The Heart of a Storyteller

Quick-Fire Q&A with Clifford Thurlow

Join us as Clifford Thurlow, author of We Shall Pass, takes part in our series of quick-fire Q&As!

What is a quick-fire Q&A?

We have our interviewee pick a number at random and we ask them the general question listed next to it.

Shortly after we switch to asking book-specific questions, to give you a brief insight into our wonderful writers and their books.

What's your favourite word?

Subtle.

Have you always wanted to be an author?

Yes, I have always wanted to be an author.

I started life as a journalist. I started as a junior reporter when I was 18. I failed to get into the university I wanted to go to. I saw a job advertised for a junior reporter in East Kent, and I got the job. I was there for four years,

But very quickly, I learned, within a year, that I preferred writing long articles rather than hard news. I liked doing feature stories, stories about people. I then managed to convince my editor to let me write columns. One was called Talking About Trends. I was writing about fashion in the 60s.  I did, another column about dining out. I would go with a photographer, and eat in a restaurant, paid for. We'd have a slap-up meal, and I'd write about that.

The first book I wrote, I was living in India among the Tibetan community in a place called Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama was in exile. Many of the stories that the Tibetans had brought over the mountains with them had never been written down. So, I made a collection of these stories, which was called Stories from Beyond the Clouds. Thus, when I was 26, I had written my first book. It's like climbing a mountain, in the Himalayas, because you're starting with this blank page, ahead of you is 3 to 400 pages, before you finish a book. I liked that challenge.

And here we are today.

What attracted you to writing in the genre of historical fiction?

I grew up in north London, in the house of my grandparents. They came from East London where the bombs were dropped, where the docks were. So, they moved to North London. I lived with my grandparents; my great-grandmother was a pianist and played in cinemas. When my mother married, they had nowhere to live. So, they moved into the house.

I grew up with my parents, grandparents and great-grandmother, and my mother had two sisters who came to the house almost every day. I was born after the war.  I was like a ray of sunshine. I had all these adults around me, spoiling me. I was very fortunate to grow up like that. I realised, years later, that I had a sort of a rare privilege.

It was a working-class family. My grandfather was a labour councillor. I delivered leaflets door to door for the Labour Party. But I had the kind of privilege of being deeply loved. I think that gives you self-confidence. It gave me the self-confidence to travel and do the things I've done.

I was given a present of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. When I read it two things came up, one is I wanted to be a volunteer in the International Brigade, although it was much too late, and I wanted to be George Orwell. With these two driving forces, it was always inevitable that I would write a book about the volunteers.

I went to Spain many times and I travelled around all the sites where the British battalion in the International Brigade had fought in the Spanish Civil War.

What I've written is a love story, across the classes, of 1930s Britain and set in the heart of the Civil War.

What is your favourite animal and why?

I suppose it's the cat.

I like cats because they are independent. They are always doing their own thing. If you're a cat owner, you will suddenly discover that you’re not the owner of a cat, but the cat is an owner of you, and you will eventually do everything that has to be done for the cat. I kind of admire admire that an animal – it has independence.

What are your three favourite books?

Certainly, my favourite book is Milan Kundera's, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I am a great admirer of Kundera. When I read him, I'm always both impressed and slightly depressed because he's such a great writer.

I must go back to Orwell and say, I might not have said this five years ago or three years ago, but 1984, I think is maybe the most important book of the 20th century. I can't think of anything that so brilliantly predicted what is happening in our world today. The book was published in 1948. Things like television surveillance and what we have on the internet, none of those things existed. So, predicting them, and predicting Big Brother – represented in this time in people like Trump, Putin and the dictators in our world, who are able through social media to control their population – Orwell's book is so incredibly important.

I'd say my third choice would be the books of John le Carré. Again, because he writes so incredibly well. If I were to choose one, I might choose The Constant Gardener. The Constant Gardener has a very clever ecological element to it. I like the way that le Carré can write about 2 or 3 things at the same time. It can be an intense political discourse with an under tow of the Secret Service, and, at the same time, will glance out the window and notice a woman walking by with a flower in a hat. He will combine these things in such a way that you get a feeling of being there with him.

What do you wish you had known when you started writing We Shall Pass?

I wish I had known the depths of the commitment that the volunteers had made. These 95% of the people who went to Spain from Britain, a quarter of those from Scotland, had never travelled before. They were going somewhere where they didn't speak the language, they didn't understand the culture. They were genuine internationalists in that they saw this as being one world, not separate countries within the world. What they suffered, with a lack of training, a lack of weaponry, a lack of food was so extreme. How those men were able to overcome that and really help keep Franco from eventually winning that war. What they did was so incredibly brave, and I can't imagine anyone of my generation having that commitment, that strength of mind and body to have done that.

Writing about these people became an enormous challenge because I wanted to write something that was moving, but that people would really understand what the commitment was, yet also to write a good story.

If you were to summarise this book in five words, what would they be?

British volunteers fight for Spain.

What is the main message you would like people to take from this book?

The main message becomes more important now than ever with the rise of the right across Europe and in the United States, and to all intents and purposes in Russia. It is most dangerous for working people and ordinary people.

Old people are always left behind. But more people from working-class backgrounds were able to go to university, save up for a mortgage and buy their own house, have a motor car, and have foreign holidays, all those things, that came about through liberal democracy in Europe, are all now being crushed now by the right.

Although We Shall Pass is a novel, the subtext is the rise of the right today. I would like to see my book is on the other side, weighing in the balance against fascism.

In what ways do you relate to your main character and in what ways do you not?

 I've only thought about this recently.

I started with Robbie Gillan, my main character, who is working class and has qualities that I admire because of becoming a journalist at 18 and then a writer, my entire life has been middle class. I have never wielded the bricks.

My second character, Simon Sheridan, comes from an upper-middle-class background. He has sensitivity and a sense of poetry, which is another aspect of my personality.

The two main male characters are two parts of myself.

The other thing is because of my career as a ghostwriter, I have written several books where the main characters are women. The kind of woman I admire is independent and goes her way in life. That character is Alice Sheridan, and that has strong elements of my personality.

So, the three characters, Robbie, Simon and Alice, are all really aspects of myself. I didn't realise that until long after I finished writing the book.

I don't know whether this sounds egotistical in some way writing about myself. But they are all strands of my personality and, I suppose, extensions of it.

Robbie Gillan coming from Glasgow, is an unemployed Docker. When he goes to Spain, he discovers that he has leadership abilities. He learned Spanish. Most people didn't. He becomes an officer in the International Brigade. I suppose they're all things I would like to think that I would be capable of doing. In truth, I'm probably not. Robbie is an extension of me.

Robbie is based on a real person who I admire a great deal. The other two are total fiction.

What was the most emotional part about writing this book?

The most emotional part was writing the battle scenes. I wanted to make the battle scenes poetic. I wanted to give the actual writing a rhythm. I know the battles and wars do have rhythms as they go backwards and forwards, and there is stillness as well. I wanted to capture that in the writing.

I hope the reader gets that sense of the rhythm of what's happening as it goes along.

I wanted to describe it without making it too bloody or horrific because it was bloody and horrific. Another challenge was realism, but realism with poetry.