For Women's History Month, we are delighted to welcome author Hilary McKay to introduce her new novel, Becoming Grace, a fictionalised account of Grace Darling, the young Victorian heroine who helped rescue nine people from a shipwreck off the coast of Bamburgh, Northumberland. 

"All stories have a beginning, although not all of them an end. The story of Grace Darling has been written and rewritten, many times over, for nearly two hundred years. The first accounts began within days of her setting out onto a stormy sea with her father to rescue the survivors of the shipwrecked Forfarshire. Those stories spread from local to national newspapers, from village voices to castles and palaces. They’ve been continuing, on and off, ever since. And now here am I, beginning Grace’s story yet again.

Why? Is it not well known enough? The North Sea on a night of storm. The huge wreck seen from the lighthouse. The lighthouse keeper and his daughter. The heavy old coble rowing boat they launched out into the waves. The risks they took to reach the handful of survivors they’d spotted clinging to some rocks. And how they finally made it, there and back again. 

If it hadn’t had been for the newspapers, that could have been the end of it. It might have stayed a family story to remember now and then. Perhaps to tease Grace with when she got bashful, or to tell her small nephew, Betsy’s two-year-old James. (“So James, Aunty Grace washed her face, stepped out of her petticoats in case they got wet, tied on her shawl and rushed all the way down the lighthouse stairs to help Grandpa row to the ship. And Grandpa said, ‘My goodness, the sea is very wet today, we’ll have to go the LONG WAY ROUND!’”)

It might have been like that, but it wasn’t. To Grace and all her family’s dismay, the story spread and spread. Quiet Grace, the youngest of the lighthouse keeper’s daughters, and the only one of her brothers and sisters still living six miles out at sea with a lighthouse for a home, went from comfortably invisible to very visible indeed, all in a few short months. 

Suddenly, Grace was famous. It wasn’t just stories either, poems were written about her and songs were sung. Pictures were painted, and a gold medal was invented, especially for her. Queen Victoria sent a message with fifty pounds inside and boat trips of tourists began to visit Grace’s lighthouse.  A circus asked her to come and join them, all she had to do, they said, was sit in a make-believe boat in a make-believe story ocean and show them how she did it…

It was absolutely no use Grace trying to explain that she had only done what her father and brothers had done dozens of times before. Nobody wanted to hear her say, that although she was very grateful, what had happened to her since the rescue was ten times more alarming than rowing in any storm. Grace had become a Victorian celebrity. The stories of her beauty and bravery and kindness and courage grew and grew and grew. Nothing she or her family could do would stop them. She would never be able to return to the world she’d known before.

This small book that I’ve written, Becoming Grace, is the story of the world Grace knew before.

I’ve loved the Northeast coast of England ever since I can remember. My Godmother lived there, in Burnmouth, a small fishing village a few miles up the coast from Bamburgh. I remember the joy of running ahead on the steep track ‘down the brae’ when I was very small indeed. The hayfields were just cut, and the gorse was yellow on the cliffs and now we must race down to the harbour to meet the fishing boats coming in. ‘Our boats’, the White Heather and the Ivanhoe were pointed out to me. I’ve borrowed their names for Grace. 

I’ve been going back that way ever since. To university in Scotland, and then to live in the border town of Berwick for a while. Most often now to Bamburgh with its cliff paths, and castle, the barn owl over the sand dunes, and the lighthouses out to sea. Straight out from the village is the Longstone Light, where Grace went to live when she was ten years old. Not moving from the mainland, of course, but from another lighthouse home on the small, windswept Brownsman Island where she had lived all her life.

What kind of people were they, Grace’s family, who in the early 1800s managed to bring up nine healthy children in such places? Where the weather might cut you off from the mainland for weeks at a time?  Where drinking water arrived in barrels and the rest came down as rain. What about supplies and school and illness? How was it to have a father setting out to sea on winter nights to light a warning beacon fire on the far black rocks? Or a mother who doctored half drowned sailors, washed up into her kitchen? Was it difficult to keep a light flashing twice a minute, every night, with nothing more than oil lamps and polished mirrors and clockwork?

Were they happy, those nine children?

I stand on the beach and watch the light and wonder about them. A lighthouse keeper and a lighthouse keeper’s wife. Five boys, four girls, one big black dog named Happy. (How did he get that name?)

There’s lots of information to find if you look. The RNLI and the Greenwich museums both have websites with pages about Grace Darling. There are so many books.  I like the old ones best. There’s one called Grace Darling and Her Times that was published in1932 by Constance Smedley. So not quite a hundred years after the Forfarshire was wrecked. Village memories are long. I myself live in a village, and I happen to have the last seventy-five years of parish accounts with me as I write this. And although I can’t speak to the person who made the first notes, I can find people who remember him. 

In the same way, Constance Smedley found people who remembered, or perhaps whose mother or father remembered, the Darling family when they lived in Longstone. Grace’s sisters and brothers had married and had children. There were still Darling nieces and nephews living in the neighbourhood and roundabout. She was allowed to borrow collections of family letters, and many other records. 

So, lucky Constance Smedley. 

However, even luckier me, because I had the little gem that is The Grace Darling Museum in Bamburgh.

Not only is the museum based in the cottage belonging to Grace’s grandfather, where Grace herself was born, but it’s full of family history. The family treasures are all there: their books, their china, their teapots, the lighthouse telescope. There are exercise books from the children’s school in the lantern room, portraits on the walls, a cut away model of the Longstone Lighthouse with all the rooms furnished and the light at the top. There’s Grace and her sister’s shared pink dress (with two sets of fastenings so it could be made to fit them both). In the drawers there are letters and records written by Grace’s father and the children. A letter from teenage brother Job, apprenticed in Newcastle. ‘A blackie old place,’ wrote Job, whose boots, he mentioned, would not hold together much longer, and who sent homesick love to everyone and wished that he was there. And when you look up from reading that letter, and glance across the room, everything seems misty for a while.

At the heart of the museum is the old wooden coble, the boat that Grace and her father rowed out from the Longstone Light to the wreck of the Forfarshire. It looks heavy and long and narrow, and the oars inside must have been hard to hold, and there it is before you, with Grace’s name painted to the side.

Then you leave the museum, and walk through the village, past the walled garden where Grace’s grandfather grew vegetables for the castle. And the church where she is buried, and the cottage where, much too young, she died. Down then past the castle and onto the beach with the black basalt rocks to the north. I expect the rockpools are as bright and the bladderwrack as slippery as it would have been when the Darling children visited. Often there’s a seal about. On lucky evenings you might see dolphins, far out in the deeper water. Grace would have seen them quite often, I suppose.

This is how I wrote the story of Grace’s family and her childhood, Becoming Grace. 

I thought myself back into their world. When the lighthouses begin showing their lights, and night is coming down, and the eider ducks are gossiping on the water, the past feels so close you can almost hear their voices. One evening in summer there I heard a dog bark, a happy bark, from far, far away. 

Of course, I knew that it wasn’t Grace’s dog, but it might have been…"

@hilary_mckay

Photo credit Bella McKay

Becoming Grace is published by Barrington Stoke, a specialist award-winning publisher of accessible books. It is ideal for primary history class teaching, with fantastic opportunities for cross-curricular study.

Becoming Grace has a dyslexia-friendly font with short chapters and tinted paper, and is particularly suitable for readers aged 9+ with a reading age of 8.

You can read more about Constance Smedley in the Women's History Network - a fascinating and accomplished woman, feminist, suffragist and life-long campaigner for the poor and the arts.

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