The Kissing Gates

Mackenzie Ford on how his mother's memories of the war and his own childhood inspired his brilliant debut The Kissing Gates

In one sense, my mother was the agent for this book coming into being. She was one of four sisters, very close, as Sam is one of four sisters in the book. And, although two of her sisters lost their men in the war (the Second World War, not the First), she often spoke fondly of that time, the camaraderie, the sense of everyone pulling together, the sacrifices shared by all. There was a sense in which they all felt their lives were warmer in wartime, more urgent, more meaningful. Or at least, that’s how they remembered it.

If that was one starting point, another was my encounter with German poetry of World War One. Several critics have made the point that British poetry ‘never got over’ the First World War, that 1914-1918 was the high point of poetry in the twentieth century. This poetry is marked by being far less jingoistic than, say, contemporary newspaper coverage of the war. And the same is true with German poetry. In Germany, at the beginning of the Great War, 50,000 poems were written in August 1914 alone, 500 were sent to the newspapers every day and every day a hundred were published. Reading some of these, by poets such as Georg Trakl or August Stramm, you realise that they too were not jingoistic. Their best poets were like ours.

What these two things have in common are that they are good things that come out of war, out of horror – friendship, camaraderie, poetry, beauty, sharing. It is not so very far from there to imagining a strong love story blossoming in wartime, but a love that could only exist because of war. War throws up all manner of unusual circumstances that could never exist at any other time, and the Christmas truce of 1914 was one such episode when ordinary men, ordinary ‘Tommies’ and ‘Fritzes’, had a chance to show their common humanity in defiance of their superior officers, and they raised their game in the most beautiful way.

All these factors came together in my mind to create the opening of The Kissing Gates and governs the moral dilemma facing one of the two main characters, Henry Montgomery, or ‘Hal’, as he is known. It forces him to keep the most dreadful personal secret for all the years of the war.

The setting – Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, Stratford-upon-Avon – is pretty much where I grew up, in and around Cheltenham, its small rivers and canals, and of course its kissing gates. Canals are in many ways more ‘user friendly’ than rivers, because they have walkways alongside them where, in the nineteenth century, horses would pull the barges. So great lengths of canal are accessible in ways that rivers are not. The Severn River was part of my life, however, and the ‘bore’ which features so much in the early part of the story.

And then, of course, there were the kissing gates. I have found that many people today do not know what kissing gates are, but they were a familiar feature of the fields and meadows of Gloucestershire and Warwickshire when I was growing up. Farmers liked them, because they couldn’t be left open, and we children liked them because we could get through at any time and the big animals couldn’t. And of course we had to kiss each other as we went through, an added bonus.

Wartime London had to be researched, of course, which in my case involved reading a lot of newspapers of that time and prowling the forgotten canals and rivers – or rather small streams – that feed into the Thames. Which was more enjoyable than I anticipated. If you walk at lot in London, as I do, you soon realise what an extraordinary place it is, so different from its image. There are small parks and gardens everywhere, unusual architectural features that you would never notice from a bus or car, hidden railway sidings, arches under those railways with one-person businesses that you thought had died out long ago; and, of course, canals. 

The word ‘canal’ evokes associations of industry, grime and soot, but the canals I have known in London have been strips of wildlife and greenery – yes, a little grimy but nonetheless breaks in the cityscape where wildlife is given a chance. This is where the relationship between Hal and Sam develops, out of which the paradox and ambiguity and drama of the ending emerges.

Read the Between the Sheets feature on The Kissing Gates

Read an extract from The Kissing Gates

Posted 15/10/2008 10:19:00 by Mackenzie Ford with 5 comments.