Domestic Detail

How the ordinary can reveal the extraordinary

I received a review for ‘The Child on Platform One’ the other day that I thought was really interesting:

At times, the characters have to serve the plot, but there are small domestic moments throughout that keep the characters vivid amidst the fast pace of change and horror they are living through. One moment I enjoyed in particular was when Pamela starts trying to dig a section of frozen earth on an allotment on Hampstead Heath - a symbol of the tough business of survival when the world seems a cold, dark place.

I remember vividly writing that gardening section. My beta readers had told me that one of my protagonists, Pamela, was too passive. I needed to find her more things to do. ‘Get her out gardening,’ said one of my green-fingered fellow writers. Now what I know about gardening could be written on the back of a very small seed packet, but nonetheless I decided Pamela might have a small allotment, a way of keeping herself busy as she waited for news of her son, missing in action. The scene my reviewer describes is when she is distraught at having heard nothing for so long. I must admit I hadn’t thought of it as particularly symbolic when I wrote it (although I am very happy to claim that accolade) but it struck me as interesting that it’s sometimes the ordinary events in a novel that can reveal the extraordinary.

 As a family we love playing acting games at Christmas, and one of my favourites is the adverb game. You send someone out of the room then the rest of you decide on an adverb – drunkenly, sexily, etc. The person then comes back in and picks another person to perform an everyday action – eg washing up, in the manner of the adverb the group have chosen. The outsider then has to guess the original adverb from the way the task is performed.

The game shows us how much variety can be created by simple domestic tasks. There would be a lot of difference for example in a domestic task performed by two people who hated each other, compared to two people who fancied each other.

 Giving our characters ordinary actions might seem trivial, but handled well can give our characters something to do whilst revealing a great deal about their relationships and emotional states.