TWO FOR SORROW  INTERVIEW

Why have you chosen two time frames for the new book, Two for Sorrow?

I was interested in a real-life murder case from the early twentieth century, which revolved around the hanging of two baby farmers at Holloway Prison - it was the first execution at Holloway after its conversion to a women’s prison the year before, and the last double female hanging in Britain. What happened to those two women, and the relationship between them, fascinated me - and it seemed like something which would have interested Josephine Tey, too: much of her work - The Daughter of Time, The Franchise Affair, Richard of Bordeaux - takes another look at history. In Two for Sorrow, she sets out to write a book about Sach and Walters, but discovers that their crimes are by no means over and done with - so the novel moves between 1902 and 1935.

As I went on with it, I realised that telling the story in two narrative timeframes was also a perfect way of recreating what it’s like to write a book about a real person whose life is, in part, a mystery - the journey which Josephine goes on in researching Sach and Walters, in trying to get to the essence of who they really were, is very much like the one I take in recreating her. As a result, the book is very much about identity and about how much you can really ever know about someone else - or about yourself.

Baby farming was quite a lucrative occupation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it wasn’t a capital offence - so why were these women hanged for it?

Baby farming was a very loose term! At its best, it meant providing a service in which unwanted children - mostly from single women who were unable to bring up a child - were ‘farmed out’ into other families, like an unofficial adoption service; at its worst, it was a euphemism for child murder. In this case, Amelia Sach ran a nursing home, where young women went for the period of their confinement; some of those women then paid an additional fee - around £30, which was a lot of money in those days - to have their child adopted, but, in reality, Annie Walters would collect the baby from Sach’s house and dispose of it; Walters was paid 30 shillings for killing the baby, and Sach kept the rest.

The most famous baby farmer is Amelia Dyer, who is alleged to have killed around 400 babies before she was hanged, but there were a lot of others who abandoned the children in their care rather than killing them - most of those were given jail sentences rather than hanged, but a lot depended on who your judge and jury were.

You paint a very harrowing picture of Holloway Gaol at the turn of the century; it’s a very strong thread in the book - how factual is it?

Very. I read a lot of real-life accounts of prison life between 1900 and 1935, many of them written by suffragettes, and it was harrowing; the horror of execution, which is what drew me to the Sach and Walters story in the first place, was one thing, but day-to-day life was so bleak that you could almost believe that hanging was the lesser of two evils. I hadn’t realised that, in terms of basic humanity, women’s prisons were way behind those for men - and while those years saw such progress for women in so many ways, very little changed in terms of their prison conditions. The improvements which were made, though, were very much down to the efforts of a woman called Mary Size, who was the first female Deputy Governor of Holloway, and who became an important character in the book; the reforms she introduced - mirrors and photographs in cells, a system for prisoners to earn their own money, a prison shop, financial aid to help with debt and the provision of clothing on release - fell a long way short of all she wanted to achieve, but they made a huge difference to the lives of the prisoners.

Josephine visits Holloway in Two for Sorrow as part of her research, and her guide is a woman called Cicely McCall, a real-life prison warder who wrote a book on the prison in 1938 called They Always Come Back; it’s a very sobering account of what life was like inside, and a very good insight into how difficult it was for female prisoners to rebuild their lives again when they were freed, and it was invaluable in putting those sections together.

From the squalor of Holloway and its surrounding areas, you open the door for us on the decadent life of a private women’s club in London in the 1930s; I always thought these privileged sanctuaries were just for men. Did the Cowdray Club really exist?

Yes, and it was very important for the real-life Josephine Tey. It’s in Cavendish Square, and it was a club for nurses and professional women - the club doesn’t exist today, but the building is now the home of the Royal College of Nursing. Tey joined in 1925 (under her real name of Elizabeth Mackintosh) and was a member until her death in 1952. When I looked through the membership books for those years, it was lovely to discover that it was where she got a lot of her characters’ names from: Farrar, Ashby, Pym, several Blairs and a Marion Sharpe were all on the list.

In many ways, the Cowdray Club was privileged - the building was beautiful, it was luxuriously furnished, and it gave its members a privacy and anonymity which most women could only dream of; but it did genuinely provide comfort for young, ordinary, hard-working nurses, and had a reputation for the best-value lunches in town!

Your character, Lady Geraldine Ashby, intrigues me; she seems to be the resident femme fatale of the Club, but is she typical of that time?

Geraldine was inspired by a phrase in the Cowdray Club statute books about ‘members who were neither nurses nor professionals, but who were elected to the Club at the discretion of the council and whose purposes were purely social’. In other words, she’s there to liven the place up, and, on the surface, she’s the typical socialite - beautiful, rich, the person you’d always want at your party. But there’s a lot more to her than that: she’s a lesbian, and, like many women of her time, paid in the 1930s for the carefree attitude to sexuality which characterised the 1920s; after the publication and trial for obscenity of Radclyffe Hall’s novel, The Well of Loneliness, there was a severe backlash against lesbianism which forced a lot of women back into the closet. When Josephine is made to think about her own sexuality in this novel, Geraldine is the perfect confidante.

The aftermath of the First World War was a complex time for women of a particular age: many had their lives and their futures destroyed by the loss of so many young men, and became the so-called ‘surplus’ generation; others were liberated by it - they did their bit for the war effort, showed great bravery, and made an independent life for themselves afterwards or responded by forming emotional, economic or sexual partnerships with other women. There are lots of people in Two for Sorrow who’ve made particular choices because of  that war, Josephine included, and Geraldine is one of them

The realism is always very strong in your books, but we shouldn’t forget that you also create a murder mystery which plays closely to the rules of the Golden Age. You certainly take no prisoners in your murders and, in this book, we are on the front row of a particularly sadistic killing - how important is the actual murder in your books?

The whodunnit aspect of the books is very important because it’s the mystery which keeps many readers turning the page. But I don’t think that a crime novel written today can get away with treating death as an intellectual puzzle in the way that many Golden Age novels did and, for me, the victim really has to matter - so I always kill off someone I care about, and I always try to make the violence as realistic as possible.

Your police inspector, Archie Penrose, is particularly triumphant in this mystery, but he always seems to be surrounded by strong, single-minded women; is it hard to give him his own identity?

He is, now you mention it, and it’s to his credit, I think, that he likes his women strong and single-minded - although even Archie starts to feel a bit outnumbered in the very female atmosphere of the Cowdray Club. So far in the series, Archie’s identity has come through most strongly in his attitude to his work, and it was very important to me to have a proper policeman in the books - partly because I never want Josephine to turn into an amateur sleuth, and partly because that reflects the true detection of the period, which was a lot more advanced than we sometimes imagine. After the last book, where Archie was on holiday and where the solving of the case was down to a gradual unravelling of secrets rather than a police investigation, I wanted him to come back with a vengeance here. But I think it’s time that he had something other than work in his life, so the fourth book in the series will develop his identity in a more personal way.

A number of your regular characters have been on very personal journeys in Two for Sorrow. I find myself thinking about them and their predicaments long after I put the book down. Are you finding it hard to move on?

Yes. I always find the early stages of a book really difficult; it’s like walking into a room full of strangers and having to engage with them - that’s not something I enjoy in real life and I don’t seem to be much better at it in fiction, so it’s always lovely to have the series characters to fall back on. But this one has been much harder to move on from than the others, and I think it’s precisely because of those personal journeys - the ongoing lives of the characters are as important to me as the individual mystery within each book, if not more so. So much of Two for Sorrow is based on truth that it has a stronger resonance, somehow.

It’s factual events and real people’s lives that seem to spur you on in this series of novels; in Two for Sorrow, which strands have been most interesting to you personally?

Two very different aspects - one connected to Josephine, and one to the Sach and Walters case. 

Many of Josephine’s closest relationships in real life were with people she’d met during the West End run of her play, Richard of Bordeaux. From April 1935 to March 1936, one of them - the actress, Marda Vanne – wrote her a year-long love letter in the form of a diary. I’ll never forget the day that my partner and I first discovered it, almost by accident, when we were following some other lines of Tey research - page after page of thin blue paper, covered in impossibly tiny handwriting. It’s written partly in code, and takes a lot of deciphering, but it’s an extraordinary piece of writing - loving, angry, funny, perceptive and scorchingly honest. Some of Marda’s words from the diary are quoted in Two for Sorrow, as part of an ongoing storyline between Josephine and another character.

Sach and Walters were eventually arrested because Walters was caught carrying a dead baby. She’d walked for miles round London with it in her arms and, as part of the research for the novel, we retraced some of that journey, ending up at the house in Danbury Street, Islington, where she had lodgings. It was heading for Christmas - the same time of year, almost to the day, as the women were arrested - and the house was decorated for the season. It was obviously now a very happy family home -  toys were on some of the window sills, and a mother and child were cooking in the basement kitchen - but it was incredibly chilling to stand outside and know that, in one of those rooms in 1902, Annie Walters had killed at least two babies.

Interview by Victoria Griffiths for Venue Magazine.

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