Interview with author Frances Kay

THE STORY
Micka loves drawing and wants a pup, but with older brothers into violence and  petty crime, and a mother who can’t read the notes his teacher sends home from  school, neither he nor the pup stand much of a chance. Then a new boy, Laurie,  starts at Micka's school. The two boys both have vivid imaginations, but Laurie's fantasies are of magic and revenge, and he soon pulls Micka into a dangerous game where the line between make-believe and real life -- and,  ultimately, death -- is increasingly blurred. Written in direct, uncompromising  yet compassionate prose, and with a breathtaking clarity of insight, Micka is an  astonishingly assured debut -- and an unforgettable story.

Interview with  Frances Kay  on
THE STORY BEHIND  ‘MICKA’
 
K: How do you come to know the bleak,  deprived landscape you describe in Micka?

F: First, from my own childhood. I grew up in Notting Hill in the early fifties, when it was mostly mentioned in the papers in  connection with race riots, Rachmanism and Christie’s grisly mausoleum at 10,  Rillington Place. In my [40 strong] class at primary school were Irish, Polish  and Italian kids and later on, the first West Indians to arrive in London.  

We lived in a crumbling Victorian  three-storied house off the Portobello Road –not the whole house, just the a  semi basement flat with use of a small, uninteresting back garden through which  I could and did, frequently escape into the seemingly limitless communal  grounds, to have unsupervised and often unwise adventures. In those immediate  post war years there was no money to spare for municipal gardening. The ‘keeper’
had a basic shed with no tools except a rake and a spade. His job was mostly to  walk about with a wheelbarrow, smoking Players, the butts of which were eagerly  collected by bad boys, or run wheezily after us ‘juvenile delinquents’, shouting  and waving his fist.  It was a mad  jungle with its own laws, where the grass grew tall, the stunted hawthorn trees  survived us climbing them [not allowed by the bylaws] and the huge plane trees  were just asking to have our initials carved on their barks [the rumour was that  if we got caught, we would end up in juvenile court]. Children of all ages ran  wild and had lives their parents knew nothing about. This square was just down
the road from Ladbroke Grove, the favourite territory of Rachman type landlords  -slum properties rented by refugees and the poorest families, the ones whose  kids got free vitamins and nit inspections at school, ready to be
exploited.

 K: Did that jungle scare  you?

 F: Yes and no. I still think kids should have  secret lives where they can play and have adventures their parents don't know  about. I feel I am in a minority saying this, and of course, it has its down  side. I loved the Big Garden, but there were some boys I used to dread  encountering. They moved in packs. Most of them had viciously short crew cuts  and knees armoured with scabs [even teenagers wore short trousers then]. They
talked in a fast low Cockney monotone and thrust their head down in my face, far  too close for comfort. Once one of them took my treasured two wheeler bike [a  family hand me down, painted bright blue by my Dad, with solid tyres that gave a  bumpy and unreliable ride]. This boy, probably called Roy or Paul, wobbled a  hundred yards and back, watched by his gang, their expressions unreadable. I  knew that if he wanted the bike, he would take it. I had no idea where he lived.  But in this garden, he was King.

 K: How did you  survive?

 F: By learning to shut up and run fast. When  I was ten, we moved to Chiswick. I’d been away [and miserable] at a boarding  school for two years, and to come back to a London playground and have a bullet  head thrust in my face and the words‘You’re a fucking cow, what are you? ‘ was  familiar and avoided only by refusing to answer and running to the safety of
teacher-on-duty and the infants holding her hands, hiding behind her comfortable  large overcoat.

 K: But didn't things change when you grew up and left home?

 F: Bizarrely, no, and it was all because I  fell in love. After restful interludes at  a girls’ grammar school and the delirious pleasure of university where
boys were for the first time not out to bash me up, do me in or punch me up the  bracket, I ended up with the boy who was the most fun, one who unfortunately had  a compulsion to change the world for the better, which of course involved  finding an urban black hole to live and work in. I managed to dissuade him from  taking a job as adventure playground leader on a project in the Falls Road,  Belfast – vacant because the previous leader had been shot in the face in his  own flat, by men whose kids he had worked and been friends with for two years –  and we came to live off the Soho Road in Handsworth, on the edge of Enoch Powell  territory, with its parallel strands of cultures, never seeming to meet, Asians, Africans, Caribbeans and deeply depressed, mostly unemployed Brummies whose kids  played out their parents tribal posturings on the supposedly neutral territory  of Handsworth Adventure Playground with two young, idealistic play leaders to
keep the peace. Nights were enlivened by police hammering on our door [we had no  phone, like most people in and around the Soho Road], to tell us that the ‘hut- ’ the space built by and dedicated for use of all the local children -  had been set on fire again, most likely  by those whom John had spent the day talking and listening to, doing activities  with, intervening in knife and bottle fights with. 
 
K: And you worked on the playground  too?

 F: Occasionally, as a volunteer. I listened  to the kids talking. They were so alienated from society all they wanted to do  was destroy, even something like the hut, that was nominally theirs. It was here  that I first met children –well, boys – whose actual ambition was to go to  grown-up prison. Here, I heard about the two thirteen year olds who had walked  into the terraced house of a wheelchair bound elderly local woman, so used to  neighbours popping in to help with her shopping and cleaning that her front door
was always on the latch, had demanded money, threatening her when she said she  had none, and finally suffocating her with a plastic bag over her head, before  stealing the one and fourpence they found in her purse [this was just before  decimal coinage came in]. They were caught and sentenced. We heard about it  because some boys who were playground regulars were excited that they now knew  someone famous, they’d been in the papers, they were MURDERERS, and wasn't that  great?

 I was just a Saturday volunteer, and a girl,  so what chance did I have to get them to feel some vestige of empathy for the  victim, about whom they said nothing except she was a stupid cunt to leave her  door open and a stingy cow to have an empty  purse.

 K: And did you stay in  Handsworth?

 F: God, no, I couldn't wait to leave there -  it was too like my childhood, whereas John had been to a public school and had a  detached palace in a leafy suburb to call home. After two years, he'd had enough  to need a break too. I went to York and did a postgraduate diploma to try and  give me some framework about social policy, and straight after that I got a job
in Perth, working with travellers [gypsies]. 

K: So when would that  be?

 F: Scotland was 1972, then I continued my  ramshackle career during the seventies -more travellers in the West Midlands, community projects in York and Edinburgh, sink housing estates in Newcastle and  Tyneside. I thought nothing could surprise me, yet every week I was surprised.
By the poverty of some of their lives – not only financial, of course, but the
poverty of culture at home, parents too depressed by unemployment and social  stigma to engage even in free entertainments like conversation, larders empty of  food except for the next basic meal, parents whose spare cash was spent  forgetting their misery down the pub, and poverty of ambition and aspiration –  who did they ever meet in their lives who would lift up their horizons, give  them practical hope, something to work towards? The ‘heroes; in Newcastle were  the fifteen  and sixteen year old
school dropouts who managed to sign up for the army and who boasted about  getting their hands on machine guns and going berserk on the streets of  Belfast.

 K: So do you still do this kind of  work?

 F: No, thank God. I only had the energy for  it during my twenties. Then I escaped into running a theatre company to perform  for the same communities, plays I wrote for them, about their lives.  

K: Do you think your work made any  difference?

 F: No, and that's the tragedy. Briefly, for  the few people who knew John and me, there was a flare of hope. But Thatcher's  government utterly crushed it. All those community projects, playgrounds,  theatre companies, relied on public funding. It vanished - but by then, my  husband was very ill and all we wanted was to escape for his last year. We also  had a baby and we needed peace.

 I needed to write a book like 'Micka' because  nothing has changed. There is a whole layer of society at the bottom of the heap  that most people don't know about, don't want to think about. When I read in the  papers about babies being killed in their own homes or the terrible actions of  child criminals, I realise over and over again that nothing has changed for some
families. Born into low expectations, ignored for the most part by the media
until they hit the headlines in court cases, some brutalized, abused and
murdered by those very parents in whose care they are forced to live, who’s
going to speak up for them? 

K: So would you like your readers to feel  guilty they aren't doing more?

 F: Absolutely not! Reading a book is about  diversion and entertainment, as well as challenging set beliefs. It so happens that I love dark fiction, and I hope my readers do too. I didn’t write Micka to  accuse anyone. I wrote this story in hope. I hope that one day more people will  wish for change, believe it can happen, and work for it to happen. Change in our  present preoccupations that make celebrity and wealth the only measure of a
person’s worth to us, and a change in the individual so each child and adult is  able to feel empathy and treat others as they would like to be treated. We need  a fundamental change in a society where the top layer has no idea, really no  idea, how the bottom layer is surviving day by  day.
 
 Micka is available on Amazon.co.uk

Read more about Frances Kay on her website: 
www.franceskaywriter.wordpres.com



 
 

 

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