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We heard a ghost story from our author on this month’s Bookclub. Barbara Trapido was talking about her novel The Travelling Hornplayer, which begins with the following sentence: ‘Early on the morning of my interview, I woke up and saw my dead sister.’ Not a bad opening line for a story about two interlocking dysfunctional families, but in the course of the discussion with our readers, Barbara revealed an unusual experience of her own.

She was at a literary event in Manchester when something mysterious happened in her hotel. ‘I woke up in the morning and a young girl passed through the room. It wasn’t at all scary, and I knew straight away that this wasn’t a person of flesh and blood. She touched my bedclothes, crossed the room and seemed to disappear through the window.’ Getting up, Barbara checked behind the curtains, found nothing, and went to reception to ask if anything had ever been known to happen in Room 102. Naturally, I asked if she thought she had been dreaming. The reply was emphatic – no. Although a moment or two later, she acknowledged that she couldn’t be entirely sure. The girl – ‘a demure school girl’ dressed in white vest and knickers – seemed perfectly real. And, of course, she became the dead sister – Lydia – in the novel.

However sceptical we may be about such experiences, it was one that fitted Barbara’s approach to writing as she described it to us. ‘I never plan, plot or structure anything – I stare in the dark and wait for it to emerge.’ But, of course, it’s not as simple as that. She got the idea for The Travelling Hornplayer at a Schubert recital in Oxford – it was just after the death of her mother – and found herself studying the text of the songs more closely than before. ‘I began to think can you take these quite trashy poems and transform them - the way Schubert takes them and transforms them into something deep and resonant. And that seemed to me interesting and also because I’d experienced this bereavement - the story had got to be gloomy, the whole notion of love and death, and I thought Oh my God one of these lovely little girls is going to have to die - namely the two little girls, Ellen and Lydia, the sisters, and that was the premise with which I began.’

That intuitive approach to writing evidently springs from her personality – she rather endearingly described herself as ‘batty’ in the course of our conversation – and her feeling for some of the agonies of family life is clearly rooted in her own background – she arrived in this country from South Africa in the 1960s. Her parents had emigrated there from Berlin and Amsterdam in the 30s.

‘I’d always been an outsider. I had funny foreign parents where I grew up, where being English was the thing to be, and after a while you make a virtue of being odd and I think I’m aware politically, aware of social class, for example.’ It was from her parents that she got a love of music – they would play Schubert at home – and so in this book, the lives of the characters unfold to the rhythm of one of his song cycles, with the words introducing each chapter. For all Barbara’s commitment to stories that seem to invent themselves, and her use of coincidence as a recurring plot device, there’s a deep pattern to the novel. It’s no accident that each chapter ends with the words ‘again and again.’

Maybe these characters have no choice but to live the lives she’s made for them: life is a story of repeating cycles.

I hope you enjoy hearing Barbara Trapido.

Happy Reading

Jim