M E R I D I A N     M A G A Z I N E

Letter from the Highlands, September 2001
by Anne Perry

Actually this is written from Oxford, where I am attending the mystery writers' conference I come to every year. It is held at St. Hilda's where about a hundred or so mystery writers, fans, people in the business, and those interested in it, gather together for a long weekend about this time in August. It is small, intimate and very civilized - and great fun. We are all accommodated in St. Hilda's students' halls, or lecturers' rooms, not quite hotel standard, but it doesn't matter in the slightest. The grounds are superb! Ancient, beautiful trees, smooth-shaven lawns sloping down to the river, where punts drift up and down lazily. Actually as I write I can hear what sounds like the crack of willow on leather - somebody somewhere is playing cricket in the sun! The buildings are glorious, golden stone, mellowed by time, carved and decorated, perfectly proportioned. This morning we walked past a church a thousand years old!

This evening we will begin the conference itself, the theme is 'The scene of the Crime', and different writers will talk on settings, places, times etc. I think I am just about prepared for what I will say - but I don't have to do it until tomorrow afternoon, and I prefer to leave a good deal of room to manoeuvre as I hear what others say. I always find this so invigorating to the mind and so very enjoyable to spend time with such a delightful group of people. Some are old friends from past years, some new, but all of the most generous and interesting nature.

Simon drove me down. It is six hundred miles, give or take a few, and I don't enjoy driving so far, especially as some of it is at night. Actually near Birmingham we passed through torrential rain and a lot of lightning - I would have hated trying to see my way through that!

We are early because I had a radio interview in Worcester, about two hours away, and gave a talk in the Worcester Library in the evening. There was one older man whose smiling face I saw as soon as I began. It was one of the brightest, most interested and charming expressions I have ever seen. I wondered if I should tell him afterwards how easy he made it for me to speak with enthusiasm to them all, as if I were telling my thoughts to the kindest of friends. I didn't, because I thought I might embarrass him, but his presence made such a difference. I shall remember him for a long time, even though we did not speak to each other, in a sense everything I said was to him. Does he know that his face, in a crowd, is such a joy?

Sometimes at such events they give you a bouquet of flowers, or something of that sort. At Worcester they gave me a beautiful basket - and it is beautiful, even were there nothing in it - but it held a home-made loaf of sourdough bread - which I love! - and four beautifully decorated jars of home-made preserves - jam, chutney, jelly and marmalade. Isn't that absolutely superb? What a particularly thoughtful gift.

We did not leave Worcester until after nine o'clock, so it was around eleven when we reached Oxford. There were roadworks causing diversions, and I must admit I was completely lost - but Simon said he knew where we were. He always travels with such confidence! We did arrive safely, but heard of others who had travelled round and round for an hour and a half trying to find the way back to the intended route. When you are tired, it is late, and you are in a city you don't know, to be lost and then found is a blessing that seems even better than its real importance. Such small miracles remind me of the greater ones, both of which awaken profound gratitude.

Something that has begun, at last, to be right, is the guesthouse which I bought - if I say 'accidentally' that sounds absurd, but I really did not intend to. It began with one small step, meant to help someone, and another step followed until I had gone the whole way. The building was basically fine, but needed far more work than I had been led to believe - like re-plumbing, re-electrifying, re-carpeting, redecorating, and re-furnishing! Now a year and a half later and a very great deal of money spent - it is at last open for business! All legal points (which were supposed to have been in place - and were not!)are correct, and we are beginning to hear words of praise from happy clients. It has been a long, hard journey, and at times we thought we would not make it - but at last it is something to be proud of, and beginning to repay the effort and the money poured into it.

A little while ago I would have sold it to the first half-way passable buyer. Now I am happy still to have it, and look forward to guests coming far into the future. Fortunately it is in a good spot for travelling businessmen or for tourists who want to see the Highlands, to walk, climb, take photographs or paint, fish in fresh water or sea, or just drive and look at the spectacular scenery. In every direction it is marvellous.

South and west all around Loch Ness, due west through the mountains to the West Coast, the Isle of Skye, Gruinard Bay and Loch Torridon, North West to Stack Polly or Cape Wrath, North to John O' Groats, or just here around the villages and back round among the hills and lochs with the heather, the rhododendrons etc.

I feel as if a great weight is easing, because I really was afraid we would never turn the corner. I have such marvellous friends who have worked hard, kept faith that it could be done, and come up with endless ideas. The value of friends can never be over-estimated.

Thinking of friends, and the blessing they can be in life, reminds me of a film I saw on television a few days ago. It was an American film with a few British actors in it, but the story was set in another country, and concerned a series of crimes. I have seldom seen anything which frightened me so much, or made me think so hard. It was not the crimes themselves, although they were terrible and tragic, but regrettably we are all familiar with the facts of such things. What filled me with bottomless fear was the depiction of a society in which people are afraid to speak the truth, to acknowledge that not all is well, that we have social and moral problems that we need help in addressing. The crimes went on and on because no one was allowed to admit that their 'ideal' social order could produce such things, or was incapable of dealing with them without help. Mistakes were compounded because it was forbidden to criticize. Men rose to office and were maintained in power because any questioning of them was punished. Stupidity, self-interest, malice, incompetence and ignorance of particular skills and disciplines were continually ignored, because to criticize was disloyal!

There are times when such misguided loyalty - to the individual above the principle - to man before God - is the Adversary's greatest weapon. Those who tell us we are doing well are not always our friends, even if that is their intention. Sometimes they are the sharpest weapons of our destruction - and conversely those who criticize us, tell us when we are wrong, attack us with words that are painful but true, may seem enemies, but are actually our most productive friends - even if the mask is at times hard to see through.

'Sweet are the uses of Adversity' - sweet also are those who would push us to the best of our abilities, not allow us to rest on the least we can do! 'Well done' is good to the ear, but it is not truly good if we could have done better. It is not honest, it is not a clean friendship, one that can look you in the face at the last day, and say they wished us to fulfil the measure of our creation. It is muddled, short-sighted, and with no eye to eternity - at its kindest estimate! Perhaps it is the sort of good intention with which the road to hell is paved?

At its worst, it is the velvet chain which leads us down precisely that path. I would not like to think that any of us would willingly guide another to ruin, but it is very easy, wishing to be kind and to be liked, unwittingly to serve far darker forces. The Adversary has no morality, and will use whatever works.

Who was it who said 'I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it!'? Probably lots of people, at one time or another. How dangerous consensus is. So easily it becomes complacency, and then an attempt to silence the voice that says anything uncomfortable. The dissenting voice is infinitely precious. Treasure the questioner, the challenger, the one who demands an explanation, suggests a different answer, a different way of doing things. The truth can stand it! Not to think is not to grow, and not to grow is to begin dying. Not to learn or change anything is already to be dead.

Thinking of truths that are hard to tell, but friendship demands them, I read to my good friend Meg the last two chapters of the book I have nearly finished. I say 'good friend' advisedly. She told me that I had sprung the biggest punch, the hidden truths, in the penultimate chapter! Making the last chapter an anticlimax. I tried to argue my way out of that - and could not. She was right!

The only way to make it the best I can was to re-structure the end of the story - then go back - scrap what I had written - and re-do it! I have done, and it is immeasurably stronger. How second rate it would have been had she wanted not to hurt my feelings and curbed her criticism! How profoundly grateful I am that she cared about truth - and cared about me, enough to call it as it was!

Now I am busy planning a new series of five books, not in the Victorian period but in World War 1. It is a radical departure for me, frightening and exciting, an enormous project because the period is so well known, just within living memory, so I must be as careful as I possibly can to have every detail right, not only physically, but emotionally as well.

I plan a character based roughly on my grandfather, who was a chaplain in the trenches, and other fictional characters as brothers and sisters for him, to give me points of view of both men and women as varied as possible. He had real brothers and sisters, but I need the liberty of invention.

I have begun the research, and it is emotionally staggering. The flower of a generation died, and those who survived were never the same afterwards - the whole world had changed. We have inherited from their sacrifice of ten million lives. To read of what that cost the individual man - and woman - who lived through that time is too shattering to put into words at all, let alone a few in a letter. But I shall try hard to do some justice to a time of trial which could epitomise the Gethsemane of nations, and of each of us - if we are equal to it.

And of course the whole idea of writing books set in that time will be no good if they are not first-rate stories, as well as truths as nearly as I can make them.

So I have a vast task ahead - but what is the point in trying something easy enough to be sure you can do it?

Next week I go to the Edinburgh Festival, and then to be keynote speaker at a Church Conference in the north of England and then on the 5^th September I leave for Utah for the Utah Writers' Conference.

I'll keep you posted! I'll be home for the heather in bloom and the golden stubble fields of Autumn! And some photographs I can print out if I can find the way to transmit them.

Click here to sign up for Meridian's FREE email updates.