St Paul's Church

At the end of August popular Ryhopean author Glenda Young visited St Paul’s S.H.O.P. and generously donated sixty of her books in honour of her 60th birthday that week. I spoke to her afterwards.

Why did you choose to write about Ryhope in particular?

When I first got a literary agent she said my novels will need a strong sense of place. I thought I can only write about Sunderland as it’s all I know but then I thought I’d narrow it down and thought about Ryhope - I started looking at the history of Ryhope and how productive it was with two different sets of people, the miners and the farmers, and I thought that is perfect, almost like a soap opera setting with the village and the mine. I thought I’d concentrate on the lives of the women especially. There were so many pubs back then too. It was shop, pub, shop, pub along the street. I researched the history of the pubs going back to when they opened in the 1860s, to service the pit and miners. During the World Wars the names above the door were women. The men were away and the women ran the pubs. They would not shrink from violence which you could get in pubs - they’d really have to have something about them.

You said it was like a soap opera and you are a big fan of Coronation Street. Do you have an affinity to those sort of stories?

I do yes. Before I wrote novels, I wrote books about characters in Coronation Street. I realised then I really wanted to create my own fiction and strong women especially. I started my short stories then my novels. It has all come from Ena Sharples! My books are very soapy. They are very dramatic, there are cliff-hangers and the women drive the stories. The books are very much rooted in Ryhope’s history. Like a short miner’s strike in 1921 which I have included in one book. Most are set in the pubs. The Guide Post and the Albion feature in The Paper mill girl and Belle of the Back Streets. The family live in the Guide Post but work at Hendon paper mill. It takes a couple of months to pull all the research together. I love it - that’s my favourite part of the whole thing.

Why did you choose that time period?

Many books are set around World War Two but in Ryhope industry like mining was at its peak around the First World War and life was a lot different like there were no indoor lights and outside toilets. There is potential for more drama. There weren’t really cars - if you had a car you were well off. There are class wars in my novels and of course the women always come out on top. I focus on women’s stories as it’s women’s fiction but there are some great men in them too. At that time a lot of men were away fighting although coal mining was a protected profession, so the miners didn’t have to leave to go to war. Women were keeping Ryhope running. They looked after the miners and farmers, had coal fires burning 24/7 to get water boiled to wash the miners and feed the family. Everything was on the women.

What career did you have before writing?

I worked in universities in admin and really enjoyed it making great friends and working for some amazing people. I worked down in London at UCL for ten years. But all of the time I was writing in my spare time. It was my dream. But then I turned 50 and didn’t realise what it was at the time, but it turned out to be the menopause - I was making silly mistakes at work I’d have never made before and younger girls in the office were not very supportive. Hopefully things are a bit better nowadays. Nobody tells you what it will be like. Ultimately it led to me leaving work. It was horrible and a shock and I thought I’d just be on sick leave for a few days, but I never went back. I thought I have to do something, and I had always wanted to write. I was already writing for Coronation Street so knew I could do it. I went to the library and took a book out called “How to write and sell short stories”. I followed it to the letter, and it was amazing. I sent the author a bouquet of flowers it was so good. I started sending stories off to women’s magazines and they started taking them and paying for them. But it was a real learning curve writing different stories for different magazines finding out if they wanted fast and pacy with young people or older and slower. Then People’s Friend magazine, the world’s longest running women’s magazine, got in touch. They said the readers love your stories and they love the Coronation Street connection, so they offered me a weekly soap opera, Riverside, for the magazine. That was 2016 and today is episode 400, coinciding with my 60th birthday. Riverside is how I got an agent. I sent it to her and said it’ll be a good novel and she disagreed because there’s a cliff-hanger after every thousand words. But she loved the style and said it’d lend itself well to an historical saga. I didn’t know anything about them at that time. I hadn’t read Catherine Cookson or anything like that at all.

When Covid and lockdown hit I had to turn to crime - cosy crime novels! I set them in Scarborough because it’s my happy place. I wrote it as a comedy novel really with a murder to solve. But the publisher loved it and asked for a series, so I have been alternating between historical and cosy crime and now I’ve decided to do a book set in the toffee factory in Chester le Street. This is the first in a trilogy. I may return to writing books about Ryhope in the future but now I’ve travelled wider with my stories I’m interested in that. There are references to characters in the Ryhope books though.

Is this your dream job?

Definitely. I’m living the dream. Growing up in Ryhope in the 1970s I used to spend a lot of time in the library up the bank. I loved Agatha Christie and Famous Five. Any excuse to go to the library. There were no opportunities back then. I stuck at writing in school and loved English. When you love something, you become good at it. I still can’t do maths, but I loved writing. I left school at 15, worked until my mid 30s and then went to Sunderland university to do a degree in journalism as a very mature student. I only did that course because there was a creative writing module in the second year. It taught me the discipline of writing.

Have you had help from the church and community with research?

Reverend Chadwick has been a great help researching the history the village. I was at a christening and talked to him afterwards. I told him I was researching a novel set in World War One and he asked if I had heard of Canon Knight and invited me to the vicarage to tell me all about him. He lent me a book about him too. Canon Knight was a complete maverick,

but he wanted to bring the two sides of Ryhope, miners and farmers, together. He saw some miners walking by one day and called to them that he hadn’t seen them in church a while. One miner replied that he had more chance of knocking him out than getting him in church on Sunday. So, Canon Knight knocked him out. The canon also got involved in trying to break up a fight which led to him leading the following Sunday service with a black eye. I’ve included a vicar in my books called Reverend Daye as a nod to him.

My book Pearl of Pit Lane is about a girl escaping the pressure to work selling her body on the streets. I asked Reverend Chadwick if I could see the places a young girl may have gone to hide in the church when running away from home. He said he sometimes used them to hide himself! He showed me the children’s corner which may have been comforting to her but also let me up inside the bell tower as she may hide there. I could then write about the cold and the smells there were there but ultimately how comforting it was inside the church. He put me in touch with the man who wrote the history of St Paul’s church, Rob Shepherd. He helped with a lot of the books especially the information about the paper mills.

For heritage open days I do a walk around my book locations in Ryhope. I made sure they coincided with the MacMillan coffee mornings in the church so people can go into the church and have a look around while it is open and in use. St Paul’s church is a real focal point of the village as well as my books.

I love coming to the church fayres and seeing a lot of people who knew my mum and dad. I love the fayres at St Paul’s the most. I make sure it’s there in my diary as a priority. It really means a lot. My dad died before all of this, so he doesn’t know about my books and my mum is in a care home so doesn’t know anything about them either. So, people who knew them say how proud they would be of you. You just need to hear that sometimes.

Sadly, since this interview Glenda’s mother has passed away. The Ryhope Views team send their condolences to Glenda and her family at this sad time.

Find out more about Glenda at her website: www.glendayoungbooks.com

Or follow her on Facebook at: www.facebook.com/GlendaYoungAuthor

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