eight-year-old head: ‘prostitutes, ‘women’, ‘murder’. This is my piece of creative luck, I thought, as the hairs rose on my forearms: the moment a writer finds something which not only fits her narrative but provides a bedrock upon which to construct her narrative.
I then researched the man who became known as The Yorkshire Ripper in more detail while working on the first draft of MOTHER. Christopher was at University – he was a misfit, but was saved by jack-the-lad, Adam, who befriended him and took him under his wing. Another woman had been murdered; female students went out in groups only and had organised a minibus service. I read news articles, cried at YouTube interviews with those close to the victims, watched a television drama and a documentary. I spoke to one of my readers local to the area, Gail Shaw, about the atmosphere at that time. As well as giving me the names of a few pubs, the general lay of the land, Gail confirmed that, yes, it was a time of great terror; no woman went out alone. What better backdrop could there be for a story of a shy, awkward man whose already borderline personality has been disastrously destabilised by a traumatic revelation?
And that was the intention: to create a backdrop, an atmosphere of fear at odds with women’s relatively newfound sexual liberation, but even by the time I’d finished the first draft, Peter Sutcliffe had stepped out of the shadows and had manoeuvred himself into the very body of the text. Christopher became fascinated with him. In the second draft, he had made a scrapbook of news articles relating to him. In the third draft, he had grown a dark beard … in short, the backdrop had proved too powerful to be consigned to historical detail or sinister atmosphere - it had become an active part of the story in ways I will not divulge here.
Sutcliffe’s dead. That was all Joel wrote in his message. And I knew he meant MOTHER and that he was thinking of Christopher and then of course I was too - because long before today’s news, that story was not only haunted but inhabited by the ghost of this notorious murderer. Sometimes history is too powerful to stay in the background.