My father lived and breathed icelandic sagas so storytelling? its in my blood
Sally Magnusson, daughter of Mastermind icon Magnus,on how the fantastic tales of her childhood shaped her debut novel
ALMOST 60 years on, Sally Magnusson can still remember the first time her father smacked her. ‘There were only ever two smacks, which is probably why I remember,’ she says.
At the time, the late Magnus Magnusson – journalist, writer, enigmatic host of Mastermind and father of five – was translating Icelandic sagas, those great, sprawling, fantastical stories handed down through the generations, into English. Not that three-yearold Sally appreciated this.
‘I was in my father’s study one day and I scribbled on an Icelandic book. The writing had this strange letter D with a line through it and I thought it looked like an elf or a gnome, so I thought I’d just help the artist a little bit.’
She lets out a fond giggle. ‘Oh, he was mad at me.’
It is hard to imagine Magnusson, now 63 (but my goodness, she doesn’t look it) as anything other than the poised, polished BBC newsreader she is today.
Indeed, with almost 40 years of broadcasting experience under her designer belt – including stints on BBC Breakfast Time, The Daily Politics as well as anchoring Reporting Scotland and a long-running presenting role on Songs of Praise – you’d forgive her for wanting to put up her feet these days, perhaps even in the old Mastermind chair, which now takes pride of place in her living room.
Not a bit of it. After ten books of non-fiction, including the best-selling memoir of her mother’s struggle with dementia, Where Memories go, Magnusson has written her first novel, The Sealwoman’s Gift, which was published earlier this year and has become something of a runaway hit, garnering plaudits and prize nominations aplenty.
It might seem a natural transition for a woman steeped in storytelling from an early age, but Magnusson says it was the last thing on her mind.
‘My publisher asked me what I wanted to write next and suggested fiction. I immediately said, “Oh no, I’m a reporter, I don’t make things up. I’m sure I don’t have a good enough imagination”. But there was one story I wanted to tell.’ And what a story it is. The Sealwoman’s Gift is based on the true tale of a brutal raid on Iceland by Barbary pirates in 1627.
The pirates abducted 400 people – 1 per cent of the Icelandic population of the day – and sold them into slavery in Algiers.
It is an event that was recorded meticulously by Icelanders of the day, including one in particular, Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, who was captured along with his pregnant wife and two of his children, and wrote of his experiences.
‘I picked up an English translation in Reykjavik and here was this man describing what happened the day his family were abducted. I was blown away,’ says Magnusson.
‘There is a lot of religious imagery and it’s not a great piece of writing but then in about one sentence he described the fact that his wife had given birth on this slave ship.
‘I thought, “Given birth? Incredible”. Then he talks about their 11-year-old boy being the first to be sold at the slave market.
‘I just kept thinking, “What was it like for the mother? What was it like for the women? For the children?”.’
It is fair to say The Sealwoman’s Gift is about as far away from some TV types’ literary offerings as Katie Price is from presenting Songs of Praise. The writing is taut and assured, with long passages full of lyrical description and heartstopping suspense.
The book’s one love scene is written not only with subtlety, but an intriguing amount of eroticism. Alan Titchmarsh this most certainly ain’t.
Success has been swift. In August, the novel was selected for Zoë Ball’s book club, featured on the presenter’s ITV weekend show and, last month, it was shortlisted for the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year alongside Irvine Welsh and Leila Aboulela, who was previously nominated for the Orange Prize.
‘I had no expectations of how it would be received at all to be honest,’ Magnusson says. ‘I didn’t have a clue. My publisher was quite positive and felt that it might do well but I didn’t believe her, actually.
IWAS really pleased people seem to have liked it and got something from it. It’s a strange feeling, this thing that just started in your head that you put in people’s hands and they’re responding to it and talking about the characters you dreamt up.’
Telling stories clearly runs in the family. Born into the loud and rambunctious Scottish-Icelandic household of the Magnussons, where Hogmanays were noisy occasions with everyone round the piano and both parents were accomplished journalists, it was almost inevitable that Magnusson would, in one way or another, join the family trade.
‘When I was 12 we went on a family holiday to Iceland and went round some of the sites where these sagas had taken place,’ she says.
‘We’d drive up to somewhere where one of the sagas had its great climax, get out the car and my father would say, “Now, this is where it happened, down there somewhere are the ashes of the house, and if you look you can see them riding the horses”.
‘He made the stories live and breathe. It’s one of my most keen memories of my father, actually communicating those stories to us. It was a wonderful time.
‘He’d go round Iceland and knock on people’s doors and say, “My dear boy, where did Gunnar live again?”. The extraordinary thing is, the farmer who came to the door would know exactly which Gunnar he was talking about, that it was the one who lived in the 12th century in the Laxdale saga.
‘They’re so in touch with the history. Iceland’s past is its present.’
The same could be said of Magnusson herself. Although born and brought up in Scotland, she has worked hard to maintain close links with her father’s homeland, not least when, at the age of 19 and studying at Edinburgh University, she did a course in Icelandic and, in the summer, took a job in a Reykjavik tourist office. There she became close to Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, a family friend who would go on to become president of Iceland. She proved an illuminating mentor.
‘She would come and collect me every Saturday with her little daughter in the back seat and we would go out into the country and she’d take me to a different place each time, places where the sagas had been set,’ says Magnusson.
‘She’d say, “Look over there, where the lava goes into these strange shapes, that’s a troll, a mother troll and see her children. That mound over there, that’s an elf mound…”
‘She’d tell me all about the hidden people and my imagination was getting populated by this world.
‘I didn’t actually ever imagine it would come out but when I found myself starting to write about Icelanders of that century, out it came.
‘They had so little that their stories were one of the only things that they had, passed on by the generations.’
THE experience had a profound influence on Magnusson, and her novel is dedicated to Finnbogadóttir, now 88, still telling stories and, as the world’s first democratically directly elected female president, something of an icon in Iceland.
‘Stories are what we all need, it seems to me, to survive,’ says Magnusson. ‘It gives us a sense of ourselves and our identity.’
In 2013 Magnusson embarked on perhaps the hardest story of her life, that of her mother’s illness. Mamie Baird, a well-known journalist in her
own right (she met Magnusson’s father when the two were working at the Scottish Daily Express) was diagnosed with dementia in 2004.
Her eight-year struggle before her death in 2012 had a profound effect on the whole family. It is an experience which Magnusson relates, in pin-sharp clarity, in her memoir, Where Memories Go.
‘I wrote Where Memories Go about how difficult that journey of accompanying someone with dementia is, and how little there is to help you as you go along,’ she says. ‘There are no drugs. The social supports are better now but it’s a very lonely process.’
It was during this time, as Mamie’s health declined, that Magnusson found music was forming an increasingly important part of their communication.
‘She was always a great singer,’ she says. ‘Not in a professional way, but she loved harmonising. She knew all the Scottish ballads as well as hymns, anthems, pop songs from the 1930s and 1940s, the soundtrack to the Sound of Music.
‘Hogmanay was always a great occasion in our family in the oldfashioned way – singing around the piano – so we knew all the songs she liked to sing. ‘We would find more and more that we were using it almost as an intervention without realising it. ‘So that if she was scared in the bath you’d just lean over and sing, “Mum, it’s a lovely day tomorrow, tomorrow is a lovely day”, and she’d join in and it would calm her down. ‘If she was depressed we’d sing You Cannae Shove Your Granny Off a Bus, and she’d forget what was agitating her and sing. What was remarkable was that the words were all there, even when she couldn’t construct a sentence.’
After her mother’s death, Magnusson realised that this connection through music was something that could be shared with other families caring for a loved one with dementia.
‘I just thought, ‘Wow, I wonder if other families know this?”. I started doing research and learnt that music really did have these remarkable neurological effects and that it had real benefits.
‘People kept saying to me, “This is a great thing you’re doing, can we give you some money?”. So I thought I better set myself up properly and before I knew where I was, I was running a charity.’
PLAYLIST for Life is now a UK-wide charity providing personal music playlists and technology for dementia patients, as well as training and support for carers and care homes.
The charity has linked up with BBC Music Memories, a tool to help people with dementia to find music they love, and is setting up help points across the country.
‘I’ve got no evidence for this at all but we did manage to keep Mum at home until the end and I like to think the music helped because it helped both her resilience and ours,’ says Magnusson. ‘You get to a place of such utter hopelessness and despair and tiredness and depression that you can’t go on and music just lifted all our spirits – it enabled us to connect.
‘The worst thing about dementia is when you feel you cannot get through to someone any longer, that an unreachable gap has opened up. Music bridged that.’
With five grown-up children of her own with film director husband Norman Stone (‘I love my children being home and us all just sitting round a table for hours and hours,’ she says) it is clear family is incredibly important to Magnusson. That she had time to write a novel at all seems something of a feat.
And yet, fans of The Sealwoman’s Gift will be delighted to hear that a new novel is on the way.
‘It’s set in 19th century Scotland around the Loch Katrine waterworks,’ she says. ‘I’ve always absolutely adored it out there, as well as the story of how Glasgow built it against all sorts of opposition.’
Only two nights before we met, she put the final full stop to the first draft. ‘I haven’t read it yet,’ she admits. ‘I have an awful suspicion that it’s a load of rubbish.’
I venture that given her track record so far, this is unlikely.
‘It’s really not,’ she says. ‘But at least I have known this time around that it is possible. It’s a craft and now I’m a bit farther along the road than I was.’
Much like her father, it seems, whatever Magnusson starts, she finishes.