I thought long and hard about how to approach this topic. 5 photos of me?
5 of places I’ve enjoyed visiting? 5 of my own books? 5 of my husband, who has made the life I lead possible? Writing them down makes the choices I’m considering feel a bit self-centred. But I suppose that’s the point of this exercise. In the end the topic of my 5 pics was inevitable.
Broody
Precious moment
From then on, the die was cast. It became an emotional imperative to have my own child. But my second attempt came to an end at 21 weeks. Once I’d recovered physically and emotionally, and we stopped using contraception, I immediately became pregnant again. This time I was monitored very closely, and I spent eleven weeks in hospital during the mid- trimester. I got this image of my baby at 36 weeks gestation by taking a photograph of the ultra-sound screen. Print-outs were not yet available.
Father and son
Mother and son
I found that I slotted back into it naturally. I loved writing. So much so that as Tom grew older and I was questioned if I was planning to add to the family, I would say, “my books are my babies”. I tried to keep my writing habit separate from maternal duties, but you may have noticed by now, I have an obsessive personality, and occasionally the need to just get this bit down overwhelmed my responsibility to be as good and focused a mother as I should have been. I recall being told-off by my son, “Mummy, you’re boring! You’re always type-writing!” and I still feel rightly ashamed and guilty. But the upside of my neglect (and it was only now and then!) is that I imprinted on Tom the notion that writing must be a fun thing to do. He ‘wrote’ (dictated and then illustrated) his first book about Ghosts and Ghouls, well before he started at Byron, his infant school in Coulsdon, south of London.
We moved to Gloucestershire when Tom was seven. More by luck than judgement this coincided with the change from infants to junior school. As he was growing up, the inevitably turbulent teenage years passed without too many battles. He was always a reader, and his enthusiasms – like singing and playing the guitar – were easy to approve of (or tolerate). Luckily the heavy-metal music he preferred at a high volume was usually confined to his bedroom two floors up at the top of the house! And we operated a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about what he got up to outside the home. Coincidentally, my 4th photograph is actually taken outside our home around a decade after we moved to Gloucestershire, when Tom was around 17.
Joint venture!
Our polymath son, Thomas Williams, now has his own family in London, by which I mean his wife, Zeenat, and their cat, Pru. He plays and sings in a band, Driftway; he is currently studying astronomy and mediaeval Latin. And ‘Viking Britain’, his first adult book, went into paperback this summer. He is close to the completion of his second book on Viking London. My husband and I are naturally very proud. His success as an author has already far surpassed his boring old mum, who was always “type-writing”!
Please forgive me if this sounds like one long boast!
Not at all, Gilli. You simply sound like one very proud mum, and I think you’ve earned that right. Thanks so much for sharing your photographs and the stories behind them. It’s been lovely to find out more about you.
More About Gilli
Gilli Allan began to write in childhood, a hobby only abandoned when real life supplanted the fiction. She didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge but, after just enough exam passes to squeak in, she went to Croydon Art College. Gilli didn’t work on any of the broadsheets, in publishing or TV. Instead she chose to be a shop assistant, a beauty consultant and a barmaid before landing her dream job as an illustrator in advertising. It was only when she was at home with her son that Gilli began writing seriously. Her first two novels were quickly published, but when the publisher ceased to trade, she went independent.
Over the years, Gilli has been a school governor, a contributor to local newspapers, and a driving force behind the community shop in her Gloucestershire village. Still a keen artist, she has recently begun book illustration.
Gilli Allan’s three books, TORN, LIFE CLASS and FLY or FALL, are published by Accent Press.
Fly or Fall
Wife and mother, Nell, fears change, but it is forced upon her by her manipulative husband. Moving to a house she dislikes, in a town she has no connection to, she is cast adrift from all her previous certainties. Her life is further disrupted by the renovations her husband feels essential. She finds herself almost living with a firm of builders, one of whom irritates, intrigues and exasperates by turns.
After taking a part-time bar job at the sports club she is gradually drawn in to the social scene of the area. Finding herself in a new world of flirtation and casual infidelity, her principles are undermined and she is tempted. Should she emulate the behaviour of her new friends or stick with the safe and familiar?
But everything Nell has accepted at face value has a dark side. Everyone – even her nearest and dearest – has been lying. She’s even deceived herself. The presentiment of disaster, first felt as a tremor at the start of the story, rumbles into a full-blown earthquake. When the dust settles, nothing is as it previously seemed. And when an unlikely love blossoms from the wreckage of her life, she believes it is doomed.
The future, for the woman who feared change, is irrevocably altered. But has she been broken, or has she transformed herself?
You can buy Fly or Fall here.
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