Nub News' Amber Markwell gets UP CLOSE with Simon Pearce on how he shaped Mary Alice from fragments and how her descendants helped him.

Woolverstone may have inspired Simon to take up Mary Alice's story, it was what he found that kept him going and kept him wanting to share her story with the world.

Simon wanted his work to be accessible to all, for everyone to be able to experience Mary Alice's story.

"When I was writing it, I wanted it to almost be like a conversation so it's not an academic work at all. It just leads you through, that was the aim."

This conversation in getting know the family and their history made them all the more real to Simon.

"You walk around Woolverstone with Mary Alice in your head really. You become so familiar with the names of the family and some of the things that they did that you really start to feel they're alive for you.

"At the hall, when you're walking through the rooms you can actually walk through the rooms with her, especially if you read the poems.

"I haven't put all the poems in the appendix at the back but some of them actually tell little stories about maids and running through the hall. They become very alive as people."

Fragments

Simon's book is a comprehensive history of Mary Alice; with the fragments he has been able to find. He thinks, however, that there is more information out there which may be lost.

"You could have put more in but I think what you've got there in the book is pretty much anything anybody in the world knows about Mary Alice.

"Anthony believes his grandmother may have thrown away a lot of letters because it is absolutely clear that Mary Alice wrote to her daughter but their relationship was very tense. You can understand why because you go off and abandon your children and leave them in 1913 and never see them again.

"Her daughter got married the following year but she didn't come back for the wedding. She wasn't at the funeral of her mother or her father so I think relationships within the family must have been tense.

"You have fragments left so you have to build up a picture from the fragments."

One source of joy for Simon whilst taking on this task was to look through newspapers from the time to get a better understanding of the society at the time.

"The real fun part of it was searching through newspapers for information. Some of the Victorian newspaper reports are like little stories of their own. They tell you what music was played, they tell you what people were wearing, they tell you how the audience reacted, and they tell you what the weather was like.

"They write slightly differently to news reports today as much more of a picture of what is happening. I was able to found out Mary Alice's attendance at weddings and what she was wearing through the newspaper reports because they covered what the important guests were wearing which again brought it to life."

Delightful chap

Having access to Mary Alice's living descendants has been key to Simon's work. Their help enabled him to complete.

"Anthony Spender is not only is he a delightful chap but has been very helpful. He's in his 80s and he just let me get on with it.

"He had the six airgraphs which tell us a little bit about her life in the 1940s and was ever so generous sharing them. He had letters which were saved from Jack Spencer Warwick both to Charles Hugh Berners and to other members of the family. From those few records I could not have done it without Anthony."

These fragments of information about Mary Alice built into a picture which Simon came to greatly admire and respect.

"The more I got to know her, the more I wanted to treat her with the respect and dignity that I think she deserves. Her courage is just astonishing. Her singlemindedness is terrific too and her resilience in the face of some of the difficulties that she faced. I have enormous admiration for her. She's fascinating.

"I wanted to make sure that what I did was right for her; that if she was going to walk into the room right now, that was fair. I think there's a tragic element which I didn't really hone in on that her life is pretty much, because of her spontaneity and her impulsiveness, you have this tragic bit at the end all the way through. The infant that died, the husband that was the villain of the piece

"Her ability to survive even though he was treating her so badly and the hope that she could set up a new life and at an age where most of us would be taking things a little bit easier, in a completely different world.

"I wanted to show her extraordinary qualities and strengths and the difficult life that she had had. You always wonder what would have happened if she hadn't run off with this soldier at the beginning but she was an impulsive lady and had been since childhood. Her sister said they never knew what she was going to do next and I think that runs through the story. You never really knew what she was going to do next."

Friends

Simon hopes that, if they could meet, they would be friends. If not friends, he would love to know her thoughts better and find motivation for some of her decisions.

"I think she is remarkable. If I could choose somebody to sit down with, I would. I would want to talk to her, to understand. I think it is difficult for a chap to write about a woman in a way. I would like to know her thinking behind all the things that happened to her.

"Just to sit and have a conversation with her would be wonderful. I would be listening and she'd be talking to me and explaining.

"I just hope I've done her justice. Her story is now no longer in pieces around the world and hidden away. It's now there to be shared by other people and that's what I really wanted to do for other people to meet Mary Alice.

"If something new comes from that, wouldn't that be terrific?"

Simon is holding a talk about his book on Friday September 24 More details here...

Read part one of Amber's UP CLOSE with Simon Pearce here...