This book began with a postcard, bought in Dunwich Museum – Dunwich being a tiny village on the Suffolk coast. Dunwich’s history is a haunting one: it was once a major port but is now a handful of cottages, the rest of the town having been eaten away by the sea; churches, houses, civic buildings, shops, all gone. The church depicted in the photograph (taken 1903) has now completely disappeared but there are stories of bones from the old graveyard dropping out of the eroding cliff. But what intrigued me most about the postcard were the two women in the foreground who in the novel become Ruth Styles and Maud Waterford.
I’m fascinated by photographs, although I rarely take pictures myself for the very reason that I find them so compelling – I think the act of taking a photograph distorts the moment, makes it self-conscious. Footsteps has a lot of photographs in it and at least one of the photographers, Nick Broadbent, is aware of the bitter irony of taking pictures, especially of suffering, whilst not being able to intervene in any other way. But of course photographs are also mysterious; they are a snapshot of a long lost moment and open to misinterpretation. They can be unbearably poignant – there’s a photo of Michael a few minutes before he fell to his death.
Although this combination of disappearing landscapes and photography gave me the seeds of a novel, what I really wanted to write about was family history, to test how much we all have a foot in the past. Footsteps is about women in particular for whom the past is a burden. They can’t break free of it. But what strikes me most strongly on re-reading the book is how much it is also about women who are afraid of the opportunities that are open to them. They use the past as an excuse not to engage fully with the present. The point is that Ruth doesn’t need to stay in Westwich with her mother, she chooses to sacrifice herself because the alternative is too frightening. At school she had been apprehensive ‘not because she had been unable to flourish in such an environment, but because she succeeded too well. So much was expected of her.’ And in the book the alternative to domesticity does often prove very dangerous: people fall off mountains or get killed in battle or fall in love unexpectedly and sometimes with the wrong person. But on the other hand, indoors is unsafe too. Julia can’t escape the storms that batter her bedroom, Ruth can’t evade the men who come calling, and houses are full of secrets.
In some ways it was unnerving to re-read this book some time after writing it as so much has changed. In Footsteps there’s not a mention of mobile phones, Nina draws on perforated computer paper and plays cassettes in the car. Nature is unpredictable and sometimes dangerous but there’s no mention of global warming. And yet Footsteps has themes that I have since returned to again and again, not least women confined by their sex and historical context. Above all, I have gone on writing about love and death, in all their many shades, because those two inescapable facets of being human are eternal and never lose their fascination.
The Story Behind Footsteps
Katharine McMahon April 2008
