Author finds inspiration in his sweet-smelling youth!
JONATHAN COE TELLS STORER ABOUT HIS LINKS TO BOURNVILLE AND THE SAD LOSS OF HIS MOTHER
“IT feels different to me than the other suburbs surrounding Birmingham. There is a certain kind of texture change. I use the word ‘verdant’ a lot.”
In other words, ‘very green’ is how award-winning and local author Jonathan Coe sees Bournville, the peaceful and idyllic village that lends its name to the title of his new book.
But tonight is not pleasant nor charming. It is pelting it down outside the University of Birmingham School, and the roads are swallowed up by car after car due to a suspected grenade, which turned out to be a grenade-shaped cannabis grinder.
When I tell Jonathan this, he chuckles, and mulls over this bizarre piece of information. “Oh, that’s good,” he says. Perhaps it will feature in his future writings, which include much self-deprecating humour.
From What a Carve Up!, the novel that made Jonathan’s name in 1994, to his prize-winning novel Middle England in 2018, good old mild English satire is woven into his books. His new book, he says, is both his most personal and most political.
It’s set over a long timeline of significant events through the conversations and progress of a local family. They witness VE Day jubilations, the 1953 Coronation, the 1966 World Cup, the 1969 ceremony for the Prince of Wales, his wedding to Diana in 1981, her funeral in 1997, and the Covid-curtailed 75th anniversary of VE Day.
Bournville opens with a prologue at the onset of the pandemic and ends with the distressing circumstances of Jonathan’s mother’s death.
“Her death was very strange because we hadn’t seen each other for months because of lockdown.’’
Before lockdown, Jonathan would visit her every three or four weeks.
“She’d phone up and ask, ‘When will you come and see me?’, and I’d tell her, ‘Well, I guess it depends on Boris Johnson’, before we finally were allowed to sit in each other’s gardens.”
Jonathan explains it was pouring with rain the morning after that phone call, and told her he would come in three days’ time when it was sunny.
“She sounded really upset, but after those days I went up and visited her,” he says. She gave him a small Cadbury chocolate bar, as she had done every day when he got home from school as a boy.
“I had a very lovely afternoon with her. Three or four hours, very much about the past. I drove home through the Cotswolds as it was such a nice day.”
That evening, she phoned Jonathan
saying she felt terrible. She died that night of a ruptured aortic aneurysm that had been growing near to her heart for years.
“In a way, she was keeping herself going in order for us to have one more conversation,” Jonathan says. “Her part in this book is key in describing the intensity of the relationship between Peter and his mother.”
Family, and its place within the remains of the British class system, is also key to his novel. Both Jonathan’s grandparents worked in the Cadbury factory and his mother, like Mary in the novel, spent her earliest years in Bournville.
One character in the book, Carl Schmidt, a German, is based on Jonathan’s great-grandfather.
“He’s buried somewhere not too far from us in Lodge Hill cemetery. Of course, finding out information about a man from 120 years ago called Carl Schmidt is a needle in a haystack. If anyone wants to help me out then I’d be very happy.”
Jonathan now resides in west London. “I don’t have any family here, my mother was my last connection to Birmingham. I feel much more like a visitor now than ever.
“Birmingham is a city I always wanted to shout about. It’s the same as Benjamin Trotter in The Rotters Club running around the city centre shouting, ‘I love this city!’. That’s what I would have done if I wasn’t so introverted”.
He says it was great to see the city “full of confidence” after the Commonwealth Games.
Cadbury chocolate features just as much as Bournville itself in the book. Jonathan was amused when the factory turned into a tourist attraction, and when the company had difficulty exporting to the EU in the late ‘90s because the Europeans thought the chocolate was “too greasy”.
Bournville’s front cover looks strikingly similar to the Aston Villa badge. “At least we got a team from the West Midlands on the cover,” he smiles.