Chrissie Gittins

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844712984
ISBN-10:  1844712982
ISBN-13:  9781844712984
Author:  Chrissie Gittins
Title:  Family Connections
Series:  Salt Modern Fiction
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  FBC
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Apr-07
Extent:  152pp
Height:  203 mm
Width:  127 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  180 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  These stories trace the fragile and enduring connections between those related by blood, and those not. A gay couple care for a cantankerous neighbour, a daughter hangs on to the threads of her father’s mind, an anthropologist finds it difficult to leave behind the refugees she has studied. They take an unflinching look at the moments in lives when the axis swivels to reveal insights and actions which surprise and disturb. With crackling wit and a deadpan lyricism the fate of a nonagenarian former channel swimmer is sealed alongside a virginal teenager and a baroque beautician.

Meet the author:

Podcasts

Play American Tan (4.1 KB)


Play Family Connections (4.9 MB)


Play Saying Goodbye to the Englishwoman (3.9 MB)


Play Between Here and Knitwear (12.5 MB)

Table of contents:
Family Connections
Matilda and One of the Twelve Dancing Princes
American Tan
Treatment Room
Papering Over the Cracks
Lady Macbeth
The Understudy
Queen of Sheba
Stepping in the Dark
Creative Writing
Sand Shift
A Small Smudge of Blood
Bates Green
James Stewart was my uncle Charlie
Onyx
Frederick Takes a Walk
Unsaid
Swan
Between Here and Knitwear
The Deputy Head
Saying Goodbye to the Englishwoman
A Revolutionary Wife
The Real Estate

Excerpt from book:  

Between Here and Knitwear

The New Year had started. Myra wanted to smash the glass and china display at Alder’s sale; the Croydon branch was dense with discounts and offers. Pyramids of bulging red wineglasses and ladders of flutes were asking for it. There was a particularly cocky arrangement of Royal Doulton seconds – fine white china with gold rims, which definitely had it coming.

It wasn’t as if Christmas had been an out and out disaster. The day had begun with Jacques Loussier playing Bach, and a little snow – a fine flurry settling on the night’s frost. Myra sorted through the albums in her parents’ radiogram – James Last and his Orchestra, Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass, Kiri te Kanawa. She stacked up likely contenders to play through the day.

She had driven up from London the day before. The traffic had been surprisingly light, but the journey took six hours. Despite her many visits over the years she was not sure, even now, if she had found the shortest route. When she hit Ramsbottom the Victorian Fayre was putting its stalls away. The Christmas lights over the shops were delicate and fleeting, unlike the clumsy lumpen lights she had left behind in Lewisham.

The bungalow looked the same as ever – solid and snug like a familiar illustration in a children’s book. The garden was overgrown – the trees and shrubs were indistinguishable from one another, and the plastic urns were blown over onto their sides.

Myra picked up two bottles of milk from the doorstep and took them in with her. Her mother had taken to keeping odd items in the fridge – a packet of sugar, a box of dried lasagne, a bag of boiled sweets. Myra pulled them out.

“It’s damp in the cupboards,” said her mother.

It took a while for Myra to slot into the mode of her mother’s home. The kitchen floor and the bathroom floor were filthy.

“Hasn’t your cleaner been?” asked Myra.

“Sonia? She wouldn’t come.”

“Why not?”

“She wouldn’t come while the decorators were here. She didn’t want to clean everything and then …”

“… it all get dirty again.” Myra often finished off her mother’s sentences.

The newly papered walls undulated with various designs on anaglypta; but the curtains were rolled up on the beds, and her mother’s ornaments, pictures and mirrors were boxed up in the sunroom. Her mother called it ‘the conservatory.’ To Myra, a conservatory was a splendour of Victorian glass built into a beautiful shape. But her mother was proud of her perspex extension, even if now it did only house dried flowers and a couple of intrepid geraniums.

Her mother had tried to replace the brass swans and the Dick Turpin toby jug on the shelves by the fireplace, but her arthritis soon sent her into her high–backed chair with a hot water bottle.

When Jacques Loussier finished Myra put on Maura Lympany playing Chopin waltzes and got out the mop and bucket.

“Do it on Boxing Day,” pleaded her mother.

“I’m not having Christmas Day with dirty floors,” said Myra. She couldn’t say, ‘I’m not having Christmas dinner with dirty floors’, because they were due to go out for their festive meal. They had an invitation. From Gorsey Clough.

Myra screwed the grey mop round in the sieve of the orange plastic bucket and dragged it across the kitchen floor. The Chopin was jumping over the scratches on the L.P.. As the piano swelled towards crescendos Myra swathed the floors with grey water. She stroked and soaked and smoothed the floors until all that was left were the burn marks on the lino where her mother had dropped cigarettes. She had started to smoke when she was fifteen. At seventy–four she wasn’t about to give up.

“There was a tune I like on Desert Island Discs. Was it yesterday? Slaves. She was a writer.”

“Not an astrologer?” Myra had heard the same programme.

“Yes, that was it.”

“Verdi.”

“Might have been.”

“You can see the dust when the sun shines,” said her mother. Her mother spoke slowly and deliberately, each word an effort. There were frequent pauses and hesitations. Pauses which Myra’s answermachine back in London did not have patience for. She would often get home to a message of her mother’s heavy breathing.

Myra found a feather duster in the umbrella stand and set about the sideboard, flicking a pathway through the dust on the mahogany surface. Six frosted glasses stood next to a Capo di Monte figure who was frying an egg on his knee.

Gorsey Clough was a residential care home in Tottington. Myra’s father had lived there for eight months. If Myra and her mother arrived by eleven forty–five they could eat Christmas dinner with him. Myra put on her make– up – the same make–up she’d been wearing for fifteen years. She occasionally replaced a dried up mascara, or tried out a new slimline lipstick, but mostly she stuck with what she knew. Her mother put on a pair of lace–up shoes instead of the slippers which she usually wore inside and out, for comfort.

Myra made a quick phone call. She wanted to hear David’s voice. They’d been together for five years. They hadn’t wanted to spend Christmas apart, but their parents were at opposite ends of the country. He was attending to his parents in Edenbridge.

“Happy Christmas Myra.”

“Happy Christmas David.”

“Is it?”

“Too early to say. I’ll tell you later.”

David’s parents were slightly younger, more mobile and more a part of the world. They did line dancing, drove a new car and went on holiday to Majorca. Myra envied them their quality of life on her parents’ behalf.

By the time Myra escorted her mother to the car, the water which she had earlier dribbled over her windscreen had frozen into a rivulet on the path.

“What’s that?” asked her mother, pointing. “Is your car leaking?”

Gorsey Clough was an old coaching house – stone walls turned black, and dependable windows. It could’ve been a scene from a Bronte novel – women moving gracefully in long frocks, horses trotting on the wet cobbles. Instead it was home for the forgotten and the forlorn. The cars that were in the carpark mostly belonged to the staff.

Her father was sitting in the lounge. The second lounge, for the badly behaved. Not that it was their fault. But the residential home residents wouldn’t put up with a continuous loop of shouting, or impromptu urination from the ‘mentally infirm’ residents.

“Harry, you’ve got visitors,” said Peter. Peter was a familiar member of staff to Myra and her mother. He always smiled and was quick to offer a tray of tea. They were rather sorry that he was due to leave. He kissed them both for Christmas but Myra didn’t feel comfortable with this affection–because–it’s–Christmas. He father stirred and tried to turn round. His eyes were milky and wet.

Review quote:  There is irony in Gittins’s title: the collection is mostly about disconnections. She writes about the banalities of daily life, but not for easy comedy. Observing the small things that are significant to people, she shows how her characters are essentially alone.

Nicholas Clee
The Guardian

Unpublished endorsement :  She is a gifted writer.

Patricia Routledge

Unpublished endorsement :  A wry and moving collection. Chrissie Gittins has achieved that difficult thing — stories which stay in the mind, inviting us to register the world more acutely and relish its tiny details.

Moniza Alvi

Unpublished endorsement :  Chrissie Gittins is a real writer with a bleak, accurate and often very funny take on the drab lives most of us lead. Above all she understands the brutal economy you need for a really successful short story.

Nigel Williams

Unpublished endorsement :  I am SO enjoying the stories. Vivid and touching. I've almost finished it now – I read two or three last thing, then one in the morning. That morning read is a sign I'm loving the book.

Suzannah Dunn

Unpublished endorsement :  I enjoyed Family Connection so much — I’ve re-read most of the stories. It’s the polished laconic storytelling — and the way this combines with your subject matter, which is often profoundly sad, even painful — but never flat, never gloomy, never depressing. You have a real voice and it comes out with the apparently effortlessness which is the mark of finished writing.

Helen Dunmore

Previous review quote:  a true original … she has a genuine gift.

Jane Yeh
Poetry Review

Previous review quote:  Chrissie Gittins has a McGough-like flair for idiomatic surrealism.

Michael Thorn
TES