Once Upon A Time In The Northwest

or many authors, the first novel is an attempt to solve the mystery of who they are by drawing a map of the place from where they came. Over a decade as a journalist with The Guardian, Laura Barton carved out a reputation as one of the finest music and arts writers of her generation. The highly subjective, tactile style of her Hail, Hail, Rock ‘N’ Roll columns, incorporating a strong sense of place and a sharp understanding of the rhythms of nature, was a tonic to the prevailing macho noir style of cock ‘n’ bull music journalese (ie blokes from Bognor who fancy themselves as Bukowski), or the just-the-facts-ma’am approach of what Paul Morley calls ‘the librarians’.

“I still get so many letters and things from people about that column,” Barton admits. “They write me incredibly personal e-mails, which is great, but I think probably that bloke from Bognor still dominates the music press, which is funny to me because I think how most of us listen to music is in that tactile way. People want to tell you about the songs they listened to when they fell in love or when they do the washing up.
“I got offered my job at The Guardian before I’d left University,” she continues, “and it made a lot of sense to do it. I stayed at it for ten years and it’s taken me around the world and made me a better writer, but I think I always wanted to write a book. I resigned earlier this year so that means I can hopefully balance doing fiction and journalism. It felt intolerable to be trying to be two different kinds of people.”
21 Locks, Barton’s debut novel, is a small, tender story that hinges on a mousey perfume girl’s dilemma of whether to marry her meat-and-potatoes fiancé or run away with the local arty oddball. It also functions as an ambiguous love letter to her native Lancashire.
“I think a lot of it comes from memory,” she concedes. “Every time I get to the train when I go home the smells are still quite exotic. All of my friends say it’s a smelly, spooky dread, so I think that’s obviously how I remember things, those are my triggers. There’s a piece I wrote for the papers around the time the book was published (‘My North-South Divide’), talking about how where you’re from can get under your skin and you don’t even realise it. You try and shake it off when you’re young, and then it becomes dearer and dearer as you get older. The Northwest of England is a very overlooked place, and I felt this real desire to give it a voice. I’m a bit worried that people think I’m being negative about it, and I didn’t mean to be, because I love it very much.”
Certainly, many of us from beyond the metropolis start out mortified by our regional roots, but as we get older we begin to flaunt our accent as a badge of honour.
“I think that happened to me when I went to University,” Barton recalls. “I remember being teased for being Northern, and suddenly I realised that so many people didn’t have an understanding of that part of the world, so I became quite protective of it.”
Do readers get frustrated with the character of Jeannie because she’s essentially quite passive?
“Not my publisher. A couple of people have mentioned it, but it was intentional, because I knew so many girls who were quite passive when I was growing up, and you’d be thinking, ‘What’s in your head? What are you thinking? What do you want to do?’ – I had no right to be frustrated with them, but I was a bit. So that stayed with me, the idea of having a central character who wasn’t this larger than life figure. I don’t think it would have been true to make her a very definite, sure, bolshy type of person.”
The predominant atmosphere of 21 Locks is akin to the grand northern kitchen sink dramas of the ‘60s, by way of classic British indie films by Mike Leigh and Ken Loach.
“I grew up watching those films and I always liked the kind of flat humour that a lot of them had, and the way that they were very small stories and they stayed with you,” Barton says. “I felt quite passionately that people in the media bubble might think lives have changed so much around the country, and because of education opportunities, people can move on and be whatever they want, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. When I go home and see people I went to school with, I don’t feel their lives have been so different from their mothers’ or grandmothers’ or whatever. And I think that was the kind of stuff that you got from British ‘60s and ‘70s films, a lot of them novel adaptations.”
21 Locks might also have a sibling in the form of His & Hers, Ken Wardrop’s paean to the women of the Irish midlands, many of whom are happy to stay in the place they were reared, marry, build a house and have children.
“Sometimes I feel very guilty that I broke the thread by moving away and concentrating on my career,” Barton admits. “My grandmother died last year and she lived next door to my mum, and I knew that I’d sacrificed something very warm and personal and special in order to pursue my professional career. I think there is something to be said for staying where you grew up in and settling down and building a home.
“I was at a hen night in Doncaster not long ago, and you realise that the songs people are dancing to and the fashions that they’re wearing are from now, but I don’t imagine that going out in Wigan 40 years ago would’ve been any different. Maybe they drink different drinks and dance different dances, but people still go out for the same reasons. There’s some footage on the BFI website of a Northern town, the film’s called Tomorrow Is Saturday, and it shows the end of the factory week, people getting ready for their big night out, and it shows them in the pub having a singalong and they’ve all got their finery on, and it’s remarkably similar to now.”