Why did I write about a baby in a jar?
November 22, 2012 in Uncategorized
Reading at Bookstock was my first reading since the publication of Jar Baby, and I loved it – everyone there was a reader, and it’s my belief that most writers are readers, and it’s the reading that starts them off writing their own stories. Well that’s how it was for me.
Talking to a room of people about your book gets you thinking differently about it. My reading at Bookstock got me thinking about jars. Yes, jars.
A lovely couple asked me why I’d called the book Jar Baby, and I explained that in the book, as a child, the main character, Diana Rickwood, sees a foetus in on her Uncle Rohan’s desk, and that it captures her imagination. As an adult, investigating the jar baby helps Diana investigate and come to terms with her own unsettling past.
A jar obsession
But that couple got me thinking – why a jar? Why did I write about a baby in a jar?
I didn’t realise I had a ‘thing’ about jars until a good friend I’ve known since school pointed it out to me.
“You are always going on about jars,” she said.
“I am not,” I said.
“You are,” she said.
“Examples,” I said.
“You wrote about that woman with the plums in the jar that she pretended was her pet. When we were at school.”
“I didn’t,” I said.
I remembered the story, but didn’t want her to win.
“You did,” she said.. “And you said everywhere you looked as a small child, you saw jars.”
She won the argument for saying that. I’d forgotten, but it’s true. My parents were avid vegetable and fruit gardeners and home produce makers. At one time – I’ve seen a photo at my grandmother’s house – the Welsh Dresser had twenty different large jars of pickled onions on it. We had glass demijohns lined up in the hallway, quietly bubbling up elderberry, potato peel or dandelion wine.
Secrets
They were like time travel, those jars. Items entered them, and came out unchanged. Pickled, but unchanged. They would be flecked through with slivers of white and yellow, but they were frozen in time. They were fascinating, to a child, as well as oddly beautiful with their too-bright colours.
Two years after my mum died, I found a bottle of her dandelion wine in a cupboard. Opening it, flicking out the dark cork with a knife, pouring and then tasting it was like time travel. At times like that you know how much you miss someone.
So maybe jars have magic, time travelling qualities. You can store things in any old wooden box, but glass lets you see. That in itself is quite mystical and peculiar and strange. Which is probably why I’m ‘obsessed’ with them. They hold secrets that everybody else can see…
As to why I put a baby in the jar in my novel, well, that is definitely one to think about for my next Bookstock…
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