Dignity
Page 28
Like a lady let out of her corset, or like the first inflation of a tiny baby’s lungs, the garden starts to breathe.
When the aristocracy of the great Olympian gods collapsed at the end of antiquity, it did not take down with it the mass of indigenous gods, the populace of gods that still possessed the immensity of fields, forests, woods, mountains, springs, intimately associated with the life of the country. These gods lived in the hearts of oaks, in the swift, deep waters and could not be driven out of them … where are they? In the desert, on the heath, in the forest? Yes, but also and especially in the home. They live on in the most intimate of domestic habits.
La Sorcière,
Jules Michelet
Acknowledgements
During and before the writing, vital and vivid conversations were shared with friends, colleagues, ex-servicemen, carers, occupational therapists, psychologists, children of the Raj, exmemsahibs and family. Your lives are not in the book, but your insights helped to shape it. Thank you.
Thank you to all the hoteliers, shopkeepers, librarians and museum guides (from West-Bengal to Weston-super-Mare to Llandudno) who made my writing visits valuable.
To writers and scholars Zoe Skoulding, Jodie Kim, Sampurna Chattarji, Laura Ellen Joyce, Kathryn Pallant, Kachi A. Ozumba, Neelam Srivastava, DeAnn Bell, Fiona Cameron, Maureen McCue, Tomos Owen and Holly Ringland, thank you for sharing drafts, embryonic ideas, books, or for encouraging me along the way.
With our colonial history largely publically inaccessible - like the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum which is largely out-of-bounds in storage – thanks to the Bristol Archive for making some of its material available to the public. Thank you to the British Library for access to invaluable audio and written materials, and to the British in India Museum, in its suitably kitsch prefab in Hendon Mill, for giving a unique perspective, perhaps with unintentional nuance, on the legacy of the Raj.
Thank you to Bangor University and the AHRC for the grant that afforded me time to research and write this novel, and heartfelt thanks to Parthian Books, The Welsh Books Council, Literature Wales, and T. Newydd for your support of my writing until now.
To Jenny Hewson, for your incisive reading and work on my behalf, a big thank you. And to Federico Andornino, thank goodness for the rare combination of precision and openness that you brought to the process of editing Dignity. Thank you to everyone at Weidenfeld & Nicolson for taking care of this book and making others care for it.
Finally, to my Joe, for the gentleness, humour and affection of our home, which made it possible for me to see this book through. Diolch cariad, eto, o waelod calon.
About the Author
Alys Conran, originally from North Wales, spent several years in Edinburgh and Barcelona before returning to the area to live and write. She speaks Welsh and English as first languages, and also speaks Spanish and Catalan. She has worked as a youth worker, teacher, and in community arts and is now Lecturer in Creative Writing at Bangor. Her late father, also a writer, was born in Kharagpur, Bengal.
Her poetry, short stories, creative non-fiction, creative essays and literary translations, and other work is to be found in numerous magazines and anthologies including Stand and the Manchester Review.
Also by Alys Conran
Pigeon
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2019
by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK Company
Copyright © Alys Conran 2019
The moral right of Alys Conran to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
‘Dychwelyd’ by T.H. Parry-Williams ©T.H. Parry-Williams Estate.
Reproduced through permission of Gomer Press.
Extract from Culinary Reactions by Simon Quellen Field on p352
reprinted by permission of Chicago Review Press.
This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 4746 0943 2 (Hardback)
ISBN 978 1 4746 0944 9 (Export Trade Paperback)
ISBN 978 1 4746 0946 3 (eBook) www.orionbooks.co.uk
www.weidenfeldandnicolson.co.uk