Bound to the elsewhere place

Some weeks ago I visited a part of Wales I’d never seen before — Llandeilo, one of the most beautiful towns in Carmarthenshire, which sits atop the valley of the River Tywi. My travelling companion was Lucy Caldwell, a young novelist and playwright, whose second novel, The Meeting Point, won the prestigious Dylan Thomas Award. Lucy was born in Belfast in 1981, but has lived most of her adult life in London. Growing up, she says she always felt ‘other’ — her mother is English Catholic, and her father, Irish Protestant. “I didn’t have the accent or the religion that would have marked me out as belonging,” she said. “People used to ask me where I was from, and when I said, from here, they’d say, No, but where are you really from? So I grew up imagining that I belonged more truly elsewhere.”

During our long train journey to the festival in Llandeilo and back to London we found much to bond over: a shared passion for Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the challenge of writing across genres, and the drawbacks of possessing tropical circulatory systems (we both froze in the infamous wet and windy Welsh weather). What connected us was this notion of ‘elsewhere.’ “Place,” Lucy said, is never neutral for her, never just an inert painted backdrop. It’s a character in the story too. She has written about Belfast in the 80s, Donegal in the 90s and Bahrain in 2003. “I’m fascinated by the way that place exists in time — the two are inextricably intertwined. You can’t return to a place you’ve left, not ever, not really, because you can’t return to who you were, then.”

Lucy’s first novel, Where They Were Missed, was written from the point of view of a child growing up in Northern Ireland, (the first half when she’s six, the second, ten years later), and while she says it wasn’t autobiographical, she did use elements of her life and childhood. For her second book, she wanted to try something bolder, more ambitious, so she used all her grant money to go to Bahrain to research her novel about a young Irish couple who move there and have problems with their marriage and their ideas of faith. “I struggled so much,” Lucy said, “At one point I had to discard a full draft of 100,000 words.” The low moment lasted an entire year, until she heard Kiran Desai speaking at the Hay Festival about how difficult her second novel had been to complete. “She (Desai), was so wise and witty and self-deprecating, she gave me a spark of hope. I went away and thought, maybe it’s possible to salvage something of the story I want to tell. And I started again.”

Despair is something all writers battle with but it’s rare to see someone as young as Lucy be so composed and philosophical about it. “You have to learn to be kind to yourself,” she told me. “I have Beckett’s famous words pinned to my notice-board: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ With several full-length plays under her belt and a third novel — All the Beggars Riding (Faber) due out soon, I get the sense that Lucy Caldwell has learned exactly how kind she needs to be to herself.

The writer is a poet, novelist and dancer.