“July 2nd 1916

Dear Harold,

I arrived in England last Thursday. I have been hoping to be able to come up to see you before we go to France, but the Colonel told us this morning at church parade that it was impossible to grant any leave at all because they want to rush us through & get us ready to go to France sometime in August, he said the only passes that he could give us were from noon on Saturday until ten o’clock on Sunday night & that wouldn’t be any use at all. I went home for a day before we left Canada & everybody was quite well when I was there, we left Saskatoon on the 12 of June. We were inspected yesterday by the King about 8 miles from here & believe me it was some march with a full pack after doing nothing but sit around for nearly 3 weeks, we were away at 6 in the morning & didn’t get back until six at night & were pretty tired boys. Have you enlisted yet or what are you doing, I suppose this letter will find you if you are not at home, I have been wondering if you have enlisted and are by any chance camped anywhere around here, if so we could arrange to see one another somewhere. Well, I think this is all now I will write again as soon as I hear from you.

Your dearly beloved little chip, Bill”

Eight days’ ago, my writing “to do” list looked something like this:

-Refine elevator pitch for The Gardener’s Boy

-Rewrite synopsis

-Tailor cover letter to agents

-Wait for kind beta readers to return said novel covered in corrections and suggestions

-Catch up on the last three poems for the “52 poems project”

-Write travel piece on flying a light aeroplane in Mozambique

What I’ve actually achieved is more like:

-Flood Facebook and Twitter with dozens of incredulous/furious/sorrowful posts about, yes, Brexit

-Shout at the television and radio

-Read everything I could find on why why goddamnit why this has happened and where we might go next other than hell in a handcart

-Talk until my jaw stopped working to everyone I know who shares my stupefied horror.

And that last point is becoming the crux for me. I happen to live in one of the very few places in England which returned a majority remain vote. Most of my friends are remainers. Likewise, bar one person, so are my family and in-laws. I also spent over a decade working at an international law firm. Its clients – largely from the financial sector, FTSE 100 and comparable foreign-listed companies – tended to be international in set-up and global in outlook. We had offices in over a dozen countries and I was fortunate enough to spend time in France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain and Ireland as part of my job. I made friends from all over Europe, some of whom are still very dear to me. And I ended up feeling very European. It is as much a part of my identity – maybe even a little more so right now – as my Britishness. Learning that my legal identity as a European is to be removed feels rather like bereavement: the disbelief, the growing anger and first-thing-to-greet-me-in-the-morning sorrow is uncanny in its similarity.

With an EU-focussed jobs, as mine was, I learned a good deal about how that sprawling, gargantuan organisation works. I am aware of how desperately it needs reforming in some aspects. I am also aware of how much of a force for good it is. I discounted half the headlines I caught sight of, particularly if they were in The Sun: everything from wonky bananas to EU legislation not being scrutinised by the UK Parliament before being adopted. I had an idea of just how much money was ploughed into deprived regions of the UK such as the Welsh Valleys, Cornwall and, yes, Sunderland. I knew just how much our financial services’ sector – our main export nowadays, for want of a better description – relies on being able to operate across EU markets thanks to the “passporting” scheme. I understood that in these days of increasing globalisation, more and more countries are forming trading blocs and that trying to negotiate with one of these as a single state might be a little like chucking someone down a crevasse and expecting them to haul themselves up again with no rope or crampons.

I can’t remember not seeing the risibility in the argument that Britain was just fine and dandy before the EU and so could be again. Hark back 120 years and we were riding on the bowed shoulders of an empire that rightly no longer exists but that, while it did, supplied us with low cost raw materials while we, in turn, forced them to buy our manufactured goods at prices that suited us better than them. Moving forward a little further, were the two world wars, both of which had their genesis in Europe. Quite aside from the human cost, those wars left us, and the rest of Europe, financially devastated. Once aid from the US-funded Marshall Plan stopped in 1952, it was still a long haul back into the black. Thankfully we had a strong manufacturing and mining industry. That’s all gone now, driven to obsoletion by lower priced competition from developing nations. And here’s the bit I let my London-centric, left-leaning, liberal, all-friends-together bubble blind me to: all those devastated communities, whose jobs and hope seeped away as mine after mine and factory after factory closed did not feel the same as me about what the EU had given them. Why should they? In what way did their lives bear any similarity to mine? Angry, bitter and increasingly disenfranchised by a political system that never fails to look after its own, who should be surprised that millions of those people voted out last week? It was the first chance they’d had to have a voice and to make that voice count – even if they were shouting the wrong way and at the wrong people.

The immigration issue that appears to have exercised so many people is too depressing to spill many words over. But this “fear of the other” that is apparently so entrenched in so many communities and that people seemed to have misunderstood, or been denied the information to help them understand, that the free trade they so desire to keep is, according to the current rules governing the EEA and EFTA, entirely unachievable without free movement of labour – the one thing that is abhorred above all else – makes me feel a sick stranger in what its supposed to be my own country. I am furious with the disingenuous, self-serving leave campaign that not only failed to deliver the facts but that flooded its recipients with hopeful lies. And I’m starting to find fury with the remain campaign, with myself, for not finding some better way of explaining all of this, with making some attempt to engage those people who felt they no longer mattered.

So we are where we are. And, frankly, it’s as if the grown-ups have gone away for good and left us to re-enact our very own Lord of the Flies. The Government exists in name only, prominent Leave supporters are falling over themselves to knife each other in the back, one individual who decimated our education and prison systems and spent years telling us “I can’t be leader, I’d be no good, I can’t be leader” is now asking his party to elect him, and the opposition is rapidly turning itself into a cult. No wonder the Irish embassy has just asked eligible UK citizens to hold off applying for passports as its systems shook under the weight of applications already received. No wonder China is holding us up as an example of why democracy does not work.

Where now? Where now? There has to be something beyond posting memes on Facebook, signing petitions and worrying over our children’s future. Who is going to show us what that is?

There are some things about living in the country in the winter that I now know you really have to live to understand. One is the mud. It’s not so bad when it’s frozen, other than when the children slip over on it, of course (filthy clothes and cuts and scrapes) but in its normal state it’s gone straight into my room 101. Child 2 has lost wellies to it, the dogs, even after much grooming, have acquired interestingly freckled abdomens and I have taken to identifying the cars of other country-dwellers by the levels of dirt on their vehicles. Previously I was slightly thin-lipped about why you wouldn’t take better care of such an expensive item; now, I quite understand the impulse to do no more than wipe clean the number plates and windscreens. Takings at Tesco’s car wash might be down but I am at least four pints up per month at the village pub – or I would be had said pub not just closed.

Inside the house, Child 1 stuffs cotton wool inside his ears each time I remind him please not to run up the stairs in muddy trainers, my kitchen cupboards have tidemarks so impressive I’m considering whether they have any artistic merit and the radiator behind Dog 1’s crate needs the dried dirt chipping off only the day after I spent forty-five minutes engaged on the same task. After considerable experimentation I have discovered that biological washing powder and bleach works best on the (textured cream) stone floor in kitchen and utility room. Sadly, the septic tank doesn’t like either of these much so most of the time it’s bicarbonate of soda, a splash of Zofresh and a scrubbing brush that has a disingenuous habit of slipping sideways out from underneath my hand.

Another thing is the cold. It’s mildly perplexing that a gas bill that disappears monthly or quarterly from a bank account was barely noticed. A tank of LPG in the garden, however, is something to watch and hoard and mutter happy self-congratulatory sounds over when yet another month passes without the dial dipping into the red. Meanwhile, we spend more than we care to count on seasoned logs for the wood burning stove while simultaneously convincing ourselves that the pile of wood pruned from the apple trees should save us, oh, at least the cost of two slankets next winter.

I wasn’t the sort of child who went dribbly-mouthed and frantically bothersome outside a sweet shop. Stand me in front of a bookshop, however, and there was no peace for anyone until I’d emptied my purse into its till. I’m still rather like that now, particularly where second-hand bookshops are concerned. And, for that, I credit one particular place: Unit 72, Birkenhead Market.

It’s been more than two decades since I went there – in fact, I don’t suppose it even exists anymore – but I thought of it the other day when I reread Helene Hanff’s wonderful 84, Charing Cross Road. Hanff, a martini-loving, cigarette-smoking, New York dweller, was a playwright and screenwriter who found by far her greatest success in later life when she published a book of her correspondence with a London bookshop, Marks & Co. The shop specialised in acquiring second-hand books, particularly from the sales and clearances that increased so rapidly in number after the Second World War (WWII) as the owners of many of the UK’s largest houses admitted financial defeat and sold off their possessions along with their bricks and mortar.

One person’s loss was another’s gain, and Hanff, whose formal education did not extend beyond high school, was a lifelong self-educator with a particular passion for English literature. Although even some of the more obscure titles she ordered by post from Marks & Co could doubtless have been obtained in New York, she would buy her books from nowhere else: “The books arrived safely, the Stevenson is so fine it embarrasses my orange-crate bookshelves…I never knew a book could be such a joy to the touch.” Through her correspondence first with Frank Doel, the chief buyer for the shop, and then with other staff members too, she became closely involved with their lives. For several years after WWII she sent them food parcels (“My little ones…were in Heaven – with the raisins and egg I was actually able to make them a cake!”) and they reciprocated with a beautiful hand-made Irish linen tablecloth and repeated invitations to please visit them in London.

There was little Hanff wanted more than to visit the “London of English literature” but she was stymied repeatedly by financial constraints, poor health and also, one senses, a fear of travel. For more than two decades her explorations happened solely through the pages of the books she ordered from Marks & Co. When Frank Doel died suddenly following a ruptured appendix, Hanff was motivated to ask his widow, Nora, if she could publish a volume of their correspondence. And so 84, Charing Cross Road, the book, was born.

Published by Andre Deutsch, it gave her both plaudits and money.  At long last one of the barriers preventing her from crossing the Atlantic was blown away. And so, with a case of newly purchased clothes, including a dress – “silk, chic and expensive…intended to cover large evenings” – and a growing sense of trepidation that had kept her from sleeping the night before, she found herself on a plane. The result of her ensuing six week stay in London is recorded in her book The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street (currently out of print in the UK but due to be rereleased in July 2016).

“All my life I’ve wanted to see London. I used to go to English movies just to look at streets with houses like those [on Bedford Square]…I wanted to see London the way old people want to see home before they die.”

I was living in London when I first read this book – living in London, slightly jaded by its dirt, its cost of living, its crowds and the quietly terrifying sense of threat that pervaded the place after 9/11. The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street seized me by the scruff of my surprised neck and reminded me of all that was good about London and how much I too had once wanted to be there. Mine was the crowded, crawling streets of the Medieval city; the flash and dangerous opulence of Henry VIII’s time; the oh-so desirable salons of the Bloomsbury Set; the West London streets set with large white houses with pillared entrances and chequerboard steps; and St Pauls-the-Phoenix. Hers was Bloomsbury, Russell Square, Regents Park, St Pauls, Westminster Cathedral and Shakespeare Shakespeare Shakespeare. More than that, though, she opened her arms and her heart to the modern day city, and it to her.

I don’t think she ever made a repeat visit but I’m not sure she needed to. I don’t live in London anymore but if I need reminding of what I did come to love about the city I only have to read her books. Her places were not necessarily mine but her words fill me with the sense of how books open doors figuratively and, sometimes, literally. Unit 72, Birkenhead Market once did that for me, too. It’s where I joined the Chalet School, tried out a US Californian high school, travelled the world with Gerald Durrell, set my cap at becoming a Yorkshire vet, stomped across Egdon Heath and wept over the fate of those luckless last few in “On the Beach”. I still have almost all of the books I bought from Unit 72 – only those that I knew I’d never want to read again or actually fell apart have been, reluctantly, retired – and I still read most of them, now and then. Some people (my husband!) say life is too short and there are too many good books to read one more than once. It’s a valid point but I’m with Helene Hanff here: like clothes that I wear many, many times, I reread my books again and again. Why would I not when they take me to so many places I’ll never visit any other way?

My writers’ group is lucky enough to be involved in 10 days – Winchester, a biennial, interdisciplinary arts festival supported by organisations such as Arts Council England, Hampshire County Council and Winchester City Council. The aim is to bring together artists of many different types, provide them with the opportunity to showcase their work – in Winchester Cathedral, the City Museum and the Discovery Centre – and to engage the public, both creatively and perhaps also by making them look at their city in a new way.

The theme is Chalk – and cities don’t get chalkier than Winchester. Dig down anywhere in this ancient capital of old England and its environs and you’ll find lumps of the stuff studding the topsoil. Keep burrowing and you’ll find chalk bedrock. Thanks to the filtration qualities of the chalk in the riverbed,  the tributaries of our river, the Itchen, are transparent as the most precious diamonds and provide the ideal habitat for water voles, otters and white-clawed crayfish.  Chalk imbues our buildings, our streets, the graves we bury our dead in, our whole history. It’s a huge subject.

Last night the writers involved – those from my writing group and another local group – came together to decide which of the several pieces each of us had written would be showcased in the various venues. We then moved on to discuss several different public engagement activities. One of these, due to include crowd-pulling speakers, raised particular concerns. It wasn’t that we couldn’t find interesting – and successful – literary people who’d be willing to speak; it was that we weren’t offering anything different from the myriad of other talks and conferences held locally on how to get published, how to secure an agent, why Mr X wrote the book he did and what made Ms Y persist with hers in the face of a full-time job and multiple rejections. That’s not to say these are not valuable topics to hear about because of course they are.  However, we wanted something different: something for all those writers for whom publication is never going to happen for whatever reason and also for those mid-way along the journey, who might want new ideas to keep them going, to validate what they do and support who they are. This resulted in the idea, put forward by the director of the Winchester Writers’ Festival, that we discuss (and it will be a discussion rather than speeches) how to have  a vibrant writing life – and celebrate it. Of course, this might include publication but it might also mean thinking about what else is available locally to stimulate your writing. Yes, we’ll have interesting, successful and well-known writers on the programme but hopefully they will be able to approach the event in a different frame of mind from other similar ones and to inspire in listeners the sense that the world is full of possibilities, big and small. And what, after all, is more important to any writer – indeed, at times, to any person – than inspiration and possibility.

Chalk, it seems, runs deeper than the bedrock.

For more details about the collaboration between the Hyde and Taverners writers’ groups for 10 days – Winchester, please check out our website. There’s an opportunity to send in your own work (flash fiction or poems of 200 words or less) or a chalk moment to feature on the website. (NB You don’t have to be from Winchester to do so!)

Today is the 40th anniversary of the release of Jaws, the movie. Rarely can a film have entered into the collective psyche in the way that this one did. I can’t remember when I first saw it although I do remember when I first didn’t. It was shown on television here when I was a very small child of four or five. I came home from school the following day highly indignant because my teacher had asked the class who had stayed up to watch it. Apparently – or so I interpreted it – mine was one of the very few hands not to be raised. Of course I made up for it in years to come, watching the films (all of them) and reading the book. Perhaps that’s why the spectre of sharks has never been far from my mind when swimming in seas and oceans as geographically, biologically and climatically diverse as the Irish sea, the Mediterranean and the Indian ocean. Older people tell me it didn’t used to be that way. ‘Sharks?’ I recall a great-uncle saying. ‘No, you might worry about sharks if you were torpedoed [he was in the Merchant Navy in WWII] but not at the beach. Never at the beach.’ I did though – and a cousin and I used to spend goodly portions of our Easter holidays in that well-known shark mecca, the Lleyn Peninsula, committing to heart the tragedy on every page of a luridly-illustrated book entitled something like “Shark Attack!” that we’d picked up for 50 pence in the discount bookshop in Portmadoc. Needless to say, any large marine creatures in Cardigan Bay remained prudently elusive.

My children still haven’t seen any of the Jaws films (yes, my five year-old self would be disgusted with me) but the idea of sharks as Something Bad and Dangerous is sewn into their consciousness. I realised as much three or so years ago at a tearoom in Orkney’s Bay of Birsay. ‘There was a pod of orcas out there last month,’ the waitress said, as she put her tray down. My four-year son and niece squabbling over turns of the binoculars in front of the picture windows either did not hear her or, more probably, orca meant nothing to them. My two-year old daughter, however, with eyes fixed firmly on the cakes, tried out the new word. ‘Orca?’ she said.

The waitress smiled, wiped her hands on her apron, and went over to a small display of postcards next to the homemade jams. She put one glossy card on the table. ‘Here,’ she said, pointing to the impossibly smooth curve of black and white back. ‘This is an orca. It’s also called a killer whale although, really, it’s a dolphin’. With wide, interested eyes, my daughter looked up and nodded as if she understood. Then she frowned and looked down again. She jabbed her finger against three tall triangular fins that broke the surface of the water around the orca’s back. ‘Sharks,’ she said, unhappily. ‘There are no sharks in the swimming pool.’ We adults nodded in hearty agreement. ‘Sometimes in the sea,’ I began, before sensing the need for a change of tack. ‘But these aren’t sharks. They’re orcas. And you needn’t worry; this sea is far too cold for swimming.’

The storm that had sent us hurrying along the coast away from Skara Brae had subsided. Wind-driven sea-spray still misted the tearoom’s windows but the seaweed on the shore outside no longer tossed its rubbery green tentacles from side to side like long-haired headbangers at a heavy metal concert. The water – so recently a foaming cauldron with sea birds expertly piloting the wind above it – was grey and almost glassy, and the birds now rode its surface, easy as paper ships on a boating pond. A slice of sun poked out coyly from behind a cloud to coax diamond chips of light from the sea. The children at the window were sufficiently entranced not to notice the plate of cakes on the table behind them. Still clad in now slightly steaming waterproofs, they’d reached some sort of accord as to who had which pair of binoculars. No matter that one was looking through the wrong end; they were happy and quiet. We ate our cakes and drank our tea. I wondered how many times I would need to return before I saw an orca. The four year-olds shrieked simultaneously. Several small balls were bobbing closer to shore before resolving themselves into large grey animals that humped fatly out of the water and onto a narrow spit of sand. One rolled onto its side and waved a celebratory flipper at the sun. I stared at the seals, thinking them fair compensation for the lack of orcas. My daughter looked at them before shaking her head a little sadly. ‘Sharks,’ she said.