Author Kate Worsley’s new novel is a story of human struggle set against the backdrop of a Land Settlement Association community in Suffolk.
Although we'd arranged to meet at a garden centre, it was still a surprise to see writer Kate Worsley approaching with a posy of lettuce plants. 'These are for you,' she says, presenting her unusual gift. On this dark, rainy day, the pale, delicate leaves promise summer salads. But in Kate’s new novel lettuce triggers a sinister and mystical turn of events. It's a powerful prompt for our conversation about Foxash.
The book takes its name from a place near Manningtree, a small rural area on the border of Suffolk with Essex, that was the site of the Land Settlement Association programme in the 1930s. The concept and its continuing presence fascinate Kate.
'There are dozens of these neat little semi-detached brick cottages fronting huge glasshouses with orchards behind,' she says. They were home to long-term unemployed people, who had been moved from deprived areas, retrained and engaged in co-operative farming communities.
'It was massive,' Kate says. 'There had been lots of similar schemes getting returning soldiers back to work and rehabilitating people, but the 1934 Land Settlement Association was the biggest and had government backing. Over five years it acquired more than 11,000 acres, developed 1,100 holdings on 21 estates and trained more than 1,700 men plus their wives and families.'
There were sites all over the country, wherever there was level fertile land suitable for horticulture. In addition to Foxash, there was another LSA colony in Suffolk at Newbourne, near Woodbridge. 'People were given land, money and equipment. After three months training they were running their own smallholdings. And it was hard work.
'As redundant steel workers or miners, these people knew how to work hard, but that was shift work with a weekly wage in a community. I was interested in the idealistic, paternalistic, social engineering aspect of the scheme,' says Kate, 'and what the human consequences might be for the individuals involved.'
Back-to-the-land movements such as the LSA offered improved living conditions, sunlight and fresh air, after dark, miserable towns. 'But there was a gap between the real, lived experience of poverty and deprivation, and the well-meaning gesture,' says Kate.
For her story, she imagined two couples whose lives collide through the LSA scheme. Tommy and Lettie Radley leave a mining community in north-east England to take up a smallholding at Foxash. They know nothing about rural life or growing vegetables and they have to lean on their neighbours, Jean and Adam Dell. But the Dells are overbearing, unkempt and manipulative, and have their own agenda. What’s more, this is a world of folklore, old wives’ tales, herbal remedies and superstition, which creates a dark and eery atmosphere in the novel
'I wanted to explore what happens when you put people in the middle of nowhere, alongside others,' she says. 'How much of the difficulty is between people, how much is self-generated and how much do people attribute problems to other things.
'I was also feeling very dubious about the nostalgia for traditional life and customs by those who enjoy the benefits of modern urban life. I have felt the allure of the simple life as much as anyone, but it seems to me that in reality, rural life has always been extremely restrictive, and hard work, especially for women.'
The book has taken seven years to complete while Kate has been managing another career teaching and mentoring writers. She researched the LSA through the archives of the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading and also experienced life working the land herself. 'I got an Arts Council grant to work on a smallholding here,' says Kate. 'There was an organic grower who very kindly let me watch her plant carrots and the like, learn techniques and observe the changing seasons.'
Sadly it hasn’t resulted in Kate becoming skilled herself. 'I’m given orchids or roses in pots and the next day the flowers will fall off,' she says. 'My mother grew up on a council farm and has always seemed to be able to grow anything, make anything. She just has a feeling for it and it was like magic to me. It’s not like I didn’t learn from her. But what I’ve written into my character Lettie is the horror and the shame that you can’t look after something properly.'
Life in this corner of East Anglia has cultivated creativity in Kate, though. Moving here from London more than a decade ago, she's found the open spaces gave her freedom to write. 'It’s an amazing place,' she says. 'The sea, the land, the sky, they’re all huge. And there’s so much unwritten history round here.'
She previously worked as a journalis, but after being made redundant, took a creative writing MA at City University and embarked on her first novel She Rises. Set in the 18th century, it tells of a young dairy maid who leaves home to work in the naval port of Harwich, and embarks on a new life of travel and adventure. It won the HWA Debut Crown for Historical Fiction and the New Angle Prize in 2015.
Now, with her third book underway, Kate is hoping to create a thematic trilogy in her novels. 'I have a big schematic thing going on; it’s about the water, land and air. She Rises was about the sea, about liquid; how liquid changes shape according to whatever vessel it’s in. That was about identity being fluid. Foxash is about the energy that solids have, whether in the soil or in coal, and which builds up between people in a relationship, and how this can become explosive.
'And my third book is about the nebulousness of the air. So, for instance, when you walk into a cloud, it looks solid but there’s nothing there; the essential unknowability of other people.' Big ideas to explore and, ultimately, great stories to read.
Foxash is published by Headline
