Pansies (Spires #4)

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen

1 . Paragraph begins with: The tide was coming in, but slowly.

Alexis: I’m pleased with this description of Marsden Rock because it feels Alfie-ish.

You can Google for a picture if you like, but basically Marsden Rock is a stack of compacted limestone that broke away from the softer cliff face at some point in the past. It has a bunch of caves underneath it and at one point had a natural arch, except this collapsed and fell into the sea, leaving Marsden Rock and a second, thinner stack that was briefly named Son of Marsden before it was, err, demolished due to safety concerns.

You can still walk right up to the base of the rock during low tide (though you have to be careful because it’s completely cut off from the shore when the tide comes in). Back in Victorian times, there were apparently stairs cut into the side so you could sit on the top. I suspect those are long, long gone—and climbing it would be incredibly dangerous. So, y’know, don’t do that if you’re ever in South Shields.

2 . Paragraph begins with: Alfie grabbed Fen’s elbow and dragged him back…

Alexis: I know Alfie has a slight fear that too many words aren’t manly somehow, which makes him self-consciously position himself as somewhat inarticulate. But I do think it’s important to recognise that saying the right thing doesn’t have to be complicated; it just has to be sincere, like he is here.

3 . Paragraph begins with: “Fifty-six.” Fen tugged his hands free…

Alexis: Eesh, this book goes hard. Sometimes I worry that my ambitions with it outstripped my capacity to execute them. But, still, Pansies is important to me, and I’m glad I tried.

I know I’ve fretted about this in annotations before, but something that I find really anxious-making about writing in general is the degree to which the specific can sometimes be taken as universal. Like, you write one character who makes an impossible choice, like Nora Shaftoe does here, and it may seem like I—the author—am trying to say this is the “right” choice for everyone. Or, worse, that I’m implying a wider judgement about the possible quality of life or individual value of people with particular progressive conditions.

I hope it goes without saying that I don’t believe that. But, like Nora, I do believe in personal autonomy. Above all else, I believe in that.

4 . Paragraph begins with: Fen drew in a shuddering breath…

Alexis: Coming back to Nora and her choices, it was important to me when I was writing about her, and them, not to accidentally present a picture of such decisions as straightforward.

I think one of the most complicated things about existing in the world is the way certain rights and freedoms can be framed or seen as competing for space. Like, I don’t know, the word queer . There are some people for who this word is deeply painful, others for who it is deeply liberating; both are and need to keep being true. But it’s hard not to believe, especially if you’re strongly inclined one way, that these two perspectives are treading on each other’s toes—that if person x embraces the label queer, that’s trampling the painful experiences of person y.

And something like, well, assisted suicide (and the right to die in general) is even more complicated because the stakes are sky-high. But the point is, you can believe something is morally right without it being easy. You can support someone’s choices while those choices are tearing you apart. The freedom and the pain are equally valid, equally real.

5 . Paragraph begins with: “Some eighteenth-century weirdo…”

Alexis: This is genuinely true. The man’s name was Jack Bates, but he got the moniker Jack the Blaster when, as Fen says, either unable or unwilling to pay rent, he blew open the caves at the base of the cliffs at Marsden and moved in with his family. They couldn’t have been exactly comfortable because the caves would semi-regularly flood with seawater, but this unconventional living arrangement attracted visitors who wanted to see the family living in caves. The family made a small business out of this, serving food and drinks to the people who came—although Jack also had other, less legal sources of income that certainly benefitted from his choice of home (he was a smuggler). Apparently he was fairly wealthy when he died about ten years after moving into the caves. Oh, which he did when he was eighty, by the way.

After Jack the Blaster, there came Peter Allan, who continued the work of excavating the caves that Jack the Blaster had started. He was also a canny businessman who (despite some issues acquiring a licence) sold ale from the caves and set up a ladder system on Marsden Rock itself so visitors could climb it.

After he died in 1849, the caves passed through various hands and eventually fell into disrepair before being restored in the early twentieth century. There’s still a pub there now, and a lift that takes you from the top of the cliffs to the beach has been fitted in the shaft originally excavated by Jack, Allan, and others.

And it’s also supposed to be haunted. Because something like eighteen skeletons were supposedly discovered during Allan’s excavations. One of these was reputedly John the “Jibber,” a smuggler who informed on his comrades, and who was then left to starve by said comrades, hung in a barrel dangling into one of the caves, possibly near the current lift shaft.

6 . Paragraph begins with: “Oh, it’s my dad. He really loves this stuff.”

Alexis: I don’t know if this is a specifically British working-class thing, but it sometimes feels like the smaller and less significant the place, the more locals will be just, like, super hard-core into it.

7 . Paragraph begins with: “Had competition,” Alfie growled.

Alexis: This is broadly correct, though obviously somewhat abbreviated, as Alfie is, um, distracted right now.

As he says, following the loss of the Adventure in 1789 (which was apparently super harrowing—like, it had a thirteen-man crew, who everyone had to watch die from the shore because the seas were too rough to risk a rescue boat), a committee was formed in South Shields and a prize offered for the best design of a lifeboat.

Of all the designs submitted, the final decision was between William Wouldhave (a parish clerk and painter) and Henry Greathead (a shipbuilder). Honestly, these two should probably just have kissed: I mean, lifeboat-builders to lovers is a romance arc waiting to happen. Apparently Wouldhave was offered half the prize money, but he took offence and declined, and Greathead (who is often credited as the sole inventor of the lifeboat) combined ideas from the two designs (as well as from Lionel Lukin’s first unsinkable boat, which was built in 1784) to make the first lifeboat, the aptly named Original .

Greathead made thirty-one Original -type lifeboats over the next two decades. And he never took out a patent on the design, preferring to share his ideas for the good of others.

There are two monuments between the North and South marine parks that stand in South Shields to this day: one baroque clock, honouring both William Wouldhave and Henry Greathead, and one to-scale model of a lifeboat based on the original designs of Wouldhave and Greathead (although the model itself was built some forty years later).

I think in early drafts of this scene, Alfie provided more details about the history of the lifeboat, but then I realised probably most readers weren’t likely to be super engaged by minutiae about South Shields in the middle of a make-out scene.

8 . Paragraph begins with: Fen was waiting by the entrance…

Alexis: I’m aware I come back to this idea semi-regularly in different contexts, like a kind of personal trope. But I really love it: the moment sex with someone you care about (and please don’t think I’m knocking casual sex) becomes such a completely mutual thing.