Runner up

So, you send a story to a magazine, you don’t hear anything and you think they’ve decided against you. Then a year and a half later they email to say they want to use your story in their next issue if it hasn’t already been printed elsewhere. The story in question, Red, had been picked up by Ether in the late summer of 2011, but apparently the, er, ether, doesn’t count as print. So, Open Pen magazine (Issue 6, free, available in some good bookshops now) features my story. Their website held two surprises for me: in the first I was initially listed as Jacqueline Wilson (she does come up when I Google myself, funnily enough. Um, I mean, when I am researching how far up the list my blog comes when my name is used to search for it); in the second surprise I realised I was the runner up in the issue (each issue features a ‘winning’ story and that story features on the cover; I came second apparently).

The story had been recommended by Open Pen’s intern, Claire, who said: ‘Red is probably my favourite story [of the material I read]. I thought it was a really good piece of historic writing addressing its subject of poverty, and its consequences and sacrifices for a family, in a sensitive and insightful way, translating them in the emotional despair of the mother. The way the tone changes from vague to definite is a very good parallel to how the story becomes more serious and how the harsh and inevitable end slowly hits the reader. The indirect manner in which the taboo topic of abortion is portrayed, showing the moral dilemma and the suggestion about the relationship of the mother to her children and her husband, makes the story very moving. Motifs such as the foreshadowing of her initials or the highlighting of the everyday symbols such as cooking tea in contrast to the severe situation all work together really well.’

This is all very lovely and flattering, and it’s great that the story was read so carefully and with such a positive response. But I’m  not sure I agree with the notion of the moral dilemma. I think this is something being projected by the reader in this case. As far as my central character is concerned, there is no great moral dilemma in her decision, although I accept that for most people the subject will provoke one. In fact, Ruth celebrates that life will soon be ‘back to normal’ by buying meat for tea (and it’s not even Sunday). The real dilemma is that she has to put her life at risk, although she has heard it will be all right, really. There’s an anger in the story for me, an anger that this kind of back-street abortion is the only option the character has; that safe, legal termination was not available to her.

I read the story at the launch of Issue 6, where it was introduced by Open Pen’s editor as ‘harrowing … a difficult read…’. I guess so. But it’s an important one, at least to me. The story always affects because I know there’s every chance that the circumstances in which Ruth dies are those in which my paternal grandmother died. And although that was a long time ago, there are still places across the world where women are fighting for rights over their bodies, while politicians dictate the terms under which they can have sex or procreate.

My story made people in the audience cry, and it was tough for me to read it aloud for the first time, but I doubt that the current minister for health, Jeremy Hunt, or Maria Miller, the women’s minister (yes, WOMEN’S minister), would shed any tears as they propose reducing the legal abortion limit further and further, until our hard-won rights are lost and the experiences of women like Ruth – effectively my paternal grandmother – become the norm. But Hunt and Miller claim they are doing it for the protection of women. So that’s all right.