Book Club: Book that focuses on family members as they dream, laugh and quarrel

As formally inventive as it is narratively rich, the story is told firstly in conversations between the family members as they dream, laugh, quarrel, try to hold things together, and secondly, twenty years later, in poetic reflections of the youngest son as he tries to make sense of his father’s life and his own, and thirdly in round-robin letters by the mother. The Sheffield Telegraph publishes below an exclusive extract from one of the mother’s letters as she reflects on the last year.

Join the publisher Weatherglass Books for the launch of The Way the Day Breaks on Wednesday, 3rd May from 6.30-9pm at The Hideaway, 61 Eyre Lane, Sheffield, S1 3GF.

[Extract:]

The village remains much the same, although we have recently learnt that our nearest shop is likely to be shutting in the new year. The owners are moving from the area and it looks as if it will be converted into housing. With building work all here and there, it does seem necessary, but after the florist’s last year it will near enough be two in two. It is a nice enough community and to think that we have been here these years already, but we sometimes joke about how long it might take to be accepted by the more local locals.

Some days the insects collide so quickly there is no breath in which to catch a thought. Maybe by the time the children have children of their own. The summer fair was good this year, and there have recently been new goalposts put up in the park.

Sinclair is yet to return to work/takes it/I take him day by day/how to/if only I could get him to do more while I am out at work/I do wonder sometimes, what he does with his days (what I would do if faced with days such as his/days and days such as those he has), how he manages to contain himself from, not gin in the morning so much as the idea, the entertained notion of gin in the morning.

But is it/can it be/is it just a case of trying to get through this, doing what can be done with the belief/hope that there will come a better, a better time will come, that at least things cannot remain the same for ever. The world is not the same thing twice. The world is not the same thing twice.

We went to the Pyrenees in the summer holidays. It is quite the drive but worth it once you’re there. One night a storm blew through with hailstones the size of actual marbles. Some of the French had fortunately brought spades with them, and everyone joined in to dig trenches round the tents. One or two were quite badly damaged/ripped but we were lucky in that it blew through quite quick. It would have been a total washout had it stayed that way for long.

One day we walked to the Spanish border and the children wanted to see how many times they could cross over, how many times they might visit Spain in a single day. They were well into double figures before we succeeded in calling a halt to it. While all three do have their moments, they do keep us entertained/amused/exasperated sometimes. We saw a golden eagle, which everyone enjoyed.

Of course it is no great statement to say we each have one life only, but for my own part/now that I am well into it I do wonder sometimes what might perhaps have been. To think of when we first met (first our eyes did meet)/our eyes together across the staffroom.

When we went for that first drink after work, he suggested we meet up for a walk. To think back to our wedding day, honeymoon night. That it would come to this/all this was to come culminate. I knew then that what might be might be, but it was always going to be the case of coming to know what that might in actuality turn out to be. The poet Wallace Stevens says it can never be satisfied, the mind.

I cannot remember how I came across it, whether it was me introduced it to him or the other way round, but do remember that it was the title that first attracted me to it. The Well Dressed Man with a Beard.

Something about that tickled me. When Sinclair came home from work I used to greet him with it until the time he set fire to his tie when we were first married. If I had known then what love might turn out to be. What poems we might come to share.

To think of it that winter just married and moved into our first house, the heating going and us with no money then spare to fix it. To think we have come from that, two months it seemed with breath clarifying (like butter) amongst the air. Those months of it raining and damp/the layers we’d put on and all the knitting I did for him for us, so we might retain the dignity of not having to wear our coats inside, bring raindrops into the house.

They are the limbs of me. To separate the person from the emotion to separate the emotion from the person the event to separate, I wonder, might it even be//to separate emotion from emotion, unpick detach.

When I think of me do I think of me anymore when last did I, think of that, me myself, when last did I (put myself first) differentiate. Those Russian dolls, the beauty in them.

For me it is not contained in each alone but due to it being the case that, even when apart, the form or the presence of the others, the intimacy of their relationships, seems inherent in each individually, the individuality of each alone. Something complicit. As if they are more than (just/but) themselves (with/because of) the others around them.

But no, it cannot be, the mind it can never be satisfied. Now and these evenings with them up to bed, I do wonder, what will be. With their posters, the bluetac sullying the walls, I do wonder. Where love might go next.