Lucy Hughes-Hallett Meet the Author


Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Similar Content

Browse content similar to Lucy Hughes-Hallett. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!

Transcript


LineFromTo

A great house with a great wall around it.

:00:00.:00:08.

We are in mid-17th century England at a time of religious strife

:00:09.:00:11.

when many lives are touched by danger and intrigue.

:00:12.:00:19.

Then we are in the same house three centuries later in the grip

:00:20.:00:22.

of the Cold War and living through the whole story

:00:23.:00:24.

of the Berlin Wall from start to finish.

:00:25.:00:26.

And Witchwood, the house, a stage where some of the dramas

:00:27.:00:29.

Peculiar Ground is a fiercely ambitious novel by Lucy

:00:30.:00:33.

Hughes-Hallett, stretching across centuries and telling

:00:34.:00:35.

the tale of tolerance and strife, imprisonment and the instinct

:00:36.:00:37.

The house, Witchwood, is in a way the central

:00:38.:01:02.

Did you have the idea of a place, an enclosed place,

:01:03.:01:08.

And, as you say, the house is, it's not perhaps the central character,

:01:09.:01:18.

but it's the character that holds all of the story together

:01:19.:01:21.

because although the Berlin Wall does play quite a large part in this

:01:22.:01:27.

novel, but very few of my characters are allowed to go to Berlin

:01:28.:01:30.

and I found as I was writing sometimes they needed to go off

:01:31.:01:33.

to London and to Germany and I had to keep bringing them back

:01:34.:01:37.

It had a technical purpose that was very useful.

:01:38.:01:42.

But it has also got a sort of moral purpose in a way

:01:43.:01:45.

because it is enclosed at the very beginning of the story.

:01:46.:01:48.

Mr Norris is laying out the landscape and the wall is being

:01:49.:01:51.

There is a moment in the book when Mr Norris,

:01:52.:02:00.

the landscape designer, is talking to his friend

:02:01.:02:03.

the architect and they ask each other, "Is this a paradise

:02:04.:02:06.

we are making here or is it a prison?"

:02:07.:02:08.

And I wrote that rather sort of off-the-cuff

:02:09.:02:10.

as you do in a long book, it's just one line.

:02:11.:02:15.

Afterwards I thought, yes, that is what it's about.

:02:16.:02:19.

It's about inclusion and of course it's about all sorts of other things

:02:20.:02:24.

like falling in love and having children and dying and doing

:02:25.:02:27.

all the things that humans do, but in so far as there is a theme

:02:28.:02:30.

that can be summed up in the sentence it is a book

:02:31.:02:33.

about walls and what happens when you try to wall

:02:34.:02:37.

yourself in and you may make a garden or you may find

:02:38.:02:40.

It's also a story about how we are doomed to repeat the awful

:02:41.:02:50.

experiences of humanity again and again down the centuries.

:02:51.:02:53.

I mean, there was a moment when I was writing the first draft,

:02:54.:02:58.

of actually the last section of the book in which people

:02:59.:03:01.

are walking out of London in 1665 to escape from the plague

:03:02.:03:08.

and the roads out of London are crammed with refugees, migrants.

:03:09.:03:14.

And as I was writing that section, the newspapers were full of pictures

:03:15.:03:17.

of roads crammed with migrants trying to walk their way into safety

:03:18.:03:20.

And I hadn't set out to write a book about the migration crisis but,

:03:21.:03:32.

History repeats itself in all kinds of ways because at the time

:03:33.:03:37.

when we first encounter the house, the grounds are being laid out,

:03:38.:03:41.

it is just before the restoration in the 1660s and it's a time

:03:42.:03:44.

of darkness, of a lot of espionage, of a lot of betrayal and violence.

:03:45.:03:51.

It was a much more turbulent time for individuals.

:03:52.:03:55.

I think when you look back at history people tend

:03:56.:03:57.

Absolutely, I think in the sort of popular imagination Charles II

:03:58.:04:06.

is the merry monarch and he comes back and the theatres reopen

:04:07.:04:09.

and they are tossing oranges around and everyone is having a lovely

:04:10.:04:15.

time, but one has to remember that all those people are living

:04:16.:04:17.

in the aftermath of a full generation of civil War.

:04:18.:04:23.

Everyone has got something to hide, everyone is suspicious

:04:24.:04:25.

So in the first and last sections of my novel,

:04:26.:04:35.

I wanted not to explicitly, but just to suggest that tension,

:04:36.:04:40.

that feeling of things going on behind closed

:04:41.:04:42.

You are dealing the whole time with what is unsaid,

:04:43.:04:48.

which is as important in the kinds of situations you are imagining

:04:49.:04:51.

here, as what is said and what is put on the table.

:04:52.:04:54.

The way I write is to write a draft and then go over and over and over

:04:55.:05:03.

So a lot of what might have been explicit in the first draft has

:05:04.:05:10.

And I think that in a way that is the rest of the iceberg

:05:11.:05:20.

But it's important to the finished product, I think, that at some point

:05:21.:05:26.

And that is what produces tension, it is what produces fear,

:05:27.:05:37.

it is what produces I suppose alarm and a feeling of threat.

:05:38.:05:48.

Yes, and in the 17th century, there is quite a lot of magic.

:05:49.:05:51.

I don't believe in the supernatural at all, everything has

:05:52.:05:54.

a rational explanation, but the supernatural of one era

:05:55.:05:59.

is simply the unexplained so that there are things

:06:00.:06:01.

going on which seem particularly alarming

:06:02.:06:04.

That might be because science has yet progressed far enough

:06:05.:06:10.

to explain, or it might be because indeed someone

:06:11.:06:15.

Or because in part we have an affection for the unknown

:06:16.:06:23.

and the need for the unknown, not simply giving a name

:06:24.:06:26.

to the inexplicable, but there is something attractive

:06:27.:06:30.

about the feeling that things are going on in a way

:06:31.:06:33.

Yes, I think one of the great things about fiction

:06:34.:06:39.

whether as a reader or a writer, it allows you to live a life

:06:40.:06:46.

that is slightly larger and more interesting than your own.

:06:47.:06:48.

Peculiar is a very interesting word to use about this house, a solid,

:06:49.:06:57.

a wonderful place to live with wonderful grounds

:06:58.:07:02.

as we see them being laid out at the beginning of the book,

:07:03.:07:05.

"We are a garden wall around a sacred place, peculiar ground."

:07:06.:07:13.

And the word "peculiar" has changed its meaning over the three

:07:14.:07:16.

centuries covered in this story and it has always meant

:07:17.:07:22.

It has now become to mean odd and a bit weird,

:07:23.:07:35.

but in its original meaning it simply means reserved,

:07:36.:07:37.

enclosed, set apart from the rest of the world.

:07:38.:07:43.

So the house is peculiar, but it also contains in it

:07:44.:07:46.

everything about humanity that we recognise.

:07:47.:07:48.

The thing that holds us all together.

:07:49.:07:52.

Great country houses are very useful as a novelist or for film-makers

:07:53.:07:55.

or whatever for the same reason that pubs are.

:07:56.:07:58.

Everyone has to go to the pub an inordinate amount

:07:59.:08:01.

because if you can get your characters together under one roof

:08:02.:08:03.

then things can start to happen between them.

:08:04.:08:07.

And a great country house is of course a place for parties,

:08:08.:08:13.

a place in which a rich and glamorous life can be led,

:08:14.:08:15.

but it's also a business, it's a place where a of people can work.

:08:16.:08:20.

Far too many novels are just about who is going to bed with whom,

:08:21.:08:23.

a very interesting question, but we do actually spend our lives,

:08:24.:08:26.

most of us, most of the time, working and I like to show

:08:27.:08:32.

the gamekeepers gamekeeping and the foresters looking after the trees.

:08:33.:08:39.

We get to know the life of Witchwood very well indeed in Peculiar Ground.

:08:40.:08:44.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, thank you very much.

:08:45.:08:45.

It has been a mixed day out there today. We had sunshine, scattered

:08:46.:09:09.

showers and more persistent rain. This area of low pressure has pushed

:09:10.:09:11.

into the south-east

:09:12.:09:12.

Download Subtitles

SRT

ASS