Why do we write? It’s a question I’ve often been asked over my 30-year career. In this era of AI, of computers and VR and the internet, why do stories still matter?
I’ve been thinking a lot about that recently. But stories have always mattered: and there are stories online too, of course, and in games, and on social media, and in fact, wherever humans gather to discuss what really matters to them. Fiction matters, because sometimes fiction is the only safe space to examine what can only be seen indirectly; through the distorting lens of metaphor. In story, we can say the things that we don’t always say aloud: we can confront our real-life monsters, voice our hopes, our fears. Story always has meaning, you see: real life, not so often. In story, we can reshape the messy, chaotic narrative of reality; give it a structure; a meaning; to make it into something good. That’s what I have tried to do in writing SLEEPERS IN THE SNOW: to take something absurd, and sad, and rebuild it as something beautiful.
I started writing SLEEPERS in the autumn of 2024. My father had died a few months before, aged 85, after years of poor health, growing dementia and in January, a bad fall that had resulted in a broken pelvis and a shockingly rapid decline, during which he became increasingly confused and erratic. He died in July, of pneumonia (he was very frail by then, and had been having increasing trouble with food). My mother, who had been caring for him, removed all trace of him from the house. She gave me his things to get rid of. In one box – which I secretly kept – I found his wedding ring, cufflinks, some coins, the French paperback he had been reading for the past three years, and a little stack of notebooks, diaries dating back eight years, in which he had written a few lines a day, and which illustrated his decline.
My father had very neat handwriting. He was a teacher of languages, and always used a fountain pen – at least until 2019, when he switched to biro. Despite being English, he always wrote in French; (after marrying my French mother in 1961, he had always spoken French at home). The entries were very neat and precise, but with a perpetual undercurrent of strangeness. These are from 2020, when the dementia was still only moderate; they stopped altogether in January 2024, after the fall that accelerated his decline:
No wind. It’s cold today. No one is out. The sky is grey all over. I have a hot drink. It does me good. I had a good meal and washed the dishes. I have misplaced my glasses.
A chocolate drink. I drank it with pleasure. But today we have a chocolate sky – it must be iced chocolate. The birds don’t want to taste it.
Dad spent a lot of time in his conservatory, watching the birds. Perhaps that’s why birds and the sky feature so much in his notebooks. A distant communications tower often gets a mention; as well as what’s in the garden. He was a keen gardener all his life, and missed his allotment dearly, but my mother had been getting increasingly anxious about his ability to cope, and after a minor accident in 2019 (he fell and cut his head on the side of a cold frame), she had insisted he give it up. It continued to feature in his diary, though, as if he were travelling there in his mind. There are lots of descriptions of breakfasts, too; and visits to the village grocer’s. Some entries consist of vocabulary – la mâche; lamb’s lettuce; la giroflée, wallflower – some are people whose names he fears he might forget. Some are hallucinations – we writes about carrying heavy shopping and planting vegetables in his garden years after he became incapable of doing either – but clearly the ritual of writing in his diary is one that he found important.
Those notebooks lie at the heart of the novel I wrote in the wake of his death; the story of a man alone with the landscape and his dwindling memories. It’s a ghost story, of sorts, but it’s also about dementia, obsession and fear, and of the stories we create to replace the things we have lost. It’s also about secrets between a couple long estranged, and the guilt that comes with the knowledge that you no longer love nor recognize your partner. In my father’s diaries, people come and go unnamed – a friend he has known for sixty years becomes a chap from University; my mother often appears as my wife, and although he never failed to recognize me in person, my name is in his notebook too, with, in brackets, (daughter). My protagonist, too, is unnamed for most of the novel, and he shares my father’s obsessions: the pylon, the birds, the changing sky. I haven’t really yet unpacked all the emotional baggage of my father’s death; I thought that writing this book might help. Perhaps it did, but it also released something else; opened a box of secrets.
During my childhood my father was a somewhat distant figure. He and my mother both taught French at a girls’ high school in Barnsley. He was a brilliant linguist; absent-minded, scholarly; she was the dominant partner: practical, always taking charge. Child-rearing was her business. He was not encouraged to help. I do remember him reading to me when my mother was working; books in French, which he would record on hours of cassette tape. He was very good-looking – and rather vain – as a young man. My mother was beautiful, very French: together they looked like movie stars. Later, Dad would speak of his pride at not having married a factory girl as his brother had. But my parents fought a lot: my mother was a fiery temperament; Dad, though slow to anger, was prone to violent rages. I often wondered if they would divorce: I secretly rather hoped they would. But after the birth of my brother, ten years after mine, they seemed to find a new balance. By then my mother was Deputy Head at a different school, and they both had new friends and interests. They’d always lived very close to me: I spent a lot of time with them, both when I was teaching and later, when I became a writer. Dad read my books in German; my mother translated several of them into French. Neither made any comment: I think they were bewildered that I’d given up a perfectly good teaching job to do something as uncertain as writing for a living. In 2000 my husband and I bought a house in Huddersfield, which, although it was only fifteen miles away, was the furthest distance I’d ever lived from my parents. In 2005, we financed their move to the village where we lived: both of them were retired by then, and I wanted them to be close by in case they ever needed help.
Ten years later, my father was diagnosed with dementia. It was still mild – hardly distinguishable from his usual absent-mindedness – but my mother took the diagnosis badly. She became very over-protective, refusing to leave him alone in the house, and would see even small signs of memory loss (such as his inability to remember the plot of a French novel he’d last read sixty years ago) as signs of catastrophic decline. In fact, his dementia was only moderate right until his accident, to the extent that he refused to accept it at all. He was never ill, he said. There was nothing wrong with his mind.
My mother told a different tale. A tale of obsessive habits; of getting up during the night to clean the bathroom and disinfect the pipes. Dad had always had a slightly obsessive nature: now, she said, it had got worse. Everything he did seemed to confirm it. She stopped inviting people to the house. I think she was afraid that he would say something alarming. I called every day, but she often encouraged him to go upstairs for a nap when I arrived. It felt as if she were trying to get him out of the way. She refused to come on holiday with us, or go out on a day trip, or even attend her grandchild’s wedding, always giving “your Dad couldn’t cope” as an excuse. In truth, my father loved outings, but my mother’s anxiety had grown too great to allow even the smallest departure from his routine. For me, this was the hardest part of his illness: this enforced isolation from a world in which there was still joy to be had. The last summer of his life, I took Dad out to pick blackberries, five minutes’ walk from his house. He was delighted, but even then my mother seemed unable to let him do anything independently. Every gesture was scrutinized: every step pre-empted. Although he could still walk unaided, she was terrified that he would fall, and in the end, practically carried him home, fussing and scolding all the way. The whole outing – the last one we took together – had lasted less than fifteen minutes.
Along with his memory issues, Dad had grown increasingly frail. Over a couple of decades, he had become quite fussy about food, sometimes refusing to eat at all, and as a consequence was now seriously underweight. I realize now that this was probably due to his condition, but it infuriated my mother. His own mother had died with dementia, and his symptoms echoed hers: in his sixties he had developed a kind of anorexia, progressively refusing to eat. This affected his general health, so that when he fell and broke his hip, he was already vulnerable. After that, he was in and out of hospital almost weekly: my mother doesn’t drive, so it was up to me and my husband to deal with the practicalities. I spent many nights in A&E and dealt with many doctors – all well-meaning, but woefully underfunded and short of time. I arranged for private carers and a physio to help. But although they did their best, ultimately there were too many underlying conditions for my father to thrive. He often forgot he had a broken hip, and tried to walk unaided. He developed regular bronchial infections. He had become more or less nonverbal with my mother, but still made an effort when I was around: he never forgot who I was, and when we were alone, would tell me anecdotes from his past. I think I learnt more about him during that time than I ever had growing up, and I felt closer to him because of it.
The last photograph of him I have is of him in hospital, in his dressing gown, waving goodbye. He died a fortnight later, at home, in the bed we had set up for him in the conservatory, overlooking his beloved garden.
My mother didn’t want a funeral, or any kind of memorial. I think she’d already mourned his loss, many years before his death. It didn’t occur to her that my brother and I might want to say goodbye to our father. I managed to see his body, at least, before the ambulance took him away; my brother, who lives in Nottingham, got there too late even for that. Mum had arranged for a direct cremation, and she wanted me to handle the details. No ashes, no flowers, no ceremony, no gathering of any kind. Later, she said, she would invite his relatives – quietly, in twos and threes – to lunch at her house, where they could talk without the fuss of a service.
They cremated Dad three days later, at a private location a few miles away. The company asked me to choose an exit song: I chose See You Later, Alligator, by Bill Haley and the Comets (a phrase I remembered Dad using often when I was a child). I wasn’t there to hear it, but I played it on my mobile phone. I claimed his ashes, and scattered them quietly on the site of the school where my parents had both taught: there’s a lovely garden there now, with cherry trees, and wooden benches to sit on.
I started the book three months later, using a little stack of his notebooks as a starting-point: but at some point during the process, five of the notebooks disappeared. I’ve searched for them everywhere, but in vain: I like to believe that somehow the book claimed them as its reality. Starting this year, on his birthday, I cleared a patch of wilderness behind my greenhouse and planted a little rose garden in his memory. There are herbs, and lavender, and half a dozen climbing roses, which I hope will find their way into the trees and bushes around. I’m sure he would have liked that. I think of my book as the first stage of grief: this garden is the second. It feels like closure, but also like the start of another story, a different story with hope at its heart, and memory as its legacy.