My first book, the Forgotten Guide to Happiness, has in it a character that was loosely based on my mother, when she was in her eighties. What the editor liked about it was what she described as the intergenerational friendship between a thirty year old and an eight year old, which outside of publishing is basically just friendship, isn’t it.
A Random Act of Kindness
For my second book, A Random Act of Kindness, they wanted a similar dynamic. I asked my agent Judith Murdoch if she had any ideas and she suggested I write about vintage fashion.
Everything I know about vintage fashion I’ve learnt from the clothing sales we hold every season in church. There are two aspects to them; they raise money for our church, and secondly, and equally importantly, we also donate clothes to a church in a poorer part of Camden Town that plays a big role in addressing local social needs.
I like this combination of generosity and fashion.
My heroine, Fern Banks, is passionate about vintage clothing and she’s trying to make a living from a stall that she’s got in Camden Lock market. Fern is riddled with self-doubt but she gets her confidence from what she wears and how she looks, and she wants to share this power with others.
She meets Dinah, a stylish Jewish woman in her eighties, and does her a good deed, and a friendship develops between them. Fern is also helped newly widowed Kim tune in to his feminine side. It is not always straightforward. But Fern gets her confidence from what she wears and how she looks. Her clothes are her shield, her comfort, her ego boost – she is all about reinvention through fashion.
Dinah too is emotionally invested in her own vast collection of Haute Couture. She has kept all the outfits that her husband Moss has brought her throughout their long marriage because she sees them as proof of his love for her
As I was writing it, I was wondering if the question of looks was too trivial to make a good subject for a book.
I found my answer when I was reading an account of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in nineteen forty-five, and came across an extraordinary story. At the time, the conditions were so shocking that people continued to die. The allied troops and British doctors in charge of the clean up were waiting for medicine, clothes, food, disinfectant, but to the officers’ exasperation, what arrived in the camp at the end of April was a large quantity of scarlet red lipsticks. To their surprise, this rather random act turned out to be, in the words of one officer, ‘an act of genius, of sheer unadulterated brilliance.’ People were dying in their hundreds, but the women were wearing red lipstick. It made a huge difference to their well-being. Sick, well, or dying; naked or with just a blanket around their shoulders, they wandered around with scarlet lips and renewed hope in the future. They had been given something that made them women again, that reminded them how life was once, that restored their self-esteem. Those lipsticks started to give them back their humanity.
In my story, eighty-nine year old Dinah is remembering this period of kindness, reinvention, and transformation. She also recognises it as an act of enormous generosity.
The truth is, our appearance is important to us. In relationships, in our work, in our lives we are all looking for the power of the perfect fit. But it’s not just about how we look, it’s how things make us feel. And that we can pass that gift on to others is the basis of the story.
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