by Jess Scaffidi Saggio, Katie Farr, Iona Fleming, Lucy Powell and Ayman Sabir
Martin Raymond’s debut novel Lotte tells the story of his grandmother, Charlotte Agnes, emerging from a poverty-stricken childhood and becoming a mother, to being silenced by society and placed in an asylum. It was in a casual conversation with his daughter’s former partner, who had “a great interest in genealogy,” that Raymond was alerted to the nature of his grandmother’s death. “You know about your grandmother” he said to Raymond, more a statement than a question, to which Raymond replied “yes, of course.” It was only when he told Raymond about Lotte’s death in Stirling Asylum in 1933 that Raymond found himself taken aback. Raymond told us he was always aware that his grandmother had died young, but not the reason why – citing “family secrets are not unusual.” After this conversation, Raymond proceeded to find some online Asylum record archives and gathered more information about his grandmother’s devastating passing.
Becoming a writer wasn’t something Raymond could’ve envisioned as a child. Coming from a family in which “no one… had lingered in school beyond the age of fourteen,” while a love of reading and music was present, the opportunities for higher education were not. Raymond felt his mission was to “escape the precarity of small businesses by squeezing into the salaried professions.” Going into “the even more precarious life of a writer” would’ve felt like “a betrayal” of that mission. It was just a few years ago that Raymond ventured into fiction with short stories, having only written in a corporate setting before, though he noted that “plenty of corporate writing gets very close to fiction.” Feeling the need to “catch up,” Raymond embarked on an MLitt at Stirling University and then a PhD in Creative Writing, enjoying “the focus of short stories.” It was only when Lotte’s story came along that Raymond decided to write a novel, knowing that the story “needed a bigger space.” Raymond “doesn’t regret” starting late: “many authors have to wait until they have the time and resources to write. They bring all that experience to their drafts – no time is ever wasted.”
One of the challenges of writing Lotte was finding the balance between fact and fiction in the story, as Raymond “didn’t have enough material for a non-fiction account.” With Raymond’s father and siblings no longer living, “there was no one to ask.” Raymond decided to keep any details he did know accurate, including “the dates, the addresses, and the material details of the period,” however “the arc of the story is fiction.” It was important to Raymond to "stick to the spirit of the age,” reading 1930s fiction and local newspapers to try to capture “the strange anxiety that pervaded the inter-war years.” The fact of Raymond’s grandparents both coming from “families of skilled trades – joiner and shipwright,” and having lived “in the best street in Stirling,” provoked questions about how they would have experienced social mobility in the 1930s, in “a claustrophobic small town” with “tight hierarchies.” The answers Raymond imagined are “pure fiction,” but rooted in the truth of social history and his family’s story. Raymond says: “We always say that fiction is a lie in search of deeper truth. I think the relationship is even more complex – fiction can illuminate the facts, and vice versa.”
After working with the NHS for twenty years, Raymond found that “the asylum records from the 1930s had a strange familiarity. The same bureaucratic precision and distance.” Raymond highlights that they were both “self contained and self sustaining.” As an outsider to the system, he marveled at the way that the staff had no sense of “gothic terror.” Reflecting on the post-World War I state of asylums, Raymond explains that while some patients were able to go home after getting better, others were tested and “experimented [on] with drugs, electricity then surgery.” Thankfully, asylums have now been “replaced by mental health services,” which he expresses “work wonders in extremis, but are woefully thin and underfunded.”
Another key theme weaved throughout the novel is generational differences. Raymond establishes that he didn’t “judge” or “excuse” the behaviour of anyone involved in how Lotte was treated. He took his stance from a bird's eye view, suggesting that “it’s easy to judge. Much more difficult to understand.” With this view however, emerged multiple questions: “How could they put [his] grandmother in the asylum? But then what was the alternative?” As well as these conflicting questions, Raymond found the disappearance of Lotte’s family very difficult. Despite Lotte’s three sisters' efforts to earn money after the war, the “amazing women had disappeared completely from [his] family history.” Raymond decided to use contemporary sequences to “create an additional tension in the novel where that struggle to try to understand the past would be part of the narrative texture.”
It took Raymond less than six lockdown months to write the first draft of Lotte, which he told us was “the easy bit.” He also spent nearly five years writing down ideas, rewriting, editing, then re-editing. This was all before he received “amazing suggestions and support” from the Indie Novella Aspiring Editors programme, and the Founder of Indie Novella, Damien. They offered Raymond extensive editing support and new insights, which he remains grateful for. He is also therefore aware of what is required both “individually and collaboratively” in the publishing process.
Raymond has shared that he has a couple of projects in early drafting stages: one is a story similar to Lotte, inspired by his great uncle’s world travels following the war. However, Raymond also shared that he is very intrigued about exploring “the psychogeography of small towns through memoir and social history.” We look forward to seeing what Raymond has in store for us next!
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