An Interview with Sterkarm author Susan Price: Part II
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| The Sterkarm Handshake - Susan Price |
It came about because, while writing The Sterkarm Handshake, I realised that the horses in the book might as well have been bikes. I spent most of my childhood around dogs, so I know how they behave and the dogs in the book were convincing enough. But not the horses.
Yet The Sterkarm Handshake was partly set in the 16th Century, on the Scottish Borders, and the Sterkarms were supposed to be people whose lives were built around horses. They would have been riding, grooming, feeding, training horses every day. I needed to be more familiar with the beasts.
So when I saw an advert for a residential riding school on the Scottish Borders, which promised to teach you to ride in a week, I booked up.
On the first day I was introduced to my mount. He was a Northumberland cob, so quite close to the kind of horse that reivers like the Sterkarms used to ride. He looked the part, too, with his uncut mane and tail hanging to the ground. He was barrel-bodied, stumpy-legged, thick-necked, and a dusty black in colour. His name was, 'Misty.' You'd be looking at him a long, long time before anything about him made you think of mist.
Clambering on board him wasn't as difficult as I'd feared. There was nothing mettlesome (thank God) about Misty. He stood there stolidly while I clambered on. Once up there, it was like sitting astride a kitchen table, his body was so wide. With three other beginners, I spent the first day learning how to hold the reins, and how to walk and trot. Misty, of course, knew exactly what he was going to be asked to do next, and went ahead and did it, without bothering to wait for any signal from me, which rather hindered my progress.
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| Not 'Misty' but a Dale Pony very like him. |
Over the next few days we learned how to saddle up and how to canter. We cantered over moorland which luckily supplied deep, thick, soft turf to fall into. Misty, knowing that cantering came next, didn't bother to wait for me to get ready, or to signal him to go. He just went. I lost a stirrup and then my seat. Falling onto the turf wasn't too bad, no worse than falling heavily onto a mattress. But the riding helmet that was supposed to protect me from head injuries gave me a painful crack on the back of the head with its hard plastic lining.
The last day of the course, when I was already stiff and bruised, had us rank beginners taking the horses over low jumps. This was madness. (My much missed friend, Karen Bush, who was a qualified riding instructor, was furious when I told her this. She said the school should be prosecuted.)
However that was, I actually stayed in the saddle for one jump. At the second I thumped onto the sandy ground of the training arena, which was a lot harder than the moorland turf. At the third attempt, Misty stopped abruptly, and I shot forward, thumping my nose on his neck, which was as hard as an iron bar. I then went backwards and landed on my back in the sand. Again.
I hold this against Misty. He knew what he was doing. He could have gone over that jump if he'd wanted to. But you know what it was? I'd run out of polo-mints.
I sat up in the sand and said emphatically, "Enough!" So emphatic was I that, although the lesson had a while to run, the instructress meekly agreed and didn't even try to persuade me to get back on. I had learned about head-gear and saddles, and that horses love to come up and shove you over with their noses while frisking you for polo-mints. Most of all I'd learned that with horses, it's a toss-up as to whether staying on or falling off is more uncomfortable.
When I woke up the next morning, my glasses felt odd when I put them on. They seemed to be lop-sided. So I went into my bathroom and discovered that I had a swollen nose and a black-eye, courtesy of Misty.
Of course, my knowledge of horses was still negligible compared to what any Sterkarm child of ten would have known, but my first-hand experience gave me something to build on when I came to imagine them and their horses.
What I do in the interests of research. Some day I may tell you how I was dragged across the snow behind a husky-sled in Finland's arctic circle, as my alarmed friend and publisher watched, composing obituaries in her head.
People have more questions about the Sterkarm books. Like: Where did the idea of using aspirins to trade with the Sterkarms come from?
I spent some time thinking. What would be almost worthless to FUP, but would appear valuable to the Sterkarms?
It happened that, at the
time of Solidarity's struggles in Poland, some friends had been
sending food parcels to relatives of theirs in Gdansk. One item desperately wanted in Poland, but impossible to get, was aspirin.
That gave me the idea. Generic aspirin costs almost
nothing to produce, but to the Sterkarms, who had no really
effective painkiller for all their aches and pains, it would seem like a
magical, Elvish potion.
Another question: Where does the Sterkarm language come from?
When I started thinking about 21st Century people meeting 16th Century people, one of the first problems that occurred to me was that they wouldn't be able to understand each other's speech. After all, even today, with television eroding our accents, southerners can barely understand Glaswegians or Geordies. So was it likely that someone from the present day could step out of their time-machine and hold a conversation with a reiver from nearly five hundred years ago? Not a chance.
So how was I going to deal with problem? I could ignore it, taking the line that it was an unimportant part of the story. But I couldn't do that. It fretted me. I considered other solutions. Could I do a sort of pastiche of Chaucerian English? Not really. Not within my powers, and, anyway, Chaucer was a bit too early.
How about having the Sterkarms speak English, but an antiquated English, full of dialect words? I didn't like that idea either. For one thing, all of these solutions seemed to draw attention to the trickery involved. I always favour being really straightforward. The most straightforward way of solving the problem was actually to have the Sterkarms speak, at least some of the time, in a way that was close to English, but quite obviously hard to understand. And Danish, in some ways, is quite close to English. I happen to know a very -- very -- little Danish. I'm not claiming to be any sort of linguist. Far from it. I'm a hopeless linguist. But I do know a very little, basic Danish. So would it, I wondered, be possible to base the Sterkarm's speech on Danish?
Once this had occurred to me, I remembered that the Sterkarms were supposed to come from the borders of Scotland and England, a district where the dialect and landscape are littered with Danish words. For instance:
the Danish for church is kirke; the Scots is kirk.
The Scots for a child is bairn; the Danish for child is barne.
A Scots dialect word for 'woman' is 'quean' or 'quine'; the Danish for woman is kvinde (pronounced rather like kvin.)
The Danish for 'home' is hjemme (hyemma); and in Northern England, home is often pronounced 'hyem'.
Many northern villages and towns are called 'Kirkby', which is Danish for 'Church Town', and 'Snaefell' translates as 'Snow Mountain'.
I thought if I had the Sterkarms speak a sort of dog-Danish (it would have to be dog-Danish because of my own failures as a linguist) then I might be able to come up with a convincing northern dialect for them, something that an English reader might be able to read with a bit of concentration, but which wouldn't be English. Or not English as we know it.
I soon realised that I would have to spell it phonetically. The
Danish for 'I' is jeg, which an English speaker with no knowledge of
Danish would quite reasonably pronounce to rhyme with 'leg' In
fact, it's pronounced 'yi'. Writing it phonetically, as 'yi' not
only allowed an English speaker to pronounce it more or less correctly,
but made clear how close it is to the English word.
Several people have asked: Why did you make Andrea fat?
Oh, people have asked me many questions about this. Did I make Andrea fat to strike a blow against the body shaming of the fashion industry? To declare that Big is Beautiful? Did I make her a big hefty girl because I am myself big and hefty?
None of the above.
Rather, I was thinking about the ways in which the Sterkarms would differ from our society. They would have different attitudes, different ways of thinking. I always try to find something real that I can firmly base such speculation on, so I thought, what were the Sterkarms?
Answer: they were a close-knit agricultural community: cattle-farmers. They had banditry as a side-line, but they were farmers. So, did I know anyone from a close-knit agricultural community that would give me some clues?
I thought of my uncle, who was Polish, and actually came from a
close-knit, agricultural community. (Although as far as I know, his family wasn't into raiding neighbouring villages on a regular basis.)
Okay: So what attitudes did Uncle Stanek have that differed from the norm of English behaviour in the 20th-21st century? Well, for one thing, he was much more demonstrative: always kissing and bear-hugging people. (And he'd toned it down, to fit in.) My uptight English grandparents used to run away and hide when they knew he was coming on a visit (though later, they grew to love him. Aah.) Grandad would nip out the back way to the pub, and Gran would go upstairs and pretend to be too busy folding washing to come down.
It seems that in the past, the English were more continental. I've read extracts from letters written by 16th century foreigners who complained that the English were always hugging and kissing you and you couldn't fend them off. So I made the Sterkarms very touchy-feely too. (Assuming, it's true, that the Northern English and Scots were as touchy-feely as the soft Southerners. The reivers were as much Scots as English. Most of the riding-families lived on both sides of a border that barely existed at the time and had little loyalty to any national identity.)
Another thing about my Polish uncle was that he liked big women. His
pin-up was Diana Dors in her later years. ('That is a woman! Not a
skinny stick!') He would have loved Siobhán McSweeney.
To be portly, in my uncle's world, was a status symbol. It meant you had plenty to eat. If your wife and children were fat, that meant you had enough not only to feed yourself well, but them too.
To my uncle, to be fat also meant to be healthy, which seems bizarre to us, when we're constantly nagged about the health risks of overweight. But, in fact, it is healthier to be slightly overweight than to be underweight. If you're a little overweight, you probably have a thoroughly nourished body: a healthy skin, healthy hair, strong bones and a fully functioning immune system. Go to any famine area of the world, and ask them which is more unhealthy: to be well-fed and a bit overweight, or hungry and thin.
Then, too, in my uncle's youth, in Poland, consumption or tuberculosis, was rife. The first symptom of this fatal disease was drastic loss of weight. In my uncle's mind thinness was linked, not only with poverty, but with sickness and death.
It made sense to me that the Sterkarms would look at things in the same way. Living was hard in their time and country. Bad weather and a bad harvest, a few too many raids, or a sickness in herds, could all mean starvation for them. They would probably have been healthier than townsfolk, but they nevertheless lived crowded together in far from hygienic conditions. Any sickness would quickly infect the whole clan.
So, to the Sterkarms, our fashionable, thin models would not seem attractive. The poor things obviously can't afford to feed themselves, so they must be without family connections or wealth. They're very likely sickening for something too. Get too close and you might catch it. And they're unlikely to breed strong children, because they don't look well-fed or strong enough to be sexually mature. So what have you got to gain by being attracted to one? (The thought of gain, of status, has a lot more to do with who we're attracted to than we like to admit).
Andrea, on the other hand, being tall and plump and rosy, is obviously glowing with health. She must have been well-fed all through her childhood, which means she has a wealthy family, with plenty of cattle, and land to grow crops. Being strong and healthy, she'd breed strong children. She's a real catch, a real babe.
Of course, having arrived at this conclusion, I was delighted that
Andrea wouldn't be the usual skinny, waifish heroine. If she's
considered to be a role model for big girls, then good-oh. But that's not why I made her a big bonny lass.
How long did it take you to write 'The Sterkarm Handshake'?
It went through many changes of plot and many rewrites. In one version, Toorkild was killed. For a while Andrea had the new-age name of 'Leaf', but then I reverted to Andrea.
In the final version Bryce was written into a more important character than he had been in previous ones. But, throughout, I always had the idea that the 16th Century would raid the 21st at the end. Altogether, it took me about two years to re-write it into the book as it now stands.
Has it done well?
It's been the most successful of all my books, with great critical success in Britain, America and Germany, where it's already appeared. It's sold well in these countries too.
It's also been published in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Estonia and Japan. And, despite being marketed as a 'children's book' or a 'young adult's' book, it seems to have a healthy adult readership. At one bookstore where I made an appearance, the children were shoved out of the way by big men in rugby shirts, each with their copy of HANDSHAKE that they wanted signed.(So, I suppose 'a healthy adult readership' in all senses of the words.)
There have also been several film options taken out on it, but I'm not holding my breath while I wait for a film contract to arrive! (To date, none have.)
And despite what I say above about the creation of Andrea, I wouldn't like to see her played by some hungry, zero-sized actress!
Handshakes originated as a
gesture of trust. People gave each
other their right hand to hold: the
hand that would wield a weapon. The understanding was that neither could
use a dagger or sword against the other while their right hand was
being tightly clasped.
But the majority of Sterkarms are left-handed. So, the story went, they could hold out their right hand in friendly fashion, take a tight hold of your right-hand, while drawing their own dagger left-handed and stabbing you with it.
So their badge of a left hand holding a dagger became known to their enemies as 'The Sterkarm Handshake.' And good advice was: Never shake hands with a Sterkarm.
And 'A Sterkarm Kiss', the title of the second book? It means a cut throat.
The third book is called 'A Sterkarm Tryst.' The old English word, 'tryst' means a meeting of some sort. Today we tend to think of a 'tryst' as a romantic meeting between lovers but, originally, it was anything but romantic. The Falkirk Tryst was a great cattle market, where people met to buy and sell cattle, horses and other animals.
A Sterkarm Tryst is a meeting where only one side knows about it: an ambush.
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