On Writing Advent – a story made in Gower

It was the picture: sepia tones, a little faded around the edges, a young woman sitting on a chair with her three sons close by, at the Henkel Photographic Studio in a studio in New Jersey. It was the only image I’d ever seen of my great-aunt, Ellen, and her dark, brown eyes looked straight to camera and seemed to will me to tell her story. Or at least my fictionalised version of her story, now told in my debut novel, Advent.

At nineteen years of age, the real Ellen Thomas left her family farm in Llanrhidan, Gower in 1899 with just ten pounds in her purse, and a forwarding address in Hoboken. Research into ships’ manifests revealed that she travelled steerage class on board the steam ship Campania from Liverpool to Ellis Island, and onward to take up a position as a servant. The ships’ manifests also revealed that the very same Ellen Thomas did that very same journey again in 1905. This was the fertile ground for me to imagine why she had come home to Gower sometime in the intervening years.

So Advent takes some historical accuracies – Ellen Thomas, real and fictional, did live at Mount Pleasant Farm, she did have younger twin brothers, Jack (my grandfather) and George, and her father’s name was William, whom my ninety-year-old mother told me was particularly partial to more than a drop of alcohol. But that’s where fact ends and fiction begins.

Ellen Thomas inspired me to create a new story about her and her family that plays out over the short time-span between December 1904 and June 1905. In the run-up to Christmas that year, she arrives back at Mount Pleasant Farm after being summoned home by a letter from her brother George, in the hope that she can save her father and the family farm from ruin.

The six months see her trying to do just this against the bigger picture of agricultural poverty, growing industrialisation, the inferno of the Welsh Religious Revival, not to mention the added challenge of a former love interest.

I wanted to breathe a degree of fire into Ellen too, to give her the grit and spirit exhibited in many twenty-one year-old women I have known in my life (including my daughter Ellen who is named after her) – though perhaps sadly not shown in myself at that young age. So I have given her perhaps both the desire and the determination I lacked to question the limitations placed on women back in Gower at the turn of the century and to explore notions of belonging and duty, for both males and females, in farming families.

Place – my home patch of Gower – was a rich source of inspiration too. I felt a strong rapport with Ellen Thomas as I walked the same paths she might have walked over a hundred years earlier. It was almost as though her spirit was sometimes seeping up through the soles of my feet, such was my connection.

Advent has found the best home it could have wished for at Honno with its commitment to Welsh women writers, past and present, and its commitment to telling and selling the stories of Wales. Advent is a story not merely set in Gower for cosmetic purposes, but truly made here and part of its DNA.